Summer has been very interesting for me. Interesting for several reasons, primarily because my lifestyle has been very different than during the hectic college semesters. I wasn't planning on blogging as part of my temporary/partial technological Sabbath. Oh yes, I need to tell you about this. I have stopped using a cellphone since about a month after I got it wet and rendered it dysfunctional. No immediate plans to own a cellular device either. It is not the WHO report, linking cell-phones usage to a heightened probability of developing cancer from its radiation, that drove this change. It is primarily because I wanted to reassess the pervasiveness and impact of technology on cohesion/interaction among human beings.
The pace of digitization of appliances from analog has changed our lives pretty dramatically. We no longer produce analog acoustic waves for communication between us. Digital communication signals coded in 0 and 1 is what emanates from our devices varying from smart-phones to laptops. Communication has moved from being analog to mostly digital. Google is proud to service few billion search requests daily and happily lets tens of thousands of new users connect using its Android OS on smart-phones. Facebook too is adding millions of new members every month and Mark Zuckerberg (I don't care if I spelled his last name incorrectly) has vowed to eliminate privacy from our experience. Apparently, he believes there shouldn't be anything such as privacy. Amid this battle for digital attention, there are groups of secretive hackers expressing dissent by taking down websites of corporations and the government. What a world we live in, utterly confusing and digitized.
I am not against digitization of our world. In fact, as an aspiring and soon-to-be degree holding electrical engineer, I relish designing and thinking about novel designs for electrical and electronics products. If you have not noticed, my blog is titled "The DIGITAL Subway" and url also has the word digital. So, what is all this whining for? Well, I'm sure you know why. The ground has been shifting right before our feet. The very "laborsaving devices" that we built to free up leisure time are keeping us more occupied and busy. Staying busy has become the norm of hard-working and “intelligent” city-dwellers. The devices that we built to better communicate with our fellow acquaintances have overwhelmed us and captured all our attention. A typical workplace has become a 100 square feet of dreaded space with a computer. Seminars have transformed into webinars, meetings into conference calls, face-to-face talk into phone calls and small talks during lunch breaks into thumb swipes on touchscreens of smartphones for texting or browsing the web.
If you want to read more about how technology has changed us, I would recommend the book called, “Better off: flipping the switch on technology” by Eric Brende. Eric is a MIT graduate who took a break from his graduate education to live among a group of Mennonites to experience the life devoid of any motor-operated device which includes cars, cell-phones or any machine you can think of.
Note: More on this topic to come in subsequent posts. I actually decided to write something after a long time because I need some practice for my GRE essay; my GRE is in less than a week now.
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