This is interesting...

G'Day Head Casers! So while perusing my archives to give writing samples to a friend, I came across this piece I wrote about a year and a half ago. The funny thing is, not much has changed.

I thought I'd share and see what you guys thought:

TODAY by M.

Imagine a screen, measuring 17 inches across and about 3 inches above my desk. Linked to it by one 10 inch black cord is a box, the proverbial “black box”, a “CPU” (central processing unit) that takes up 1 foot by 1 and a half feet and has the power to connect you to a limitless space, cyberspace. We’re living in an era in which our lives have become so dependent upon the screen and box. The box is not just any box, it is a seemingly bottomless box that houses your photos, blogs (online monologues, diary entries or diatribes), driving records, dating history and on certain top secret levels every move you’ve ever made. Technology has reached the level where if I wanted to, from this very room, I could grocery shop, pick up a movie, buy a new dress, speak (not type but speak) to my entire family and see the traffic on my street without even moving from my chair.

Between webcams, search engines and People Finders, personal privacy hardly exists anymore. Forget Uncle Sam looking over your shoulder, you now have to worry about your neighbor’s 10 year old kid Sammy hacking into your email. Now don’t get me wrong, I would probably have a seizure without my Sidekick or cell phone, which are both able to make a phone call and find directions all while looking up movie times. But when is it too much? My generation is starting to get arthritis, talk to each other less and less because text messaging is easier. It used to be just an expression that your wishes and dreams are at your fingertips, however, now they literally are, just type them in.

In order for me to maintain what’s left of personal privacy, I personally will not date men that I can Google. We must be grateful that technology has taken us out of the dreadfully slow paced- access to information stone ages and brought superb efficiency into our lives. But at the same time, the consequence of more and more “efficiency” results in the loss of humanistic, face-to-face dialogue with each other. We have lost the fine art of conversing with one another, engaging in long hours of warmhearted conversation. Soon life will truly be imitating art in such movies as “Crash” where we have to “Crash into each other to feel something”. Or even a larger extreme where we keep creating devices to do things for us, to essentially think for us so much that our lives become subsumed by the machine, as in “The Matrix”.

Perhaps technology is truly the best thing that ever happened to us and I am just a skeptic. I’ll admit it is somewhat fascinating to see what computer scientists will think of next. Ten years from now, I’d rather be out doing things, experiencing life, meeting people, cooking my meal, picking my dress, finding my car, spell checking with a dictionary (ok maybe not the last one but you get the point) than having a machine do it for me! I’d rather maintain being HUMAN than running the race of MAN vs. MACHINE.


*Thoughts?