I'm reading Culture Jam, a book by Kalle Lasn. One of the arguments that the author makes is that our society has become a spectator culture. We don't sing or play musical instruments in our homes- we listen to the radio and buy other people's songs. We don't play sports- we leave it to the professionals. Often we don't make our own meals. We don't live our own lives- we watch others live on TV. With the rise of pornography in the last few decades, we can assume that many people spend more time watching others rather than investing in their own relationships.
Lasn writes from the perspective of the left. He places the blame for the rise in consumerism on the corporation and laissez faire capitalism. And yet I think that he raises issues that we should all be concerned with. What happens when you take a people that for millenia worked the land for their livelihood and transplant them into an urban environment where they have much less contact with the natural world and communicate with each other more often than not through electronic devices?
Looking to the future, it is not hard to imagine a society in which we all exist as cyborgs. Perhaps that future is already here as we depend on technology for transportation, for entertainment, for remembering, for learning, and even for communicating.
It's too late to stop the clock (and who'd want to give up their ipods, anyway?) and yet it seems that as we go forward we are oblivious to the changes around us. So quickly do innovations become part of what we see as the "natural world." It is hard to imagine life without the internet- we take it for granted. But how will the cyber-world interact with the "real" world? In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury imagined a future in which the people were pacified by the television, where no one read books anymore, or had meaningful conversations with each other.
Oops, gotta go- the Office is coming on.
