Hello all! I've already made a post on NetSmart for this week, but a quote from Zack's blog reminded me of something and it would have been too long to post as a comment.
Zack mentioned how people say things like, "get ready, because soon technology will be all around us." Netflix has an original series titled Black Mirror (they recently released the third season!) It's an incredibly morbid yet addicting show about how technology affects peoples' lives, usually negatively.
Each episode is it's own story, and some of them hit terrifyingly close to home. In the newest season one of the characters says, "I didn't realize I was living in the future." We always think of the future as flying cars and teleportation, but we're there now. 3D printing and virtual reality and phones that we can video chat on anywhere we want!
More realistically, we're all in different places in the future. My mom had to call me at school because she couldn't find the Windows button on the computer. I still have to have physical papers and CDs because I don't entirely trust in the concept of "the cloud". And my students have never had to endure the stress that was calling your friend on their house phone and her parents answering. I'm content with how I'm in the middle of this technology boom - I don't feel overwhelmed but I can survive without constant internet connection.
Just some extra thoughts. Black Mirror is an fantastically creative show - the first episode is a little much but the rest I could watch over and over!
Thanks for the shout out, Stacey! I agree completely. It's just like William Gibson (the pioneer of cyberpunk fiction and the man who coined the term "cyberspace") said "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." We live very close to the cutting edge, and people just a few generations ago would consider our Star Trek-like existence unfathomably high tech (we carry communicators in our pockets!) In fact, a lot of our technology has surpassed even the predictions of even the most brilliant and forward thinking of the sci-fi genre's conjurers.
ReplyDeleteAs I've mentioned before, however, though we like to consider ourselves high tech, we are not even at the edge of where technology can take us. There are systems in other countries that allow electronic payment much faster than our systems do. Thee are places where automobile machinery blend with wireless devices much more smoothly. There are high-tech societies on planet earth who've adopted apps to solve their problems much more quickly than we have (I'm thinking of the wired societies of the privileged in Seoul or Tokyo or Dubai). There will always be those who are at the top of the curve, and those who are behind it. Some of your tribulations with your mom remind me of my parents' own tech woes.
Black Mirror is great because it's so eerie how close it comes to depicting the actual world we live in. We need to be smart and teach our kids to be smart about how they use technology, so that we don't become enslaved to it. I don't mean that in a hyperbolic "Matrix" sense. I just mean that we already fill most of our reflective silence with apps and games. Quiet walks in the park and reflective down time in the doctor's waiting room are gone forever. What's next?