RE: Rant About Technology Use
October 24, 2012 at 2:48 am
(This post was last modified: October 24, 2012 at 2:50 am by Tempus.)
Anti-social behaviour, sedentary lifestyle, bad manners - these exist independent of technology. While technology can certainly be engineered to encourage the aforementioned behaviours, this is hardly an inherent property of technology, nor should it necessarily be taken as a condemnation of it as a whole any more than printed propaganda should be taken as an indictment of the written word. What *should* be criticised is the culture of technology (i.e., the way technology is used and integrated into our society) rather than technology itself.
The thing I noticed from reading literature from the 1700s to today (and, to a lesser extent, history in general) is that there have been people who are rude, don't respect their parents, are promiscuous, and just plain horrible people from all eras. It's vaguely irritating to hear people complain about how back in their day [insert rose-coloured glasses nonsense here] - not least because they're often wrong. (Take the people who complain about music today being awful - if they spent half as much effort using a search engine as they did complaining they might realise the true scope of current music available. As it stands, most of them apparently only bother to look in the top 40 before whining). It's likely a lot of things will have changed by the time I'm older, but I hope I have the sense to not bang on about how fucking great the 90's were and what a tragedy it is that no one dresses like Kurt Cobain or rides skateboards anymore.
The thing I noticed from reading literature from the 1700s to today (and, to a lesser extent, history in general) is that there have been people who are rude, don't respect their parents, are promiscuous, and just plain horrible people from all eras. It's vaguely irritating to hear people complain about how back in their day [insert rose-coloured glasses nonsense here] - not least because they're often wrong. (Take the people who complain about music today being awful - if they spent half as much effort using a search engine as they did complaining they might realise the true scope of current music available. As it stands, most of them apparently only bother to look in the top 40 before whining). It's likely a lot of things will have changed by the time I'm older, but I hope I have the sense to not bang on about how fucking great the 90's were and what a tragedy it is that no one dresses like Kurt Cobain or rides skateboards anymore.
