It's not so hard to imagine a world that grows more and more disjointed every day. How has technology changed the way we communicate and interact? We are a generation that would rather email than place a telephone call. We would rather take our time to get our wording just right. With the world at our fingertips, we have to ask ourselves, what is the cost of becoming internet savvy?
Every single day when I wake up, I open my search browser and I check my favorite pages. I check my facebook, my campus email, my gmail, ESPN.com, and finally the weather at www.booneweather.com. I'm so cut off from the real world that I don't even think to go or look outside to check the current weather condition, I look to the internet for answers to these formally simple questions. Does it look like it might get warmer today? For this question I just look on the internet, not out of my window.
The internet is a creation of man to connect people to people through electronic means. The internet also stores mass quantities of information, to be access by anyone and any given time. Vannevar Bush had some interesting ideas for his time when he wrote in 1945. "The Memex" is an imaginary machine that can store mass quantities of information in microfilm. "In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely. Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place. Business correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand notes, photographs, memoranda, all sort of things. "(Bush) Bush's vision for a knowledge machine came true in a sense. It's not in a single desk and it isn't stored on microfilm, but knowledge is now sorted and put on an internet server, somewhere...
The innovative spirit that Bush utilizes in his writing is evident in all of our lives and even this blog. Humanity as a whole will always continue to develop technology until humanity is destroyed by the robots they created. After that, the robots will continue to develop technology. But robots aside, the focus of this blog entry has roots elsewhere. There was a time in our development as a society, after the primitive accumulation of capital and before the invention of the light bulb, where a big concern was heating ones home. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “Fire-Worship” in 1846 and in his lengthy piece on the positives and negatives of domestic heating he brings up interesting points the still are true today. When heating of homes expands from a single fireplace to multiple sources of heat, does this not separate the family that these multiple heat sources keep warmed? There was once only one place for a family to be together and share every waking moment together, now this is not true. The same can be said about the internet. The creation of this device puts information at your fingertips at every waking moment. Families can communicate over their preferred messaging service instead of talk. They will chose to “lol” instead of share a hearty laugh. “These barren and tedious eccentricities are all that the airtight stove can bestow, in exchange for the invaluable moral influences which we have lost by our desertion of the open fire-place. Alas! is this world so very bright, that we can afford to choke up such a domestic fountain of gladsomeness, and sit down by its darkened source, without being conscious of a gloom?”(
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