“The more sophisticated the machine, the more barbaric the worker.”
I had one of those ”Aha moments” last week. I was at an airport and went through security. I had an iPod with Bose headphones; a cell phone; a Treo to do AOL email; a Kindle to read; and a Sony laptop with wireless modem. I had five chargers with me. When I checked into my hotel room, I ended up using three different sockets to recharge my devices. My briefcase weighs a ton. My doctor believes this is how I got tennis elbow from carrying my bag with my left arm.
I now have to check my three offices for voicemail messages; my Caps account for email; my AOL account for email; my Facebook account for email; I get messages on AIM and on Facebook; and I get messages on my cell phone.
What have we done to ourselves? 
Even more fun is schlepping all of that overseas and then dealing with the power adapters for said devices.
Don’t laugh at this next sentence. Consider, if you would, “The Jetsons.” Hey–what did I say about not laughing?
But think: if you see the cartoon in reruns, or if you for some reason have seen the movie, you’ll notice that it somehow feels quaint. Yet, this is a show set in the future–how can the future be quaint?
It’s quaint because it’s a vision of a future past. The idea behind The Jetsons was that as technology advanced, technology would be our slave, and we would be technology’s taskmaster.
Few could imagine, even only a few decades ago, where technology would go. Cell phones were bleeding-edge technology then, and camera phones were still the stuff of science fiction. Even the novel “Neuromancer”–which was the first use of the word “cyberspace”–did not have cell phones in its world, and that was written in 1984. And let’s not forget Blackberries while we’re at it.
In the high-tech future of the past which has now become our present, technology is not our slave: technology has become our taskmaster. Between staying in touch with friends and family on our cell phones, we have to answer office emails on our Blackberries, while finding time to maintain our websites and maybe, just maybe, having some time left over to play a massive multiplayer online game or chat in an online forum.
“Brave New World” this isn’t–yet?–but it’s certainly not a world even we ourselves would have recognized just a generation ago. Technology is getting so advanced, so quickly, I fear, that we’re not giving enough thought to the human consequences of all our new toys.
Cloning is already yesterday’s news. Genetic manipulation is easily done with modern technology. Human-animal hybrids are not beyond the reach of our technology.
I don’t think technology per se is the problem. The problem is that we’re not giving enough thought to where our technology is headed. We’re in unknown territory, yet we keep to our course with no idea where this road leads or where it ends. My hope is that we don’t find the answers to those questions too late to save ourselves.
A thought: are we now merely carbon-based CPU’s for the technology that now drives our lives?
I hear you Ted. My briefcase suffers the same dilemma. Sounds like you need to pare down your devices, and that an iPhone might do the trick for a lot of the stuff you’re looking to accomplish with all those devices. For the chargers, try Radio Shack, they probably have something that might let drop one or two. As to your voice mail dilemma, I’d suggest forwarding all the other phones to the one of your choosing, makes getting messages and calls much easier, though you do have to remember to un-forward them as you move from location to location if you want to have your present landline phone ring.
We made everything smaller so we can carry them.. and now we have to carry everything…
Oy! The irony…