I was just reading an article about how technology is ruining kids lives. And I can sympathize with it. In fact, I think technology is ruining everyone’s lives.
As a society, I believe we’re less patient now. In the old days we would get our information from weekly or monthly magazines, or even the daily paper. None of which is updated on the fly. Now, with web pages, we expect all information to be up to the second. And when we learn that there’s a new movie being made, we want to see it now, not later. We torment ourselves reading everything we can about these things and then we bitch mercilessly when they don’t show up.
As an underage boy, back in the day, you had to work at getting a glimpse of a naked woman. It meant scavenging through your parents room, the garage, the back shed or the workroom looking for your dad’s hidden stash of Playboy’s. If he didn’t have any, or your parents were divorced and you were living with mom, you had to settle for not-at-all-sexy photos of women in Redbook or Reader’s Digest. If you were lucky, there was a Vanity Fair laying around. In a worst case scenario it meant shoplifting a magazine at the 7-11.
Now, some really raunchy stuff is available just by typing a few letters after everyone has gone to sleep. Granted, it can be made difficult by putting in a firewall and other parental locks. Do not make the mistake of underestimating the lengths a pubescent boy will go through to view an image of a naked woman.
As adults we’re not much better off. You can’t hide dirty pictures on a computer. Not from your wife or girlfriend. The woman you thought was incompetent with computers will, somehow, manage to become intimate with keyloggers, web browser caches, temporary files, and undeleting programs. And she’ll still refer to the act of completely erasing a hard drive and re-installing the operating system as “rebooting.” Just to annoy you.
Why do I never use my name on my blogs? Because a potential employer might look it up and get offended by something I say, or a picture I post, and not hire me. Worse, I may get fired. It used to be that what you did in your non-work time was your own — not anymore. Now, if you have a public web page you are open to scrutiny by anybody and everybody. Is that really a good thing? Just as you’re checking up on what your new girlfriend is doing on MySpace or Facebook or Zango or whatever, so too, are they doing the same to you.
Remember making all those prank calls? With caller ID you can get yourself in trouble. Big trouble. Did you do something stupid at that party? No problem, no one will remember and it will be forgotten. Except that someone took a picture of you with their cellphone and uploaded it their web page. You really like that girl/guy you went out with but you made some not-so-nice comments on your web page about them. Uh oh.
Yeah, so while technology has helped us out a lot (like putting TV’s in refrigerators so you don’t have to skip Oprah while cooking) it’s also put a big crimp in a lot of lifestyles.
