“Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended
our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time
as far as our planet is concerned.” Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media:
The Extensions of Man.
There is this thing out there the kids are all talking about called the
“internet.” The infamous web of wires and information that links people of all races
and cultures together from all stretches of the world. The infamous place where you
can walk down the streets of Cairo or listen to music of Switzerland all from the
nakedness and darkness of your bedroom. You sit and travel the world turning white
from lack of sunlight. You wander for days and nights and seasons and then one day
you wake up, and the trees have turned to piles of leaves in the yard and the pot on
the stove has boiled over onto the floor. It is a place with no limits, none of the
boundaries of our physical world. None of the routine problems of our literal life.
The internet is the future. It is the stuff we watched in science fiction movies
just a few years ago. The stuff we saw on field trips to the museums when we were
kids.
Those museums that always had a room showing a series of scenes depicting the
stages in human existence. We would press our noses up to the cold glass
surrounding the first scene that showed a couple of hairy cavemen sitting over a fire
with woolly elephants drawn on the rough walls behind them. The next room had
some kids sitting around an old black and white television with dad listening to the
radio and smoking a cigar. The last room was always a dark world, and you would
look down at it from above. You would peer over the railing and see a dark cityscape
with thousands of little light pulses shooting around the tall buildings and streaking
through the darkness. The sign read “The Future.”
No longer are we those kids looking over the rail at the seemingly
make-believe world below. We are living it. Every second, thousands of little dots of
information are sent screaming through the telephone lines of our polished Earth.
They fly underground and overhead and into the minds of people across the world
fastened to machines a few feet from their bodies. And with each bit of information,
they read faster and faster until people in the other room looking in see pages
scrolling by luminescently across the faces of the computer users in the darkness.
The words fly by at an unreadable speed to everyone else but to the learner who
reads on intently.
It speeds up our lives and makes the world accessible through our
spiderhands as they crawl the globe looking for knowledge. Speed is a virtue and
something we have begun to count on. Our lives are now full of nothing more than
efforts to make more time. The internet is yet another time-saving device intended
to help us but will inevitably in the end be just another stepping stone to a further
addiction. It seems that we always invent technology for the sole purpose of assisting
us in our daily life, but as this technology becomes widely accepted, it turns on us to
be a dependency. It was Bob Dylan who wrote, “If you have nothing, you have
nothing to lose.”
Progress is a cycle, a routine. We invent something and love it. We use it and
need it and then want more. . . The wonderful new invention has become routine and
needs to be updated. . . it needs to be faster.
But how far do we go before we are no longer human? When do we stop and
run our lives for a change? How many of these time-saving devices are we going to
let run our lives before we say “Hey, I’m saving all this time to fill my free time with
more time-saving devices?”
The point is this: we gotta live. Technology is fun; we have a good time and
travel to places we have never seen before, but maybe we should learn a little more
about our own environment first. Maybe we should learn a little about ourselves
first.