Carrying Cells
These days, mom and dad talk constantly to invisible adults. They - the adults - can be and are interrupted at any time. They have put themselves at the mercy of the interrupt-driven chip. (That btw is how chips work in the first place, just sitting there waiting for interrupts to be called). Now that microchip way of life has morphed into the family way of life.
It feels like there’s something wrong with this, but I can’t say exactly what it is. There is the primary effect on the adults who can no longer carry on a train of thought longer than one minute. That’s obvious - and the drugs to treat these ailments are selling like hotcakes.
But the other victims of life interrupted - are the children. They are the most helpless. And they are so young that they don’t remember any other way of life. So when they grow into adults - this way of life will seem perfectly normal. And in fact, according to the Darwinian laws, those who can multi-process the best will make the most money, and will survive. I wonder how long it takes for brain mutations to become part of man’s evolution.
Well - that’s the old geezer in me talking. Maybe there are benefits that I can’t see. The car was certainly a great productive benefit - though we like to romanticize life before the car.
No - I’m no Luddite. I spend enough of my day working with chip technology. But still - I have to wonder whether the kids will be needed to lead us across the street someday as they know we are busy on the phone and not paying attention to cars.
Comments
Comment from Lester
Time: March 30, 2008, 11:14 pm
I never had a cell phone but my wife had to have one for work. Her company gave her a Treo so they could contact her day and night and tell her where to go and what to do. One day, as we were driving in the car, she accidentally dropped it into a cup of coffee. We tried everything we could to revive it, including holding it outside the moving car window and blow drying it, but the Treo was completely dead.
Before the company could send her a new one, she had a full day in which nobody could contact her and send her anywhere. She said that for the first time in years she felt liberated. A couple of months later she quit her job and now we are both retired and neither of us have a cell phone.
Comment from Lester
Time: March 30, 2008, 10:26 pm
Autism is ten times as prevalent today as it was in the 1980s. Scientists don’t know why. One study suggests a link between cell phones and autism, hypothesizing that radio waves from cell phone towers might be the cause. Maybe the cell phone link to autism is not physical, but psychological. Maybe kids with genetic predisposition for the disease are pushed over the edge when their parents spend more time talking into little machines than interactng with them.