| Do you ever feel like technology and the world in general has suddenly started changing at breakneck speed? |
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Asked 4 years ago
by spacecadet  Canada |
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Good question. The changes are mind-boggling. Hard to stay up with. Very exciting, though.
Add the Eurekalert to your feeds reader and you'll be two steps ahead.
http://www.eurekalert.org/rss.xml
As amazing as it all sounds haven't you noticed that whenever there's an amazing new discovery that promises a sure cure to the last disease that dangled from the tip of your tongue, when you read the fine print you notice that it probably won't even begin to be tested on humans for at least another ten years!
Go figure. And don't hold your breath. :)
When I was a kid at the 1964 Worlds Fair, they were predicting we'd be living like the Jetsons by now. I'm still waiting for my flying car!
Me too, at the very least I expected to have my personal jet pack. In 1964 we thought cancer would have been cured by now and, surely, the human life expectancy would have been at least 200. Boy, are they dragging butt, or what??? =]
I thought "Future Shock" was a 1980's malady and everyone would have become immune to it by now. Uh, unfortunately, 'guess not! =[
My great-grandmother (whom I remember well and loved dearly) saw the world go from horse and buggy transportation to man walking on the moon. As much as we think technology has changed things in the years of our lifetime, we've not come close to the technological miracles and changes of the previous generation or two. The computers aren't ours, automobiles aren't ours. All we've added is game systems to rivet the obsessive/compulsives and phones that disrupt our moments of privacy in public restrooms. (lol) THEIR lives actually sped up. Ours just SEEM to go faster because we've discovered unique ways to waste time. We log on 'quick' to Google something, see an interesting link, then we're off on an adventure that lasts an hour or three with no idea of when, where or how so much time has passed.
Interesting points and I think you're partly right. But what about the sudden surge in nanotechnology, or how sometime very soon somebody somewhere is probably going to successfully clone a human (if they haven't already), how small the world suddenly seems, how people are becoming more and more isolated from one another. I'm 24 and I remember writing letters and chatting to friends on the phone for an hour or more. So many kids these days just don't see the point and opt for instant messaging, and so do I I'm sorry to say. Then there's China's booming economy... it just reminds me so much of that poem:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
**The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.**
etc. etc. until: he darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Especially with the upsurge in fundamentalist religious movements while the rest of us try to constantly distract ourselves with the next gadget or celebrity disaster story.
I'm not really all that pessimistic but I do feel like there is a big shift in the world's collective concious beginning to happen.
do you know the author and title to that poem?
It is by William Butler Yeats, and is called "The Second Coming."
I find a poem called "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley to be important in considering the fate of our civilization:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
thank you. not that familiar with english literature :), but I really like these poems, both of them. specially the last one, it perfectly describes the cycle of history
Yeats was cool, even if a religious fanatic.
Cell phones disrupting our moments of privacy in public restrooms?
IMO so much better the ringtone of a cellphone coming from the stall next door than a loud cacaphony of farting noises that send an immediate signal to our brains that if we know what's good for us we will hurry up with our business and try not to breathe too deeply for the rest of our sojourn into these oh too familiar waters. =]
=)))))))))))))))))
but what happens if you chose to speak on the phone and the event you just described takes place :)
They'll know you're on the crapper, eh? =]
Hmmm. I think I just discovered one of the differences between Men's and Women's public restrooms ...
Women don't fart while they're taking a poop? o.O
The 'faster' is both actual and perceptual. We are supposed to produce more in the same amount of time at the job, i.e. 'work faster.' We get up, dash to get ready to beat the rush hour, fidget through the traffic, hurry to clock in, work as fast as we can, bolt for a too-short lunch at a fast-food place, work faster all afternoon, hurry to the drive-through to pick up the meal we don't have the time (read, 'energy') to prepare, chivvy the kids into homework, gulp down dinner, do the laundry and clean house, and if we are lucky throw ourselves down exhausted to watch a 40 minute program that takes and hour to air due to commercials before getting 7 or less hours of sleep.
The real world no longer seems to operate at a sufficient speed due to constant exposure to TV and computers. Children are developing brain disorders (ADHD) from being exposed to the rapid-fire scene changes of less than 1/10 second that dominate TV and movies. New patents for profoundly affecting technologies from drugs to sports to home are issued in such profusion that no human being is capable of tracking them all. The complexities of interactions are so great that chaos theory may be the only math sufficiently powerful to describe them--yet they occur so quickly that there is no way to gather the data to use that math in anything like a real-time fashion.
We even have a book on the subject: "Faster," by James Gleick, author of "Chaos".
I think society is developing ADD-like symptoms, but as someone who actually suffers from a major case of it and was only allowed 2 hours of TV a day and grew up using a 286 computer for most of her youth, I and most of the scientific community would agree that ADD is usually something you're born with and the effects aren't so simple as short attention span.