The assignment was to spend a day without technology and although I can hide my ipod, cell phone, and computer in a desk drawer, media surrounds me. I sit outside, on the deck with a cool breeze rushing through spring sun and my bare toes. The colors are elegantly bright after constant showers of rain. A strong smell of poised, opened, flowers cushion my sense of smell like a soft pillow. Listening in detail, I can hear the birds sing to their soon to be hatched eggs, the rustle of the leaves rubbing against the parenting branch, my neighbor talking on the phone loudly to a friend who lives down the street, an idling car engine in the near-by parking lot, children making up music videos on the trampoline behind our fence, lawnmowers, and crossing airplanes. Natural sounds wane away behind the noises of a modern city. Solitude is hard to grasp when the world rotates on an electric turntable.
A deep problem has flooded into our society, a problem that I cannot claim to be free of by any means; in fact, as I sit here writing this I am feeling its effects. Technology has raped us of our ability to communicate with one another in person, has strengthened our fear of loneliness, and has generated “contemporary terror [of] anonymity.”
Apparently there was a time when people still had the ability to talk to each other seriously and for periods of time that exceeded twenty minutes. Legends, presented in thousands of pixels of pure high definition on an open web page, have informed me that at one point people lived their lives through experiences that were their own, they read books vigorously, and decided what they needed to succeed by themselves. I cannot know what this would be like, for I have grown up with all the available forms of consuming media my entire life. I was one when I first started watching television, two when I watched my first video, three for my first film in a theater, and I was five when I first learned to use a computer. As I grow older I would like to think that I am separating myself from this tasteful resources, but that is certainly not the case. Right now I sit in front of my computer with headphones on, playing music from a list of 3,748 songs, uploading a newly edited photograph of mine to my blog, and posting on Twitter about how I am doing an assignment for Ms. Lake’s class.
I realize that although I control the media, I'm still a heavy user, weighing my dependence on technology as a need to survive societal standards.
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