Beep!
Our brand new technological world is exciting to be part of. Things we only dreamed about we can now do in a fraction of a second. If we need information it is there in front of us. We can talk to our technology and It will provide sensible responses, some of the time. But are we masters of our technology or does technology rule us?
I think we are possibly the slaves.
To illustrate this think about the noise in your home that is technologically derived. Excluding the obvious TV, radio, mp3 player etc, we all live with a considerable level of technologically driven noise. It is almost impossible to buy a domestic appliance that does not omit some form of annoying noise designed to attract attention. The washing maching, the dishwasher, the clothes dryer all beep to say they are starting and beep to say they have finished. The domestic person is becoming trained like a lab rat to notice the different tones and action any offending beep, by taking out the washing, removing the clean cups etc.
Our cookers and microwaves beep, as do our mobile devices which make a range of noises depending on how they are set up. For many of us, the setting for silent is a blessing, or a simple vibrate makes the activity of monitoring your skcig media more pleasant. Yet, I note we are all monitoring our media continually, afraid in case me miss something "important" amongst the dross of emails, texts, blogs, tweets and other posts we help co-produce.
We are even unable to do what use to be considered something relaxing, by rich I refer to driving, without being beeped at. My car beeps if I am not wearing a seat belt, as well as when it is below 3 degrees and when a service is required or a possble fault is discovered. When I crossthe road I await for the beep at the lights.
We are surrounded by noise pollution which is a result of our uptake of technology.
We decided to buy the computer, the phone, the tablet computer, the mp3 player, the washing machine, the dryer, the dishwasher, the wii, the playstation, the DS; the list could fill this page.
We are also duped by technology that purports to do things but fails to live up to expectations. Two things spring to mind that I have purchased recently are a washing machine and a clothes dryer. The washing machine does clean the clothes but takes twice as long as my previous one, but this one is ecologically friendly but this means the amount of washing I can do in one day is half that achieved by my old unecological one. The dryer is another nuissance as apart from taking hours to dry things the clothes come out damp, somewhat defeating the single point of the thing and meaning I spend longer drying already supposedly dry clothing. Beep... its dry! Oh no it is not! Beep, its on again...
We are also slaves to the technology upgrade, but that is another blog entry all on its own.
What is evident, is that we are surrounded by noise that is computer generated and are trained to respond to this far faster and more literally than in any previous time in history.
Is this a good thing? Are we really slaves or willing participants to some S&M technological fantasy?
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