Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Are We Crazy?

The internet and the connections it provides have redefined the world. The traditions of the past are rendered obsolete by the technologies of the present. Members of older generations are writing emails in lieu of letters and much of the world’s youth has no recollection of a time when one could not ‘Google’ any question, term, or idea. The World Wide Web has made transfer of information effortless. One can peruse the thoughts of the ancients or family members with just a few clicks. Within this deluge of information arises one musing of Beat Generation author Henry Miller. He writes, “There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy” and after reading this our perspective changes. Is our society crazy? we wonder. Is our world of technology dangerous? Are we isolating ourselves from the past to too great of an extreme? These questions have been posed to the great thinkers of our society, and their overwhelming response is ‘yes.’ In their novels, scholars such as Aldous Huxley, Alan Lightman, and M.T. Anderson offer precautionary tales highlighting the potential consequences of the technological road down which our society is traveling.

In Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, Lightman’s The Diagnosis, and Anderson’s Feed, the protagonists find themselves in conflict with the technology omnipresent in society. In Brave New World, the desire to create a utopia free of war, disease, and unhappiness has led the government to mass produce its citizens in laboratories and then brain-wash them into believing that they are content all the time. An outsider named John—referred as the “savage” by the citizens of the brave new world—is introduced into this place of artificial satisfaction coming from a society in which life is not regulated by the government. In the end, this brave new world is too much for John. He longs for the highs and lows that define human experience. He pleads, “But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin." His incompatibility with the society is sealed with his suicide at the conclusion of the novel.

Much like their compatriot, John, Bill Chalmers of The Diagnosis and Violet of Feed are outsiders in their societies of ubiquitous technology. Bill begins as a regular upper-middle class man with a sixty-hour-per-week job, a family, a mortgage, and a cell phone and ends paralyzed and without most of his eyesight studying the nuances of the shadow cast by a leaf on his bedroom floor. In Bill’s case, his rapid deterioration was not caused by his lack of desire to adapt to the technological world but his over zealous embrace of it. And death is the price he pays for his choices.

Violet lives in a world in which citizens are controlled by a “feed” planted in their brains to keep them constantly connected to the internet but also to advertisements and propaganda. She is unique because she has made it through most of her life without such a chip. Societal pressures eventually force her into having the surgery to implant the feed—an operation that eventually takes her freedom and her life. All of the protagonists are victims of societies that are obsessed with technology and the false promises of contentment and control it offers.

The intellectuals of society all seem to be saying the same thing; they recognize the power and potential for good in the technologies that surround us but they also see the potential for abuse that comes hand in hand with the advances. Are we crazy to follow the internet blindly into the future? Only time will tell.

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