SOCIAL COMMENTARY: Einstein's Greatest Fear Illustrated  |
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Tuesday, December 4, 2012
22 comments:
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Just yesterday, when Mr. AOW and I were at the hospital for his therapy session, we both commented about how people were walking all over the place and looking at their iPhones or the like. Most of the devise users were young (20-somethings), but not all of them.
ReplyDeleteIt's a wonder that at least one of these people didn't walk into the big Christmas tree in the hospital lobby or into the path of cars at the hospital's drop-off point! Hell, I even saw people crossing the street and, at the same time, staring raptly at their iPhones.
In a few years, all but a few of us will be held hostage to our various electronic devices. I heard somewhere that, before long, tellers at banks will be few. We'll be able to scan our checks into our iPhones, iPads, or computers, and we'll rarely go to the bank as even cash will become a thing of the past. Instead, we'll have various electronic accounts.
Einstein was absolutely correct. We already see that most people are too engaged with the virtual world instead of engage with life itself.
Recently, at a Thanksgiving party at a client's house -- she is Chinese -- all the teenagers were sitting in one room and not speaking to each other at all. Hell, no! They were playing with various electronic devices instead of enjoying each others' company at a "family reunion." Maybe they were texting each other even as all of these kids were in the same room. Such activity wouldn't surprise me in the least.
ReplyDeletePeople need to relearn the meaning of time and how to grab Kairos before he runs by. A new system of keeping time has replaced the old...
ReplyDeleteI think that Salvador Dali captured this "new attitude best.
ReplyDeleteIt's about time that the bread heads took a time out and focused on the permanent... ;)
ReplyDeleteThank God we have raised our children to not have their heads in their electronic devices all the time, and their friends don't either
ReplyDeleteWhat really saddens me is to see adults in their 30's and 40's doing it.
Urban landscape
ReplyDeleteGreat shot, duckman!
ReplyDeleteNothing says, "Don't talk to me!" like a hand held electronic device.
ReplyDeleteWhenever I'm out with friends, I make it a point to not be on my phone for more than a second at a time.
ReplyDeleteSometimes my phone will go off and someone has texted me, so I usually just check to make sure that it's nothing pressing. Other than that, I focus my attention on the moment.
Someone constantly being on his or her phone is something that I simply do not understand. To me, it sounds like these people are acting as though there's somewhere else they'd rather be. I get that if you're sitting around in a doctor's office, just waiting to be called. But if you have the chance to be somewhere else, then why not just do it?
@FJ --- Nothing says, "Don't talk to me!" like a hand held electronic device.
ReplyDelete----
Seems so to me.
Wait, its bound to get worse...
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that these devices, if used to excess, really do rewire brains, particularly young brains.
ReplyDeleteAny habit rewires your brain. Books, the violin, everything.
ReplyDeleteA.D.D. .... you ain't seen NOTHIN' yet.
ReplyDeleteJust yesterday, I was thinking about getting rid of my mobile phone. I was thinking about the futility of trying to contact my dearest husband, whom I have separated due to some misunderstanding and whom i have not been able to contact. that is when I started thinking how meaningless technology is when we can't even get in touch with our dearest and beloved. I rather live in a real world world, that is dominated by decent western values. It is depresing that one have be annonymous just to criticise horrible islamic culture or other horrible chinese or non-whtie cultures.
ReplyDeleteWLIL
I absolutely can't stand them, usually leave it in the car. I'm no luddite, I use it to make calls, check and send email, search the internet, hell, I can even edit microsoft office products on it, but honestly, half the time it rings I don't answer it or bother to check who called until later, when it's convenient to me.
ReplyDeleteI had a boss a few years back who was absolutely flabbergasted I wouldn't give him my cell phone number. Told him he didn't give me the phone, I was under no obligation to give him the number.
Cheers!
Cellphones are great if you're travelling and get stuck in your car in a lonely, deserted area. They enable you to call AAA for help without having to get out of your car, etc.
ReplyDeleteAs a substitute for a social life, they stink on ice.
A big part of the reason we seem to be withdrawing more and more into ourselves and have become addicted to electronic devices is the decline -- probably caused by the phenomenon of television coupled with aggressive feminism -- of the family eating breakfast and dinner together where actual, structured, unavoidable face-to-face communication took place.
With father regarded less and less as an authority figure deserving of respect and deference, and more and more as an out-of-touch tyrant or a bumbling buffoon (thanks to TV's grotesque, all-pervasive caricatures of family life), and the fact of TV, itself, which rapidly became a dominant factor in the 1950's, the family, as we have known it, is pretty much a quaint relic of a now-distant past.
A tragic loss for Civilization in my never humble opinion.
As is sadly typical of his generation, and what-appears-to-be his kind, Jez seems so determined to maintain a values neutral position he, apparently, sees no significant difference between changes that occur in an individual as a result of the serious discipline required to master the violin and changes that occur because some accursed manufactured device has neatly enabled that individual to avoid the responsibility of developing the kind of social skills that warm, enrich and otherwise enhance the quality of human interaction.
ReplyDeleteLearning to play an instrument or mastering a foreign language or studying trigonometry is ACTIVE and SALUBRIOUS. Lapsing into addictive dependency on ugly little hunks of plastic is PASSIVE and DEGENERATIVE.
The latter indicates that experience is becoming more and more ARTIFICIAL. It's PROCESSED and CANNED.
Much easier to jerk off to porn than to bother meeting, dating and courting a young woman. That tedious process requires you to put up with her puzzling, irritating demands, and sometimes confounding personality when you're not actually screwing. With bother with the boredom, irritation and expense when oceans of naked girls performing every kind of sex act you can imagine are available to stimulate your libido and relieve you sexual tension at will?
It's the ARTIFICIALITY, stupid!
Values neutral? But of course, it's a tool. What matters is what you say into it and to whom, not how ugly the plastic casing may be.
ReplyDeleteAnd while it wasn't my intention to closely compare the smart-phone with the violin (in fact I chose if specifically because it is so different), but don't try to tell me that practicing an instrument does not entail a great sacrifice of social time.
As ever, Jez, you have a positive genius for missing whatever point I try to make.
ReplyDeleteI used to like to think of mankind as infinitely flexible and adaptable, but the emergence of the now-dominant leftist brand of thinking has just about convinced me that decades of ruthlessly determined psychological conditioning may in fact have created an entirely new brand of humanity -- one to which members of my generation find it impossible to relate -- and vice versa.
All those references to "parallel universes" may seem fanciful, but the phenomenon many call "mindset" seems to indicate that the way individuals PERCEIVE reality determines what is and is not "real" to them.
The leftist goal has always been to deracinate younger generations -- literally cut them off from their roots, destroy respect for and enjoyment of tradition, and ultimately to destroy even the MEMORY of the past, EXCEPT as it has been rewritten and reinterpreted by agenda-driven leftist ideologues.
This kind of thing has happened many times. It's nothing new. What it does, however, is make one grateful that death ultimately will overcome us.
To be turned into a stranger on a barren shore in what was once one's own home country is a fate worse than death.
Enjoy your brave new world. I want no part of it.
Well, FJ, if Dali was right "The Persistence of Memory" might yet save us, despite the powerful obfuscatory machinations of scheming leftists to alienate us from our history and render us hostile to and cynical about the glories of the past.
ReplyDeleteI still have hope, but its flame grows dimmer by the day. The election all but extinguished it forever.