Technology Dependency
On the way in to work this morning, I was listening to z100, one of the more popular stations here in the NYC Metro area. They were running an interesting segment on a new Reality T.V. show called "Forever Eden". In this show, people are dropped onto a tropical resort and have a variety of "essentials" taken away from them.
In any event, the radio segment was about what things could we not live without for a week. They polled both the crew and the general public for answers. Here were the first few responses that were rattled off:
- Cell Phone
- Toothbrush
- Instant Messenger (AIM)
- Voicemail
- Television
- Tivo
Naturally, my ears went up when I heard this many people NEEDING technology to stay right throughout the day. More to the point, each of these tools (except maybe the toothbrush) provide us with connectivity to the world at large. E-mail, Cell Phones, Voicemail, Instant Messaging -- they all connect us with a kind of immediacy that we'll some day, if not already, look back on as trivial. Television and Tivo, however, provide more artifical proxies to the real thing and foundations for future interaction. Sure we tend to veg-out as we watch TV, but we also are learning a variety things (some of them wrong and against our will), but we're still soaking up many different messages and seeing others interact. On the other hand, this TV content serves as topics of discussion from the water cooler, to the web log, to the bar for many days to come and provides a certain level of familiarity that can help grow or launch new relationships.
The reality is that we're addicted to being connected -- to devices that extend our reach and connection to others.