Digital Oblivion At Your Fingertips

Well, break out the luddite hammer because here I am. I suffer from a growing horror at the digital devices that are gradually replacing the art of living.

Now I should mention that I do love computers. I found my calling when PCs became what they are now, and when the internet became ubiquitous. I couldn't function without my cell phone (or so I believe), I love DVDs...etc. I'm not living in a steampunk fantasy or ripped from an Andrew Wyeth painting of bucolic simplicity. But the crisis is that these tools of productivity and entertainment are no longer confined to a place of work or fun, and that was important. Even a laptop is a sort of confinement because it requires a prone position and a WiFi signal, and for most of us an outlet (the battery is brother to the printer in the dreary reality of forgotten tech) since our batteries are little more than ballast within 6-8 months of purchase. Such confinement was important because it kept those technologies on a leash, it gave them a specific place in the pattern of our days and nights. But now, oh ye gods...now...

...we walk around like animatronic mannequins with eyes glued to iPads and iPhones and all their i-clones. We watch movies and play silly games and fritter away entire paychecks on the little digital droppings of the dark side...apps. Our lives are being absorbed into our devices.

Television commercials portray people holding their special little digital tablets in front of them, to block the world and show what is surely a superior 'image' of the world via GPS and mapping and re-rendering and all kinds of other crap. There's one image of a young man who stands atop a stark and majestic mountain, gazing out into an endless panorama of mountains and valleys, escarpments and waterfalls that should boggle the mind and feed the soul. His hair blows in what must be a bracing breeze indeed. But does he revel in this? No. He gets out his iPad and uses some 'app' to change what he's seeing, to manipulate his experience in a thoroughly meaningless way. He's not even there, he's sucked into the vortex of digital rendering; a false front to life. It;s marketed as life improved, but it's a lie; it's life benignly replaced with a hologram. Other commercials show what we see all around us (assuming you raise your head from time to time): entire families strolling clumsily around the zoo or the city or the park, little fingers flickering across keypads, movies being accessed on the fly, shopping being enjoyed without so much as a credit card being pulled from a wallet...all these joys without any tactile involvement whatsoever. Meanwhile, life is passing them by.

What the hell is this all about? Don't get me wrong here...games are awesome, movies are sublime...I love having access to the internet when I need it, but I fear that the frivolous nature of this newer wave of gadgets disarms our warning systems...

WAKE UP PEOPLE! Your imaginations are under attack! Your senses are being filed down to the nub! Put the damn thing away...just for an hour or two?