The Age of Electronic Isolation.

Presently taking a late ferry home. Like those around me I am engrossed with the electronic device in my hand.  Except for those who are accompanied by someone, everyone is wholly engaged with either a laptop, a smartphone, a pad of somesort or a kindle-like device.

It makes me wonder what we ever did before all of this? Read books I suppose. Or did we actually take the opportunity to meet and converse with new people?

Should we be concerned about this electronic isolation? How strange it must seem to those who came before us.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Just think: had we had electronic devices back in 1915 or so, we'd have the records of intimate thoughts, billions of them, of how people actually reacted to similar revolutionary changes. When the automobile was popularized, a lot of people must have been asking similar questions. "Really, so we've been breeding horses for 50,000 years, and now we're done?" or "How did we live before the auto?"

- Steve K
1:37 PM
fdj said…
But don't you think there is something rather unique with the electronic isolationism we are seeing?

There I am surrounded by other human beings and none of us are interacting...instead we are "interacting" with our "friends" on Facebook instead of the people sitting right in front of us. I think it is unique in the history of innovations, no?

I'm not predicting the apocalypse here, but I do think it's something to ponder and maybe worry about some. Are we one big step closer to Forster's vision in "The Machine Stops."

Maybe it is nothing to worry about that we touch one another less and less...and instead "poke" each other on Facebook. And we are too busy doing so to be able to chance a stranger turning into a real live friend.
1:04 PM
Anonymous said…
yes it's unique. I suspect it is similar in its scale to the move from a rural/verbal culture to an urban/written one. That change had huge consequences. I heard someone complaining the other day that schools were no longer teaching cursive writing. The anxiety about this was as remarkable as the fact itself.

- Steve K
9:35 PM
Susan Sophia said…
Mka. Thea said when she started teaching 6th grade English a few years ago she began writing on the overhead projector in cursive and the students couldn't read it! She immediately implemented cursive writing 5 minutes a day. She could not believe it!
10:29 AM
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