An existential something.

I wrote this awhile ago and now think it worth posting.

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Technology has progressed ridiculously far in my own lifetime. I was born in 1992, when the old Apple Centris computers were top of the line (and cost around $2500) and the Internet was a casual toy. What’s e-mail? My father had a central bulletin board in his office where fellow doctors would pin stuff of interest. Or of course, face to face conversations would work too. Cell phones were little boxes of plastic carried by rich businessmen who thought they needed them, and no one was going home on Monday night (in their practical little hybrid car) to watch the big football game on a 54” LCD TV in HD provided by Fios. And now just sixteen years later – a mere blip on the grand scale of American history – the Internet is a versatile tool that evades definition, having application in all pursuits of our life; cell phones are ubiquitous and any kid without one is considered abnormal (or his parents don’t trust him) (personal note: five years ago, I was in sixth grade. There were about twenty people in my class of 70 who had cell phones. My brother is in sixth grade now. Of his class of 74, over 60 have cell phones). We e-mail – or instant message – anything. I admit openly to having shared music files over instant messengers. Hybrids, still a very imperfect technology, are nevertheless the latest craze, and you’ll be hard pressed to walk a college campus without seeing one of those distinctive little Priuses, decked out in Obama stickers and with one of those Christmas-tree shaped air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror. Big-screen TVs – plasma, LCD, DLP – are present in more households than seems entirely necessary. Fiber optics continue to make “fast” even more illogically faster. And, by the way, I still use my Apple Centris – and would not part with it for $2500.

Henry David Thoreau did not believe that technology would accomplish anything. In his time, the biggest technological boom was railroads, and things to travel on railroads, and things to make travel via railroad even faster. The 1840s were a long time ago. In Thoreau’s writings, one can certainly see that he would prefer a cabin in the woods to anything else; he was an isolationist. He never even married. It’s the year 2008 now, and I happen to own a cabin in the woods. It’s backed up by a lake and has thick woods separating it from the lot next door. It’s up in the Pocono mountains – a little bit of solitude and escape only two hours away. And I’m not married,…nor am I an isolationist, nor do I believe it possible. And yet I feel comfortable being alone up there. But there’s no denying the influx of technology even there. We have to have electricity. So the cabin is wired. We have to be warm and we have to cook, so we have a big ol’ propane tank outside. And of course, there’s a community center that’s got a high-speed WAN (that’s “wide-area network” – or just plain Internet). But even in this fast-paced, un-Thoreau society, I feel at peace up there.

That’s my idea of isolation (I don’t use the internet up there). The benefits of advancing technology are undeniable. The downsides, though, seem to evade our grasp. How many child nutrition specialists have been on Fox and Friends, or in Parents magazine, scaring the general public into strictly regulating their children’s diets and forcing them to exercise because of their hitherto unrestricted access to video games, computers, and generally physically unfit activities? How many preteen girls have been abducted through stupidity using the Internet? How many people need to be in fatal car accidents – hybrid or not - because they’re texting while driving?

A lot of crotchety old “experts” will probably have you believe that all this technological invasion of our otherwise bland lifestyles is a terrible thing that is corrupting modern society. Unfortunately for them, they fail to realize that modern society is shaped by technology such as this, not corrupted by it. Take it all away – and what are we left with? Would it be a society like the isolationist, contemplative one that Thoreau imagined? Or would we find that our dependence on modern entities is more than skin-deep?