Look At It This Way

This article is accurate, funny and thought provoking.

My husband and I are both retired computer professors and we can reaffirm your concept with the following: our DVR started to have problems. It would just stop playing in the middle of a recorded show. We spent about an hour with a guy named "Joe" only to have him say he would send a new DVR. His thought was that the machine's hard drive was defective...possibly the result of having been jiggled during the install. So three days later we had to install the new one. This process took about an hour. One day later the new machine was doing the same thing---not working. "Joe" then came to the house and after a couple of hours of fiddling decided to install yet another One day later, the same thing happened. When the next "Joe" arrived he spent 3 hours at the house only to say "I can't fix it. If you'd like to cancel your subscription, we would understand."
Another confirmation: We bought a new Internet radio. After a few days nothing came thru. So, being computer professors, we unplug and then re plugged the radio...in effect rebooting it. (All computer people love to "reboot.") Voila---it works again. Why??????

What to do? For no apparent reason, my computer decided that I had forgotten my password and wouldn’t grant me access. Of course I know my password as well as I know my…well…my password…but to no avail. And while you might think this would be a fairly easy problem to solve, people really do forget their passwords all the time, it wasn’t. In fact, it took the better part of a week to resolve. This reminds me of nothing quite so much as the science fiction story that has humans surrounded by machines that serve every imaginable need…and even a few you might not have imagined. The only hitch: The machines are slowly running down and nobody remembers how to reboot them. So mankind slowly shivers and starves to extinction as the marvels that made heat and food, one-by-one, go dark.

Even most mechanics nowadays do not understand the cars they are working on because they are so complicated. Doctors are using drop down menus for diagnosis purposes (as pointed out by another PT blogger), and I sometimes wonder about the people cooking my food at restaurants. If all the world electronics stopped working, I can't imagine what would happen. Anyways, the reason I write here is because a game company took this very idea and made it part of the storyline of their miniatures game. It's called Warhammer 40k and talks about the "Dark-Age of Technology". You should check out some of their literature sometime, most of it is very well thought out.

Thank you, Dr. Mason, for giving me permission to feel okay about my desire to unplug every electronic device I own. I will never understand the continuing fascination with technological machinery that constantly interrupts us. So, bye now, as I'm shutting down my computer and going to the gym, but not before I check my phone messages through my Blue Tooth in the dashboard, and then plug in my headphones on the StairMaster so the TV can take my mind off the boredom of climbing 200 flights of stairs without really going anywhere....!!!

Dr. Mason, you are my new iHero. Thank you for writing the articles you do.

I have been in the tech industry most of my adult life, going on 15 years now. I am far too young to be this disillusioned, I know. I watched the internet go from the DARPA project it was born from to the monolith that it is now. I watched offices go from paper to email, even assisting in that conversion. Recently I struck out on a 5 year plan to convert myself into a Luddite. My DVRs are gone, my cable is canceled, I have one phone (required for my job), and soon I will have a car that I can work on myself, in favor of my chrome and walnut encrusted German super computer on wheels.

Our technology is making us stupid, as you obviously are very aware of considering it is a theme that is close at hand in almost everything I have read of you. All my iGadgets have been stealing my soul for years and I am tired of it. The most unfortunate part is that as I unplug I become more and more aware of how oblivious the people around me are to the neuroses that they have become slave to because of their gizmos. "Was that my phone or yours that just rang?! Oh! I got a text message!".

A few years ago I couldn't conceive of a voluntary day without my cell phone. Now I have one simple goal to punctuate the end of my journey out of the iLife. And that goal is to travel to Easter Island, widely considered to be as far away as you can get from everything, find the highest cliff on the island, and throw my iPhone as far as I can.

And, if I am truly lucky, it won't fly far enough to clear the crags and I will get to watch it explode into a million glittering iPieces.

yes i too think that computers are making us stupid. but not exactly, it's that we no longer have to work hard, at least speaking for myself. my mom used to read tons of books, so did my uncles. i read just as much as them, but one blog, one wikipedia page at a time. the concept of reading a 400 page book to find an answer is very, not even foreign...extraterrestrial. it enables us not to have to work hard, which affects everything.

yes i too think that computers are making us stupid. but not exactly, it's that we no longer have to work hard, at least speaking for myself. my mom used to read tons of books, so did my uncles. i read just as much as them, but one blog, one wikipedia page at a time. the concept of reading a 400 page book to find an answer is very, not even foreign...extraterrestrial. it enables us not to have to work hard, which affects everything.

Sociologist Anthony Giddens scooped you on pretty much this whole essay by nearly 20 years.

http://www.amazon.com/Consequences-Modernity-Anthony-Giddens/dp/08047189...