IT'S HERE!!
The.....Future!
Criminally lazy people everywhere, unite and rejoice! Now, for the first time ever, you can navigate the web without even sitting up straight. Obama who? THIS is history.
If you laughed good-naturedly there then way to go. High-five! If you've already tried to place an advance priority-shipping order with your mom's Visa, then this post is about you. If you were filled with dread at this obvious symbol of the Technological Revolution's effect on the human race then dude, you and I are on the saaaame page.
I'm afraid of technology. Unlike Rose, my French grandmother, I'm ok with admitting that. If you feel that way too, admit it also because there is literally nothing wrong with accepting the fact that the Technological Revolution has left you somewhat reeling. Don't get me wrong: I love the Internet. I love my little cell phone. I like the convenience of e-mail. I like wasting time I don't have on sites that prominently feature people falling down. Hell, I even like Facebook. What I don't like, and what ultimately bothers me enough that I'll write a blog post about it, is the way in which this revolution has provided humanity with a one-way downhill ticket to sloth-dom.
Think about this: Look at the way that students do homework these days. With everything class-related online now (class sites, WebCT, Turnitin, library databases, Wikipedia, etc), virtually everything you need to access, research, study -ANYTHING- is only a mouse click away. Research today involves little more dexterous ability than twitching your index finger in a downwards motion. Seriously, look at yourself, you`re doing it right now. The situation is the same for accessing information in general, for ANYONE. It's not like homework was ever by any means a vigorous physical undertaking, but at least back then entire forearms were involved (and sometimes legs, if one were to choose to do such an undertaking in an atual real-life library).
What I'm saying is that we as a species have regressed in relation to the way we learn. Not far, but we have regressed. No longer do we have to walk through aisles and aisles of books, crane our necks to read titles, flip laboriously through periodicals. No, today we 'click'.
This is not something than can be blamed entirely on the Internet. It wasn't just the emergence of the cyberworld that facilitated this shift, it can be traced back to the computer interface itself. Anne Friedberg's "The Multiple" from The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft discusses the concept of multiple 'windows' within a computer desktop that we look at and work with when we use computers, as opposed to the actual tops of desks people used to work on. Friedberg says a window "refer(s) not to the full expanse of the computer screen, but rather to a subset of its screen surface: an inset screen within the screen of the computer, one of many nested in its 'desktop'". From this concept her theory of multiple windows emerges. We can look at a whole bunch of little windows, as many as we want, within a single other window. It is basically this condition of the computer-world that has made information gathering and working so ridiculously effortless. We don't even have to move our heads to look at different windows of information. We can keep them perfectly still! NICE!
Seriously, is this not terrible?!
How long will it be until we become drooling, immobile, glassy-eyed, big-butted zombies navigating the web with the shift of a pupil? They could DO that.
And you laughed at the computer bed.
