heal me...

The interesting thing about technology is that is makes you so secure that you become completely insecure in yourself.



This musing is prompted by a conversation with my brother yesterday about setting his house alarm. His old house didn't have an alarm...this one has a crazy high tech one (so yeah don't bother trying to break in here cops will be on your butts in about 3 mins). Anyway, he was saying he can't go to sleep now without setting the night alarm or he worries that someones going to break in at night and he won't hear them, but he realizes that he didn't have that fear at his old house. Interesting how something made to make you more secure ends up making you less secure in your own abilities and your general safety.

Look at cell phones. A few years ago you were lucky to have a cordless phone in your house. If you were out doing something you just waited till you were home to talk to people, got messages on your answering machine, and if in an emergency used one of the 100,000 pay phones in every city. Now, if most of us leave home without our cell phones we feel completely naked. What if someone's trying to call us? What if we need to contact someone? What if we're in an emergency? They've becomes one of the many technological security blankets that we suck our thumbs to every day. Its going to be interesting being in England for atleast a year without a cell phone and possibly without any phone at all. I don't even remember/write down numbers like I used to when I was little because they're all in my cell phone.

It's even bothering me going a few days here without my AIM.

One of the things this topic makes me think about is those new car commercials for OnStar where the kids are asking if you'd put your child in the car without a seat belt? and who would help them in an accident?
Now on one hand this can be a good form of added security for you. on the other hand this is scare tactic advertising and those commercials bother me. But its also another good example of this very thing. In a few years we're all going to feel panicked and insecure in a car without OnStar or something similar. We're going to lose faith in our driving abilities just like we lost faith in our ability to find a pay phone or like we lost faith in the abilities of our dead bolts and chain locks.

GPS systems diminished our abilities to read maps...mapquest diminished our abilities to find things on real maps lol And if you've ever seen me and my friends huddled in a gas station around a map on the outskirts of Houston, you'd know thats completely true.

I can't even go without a watch, or I spend all day looking at my watch-tanned wrist wondering what time it is.

so in other words technology has become the big person's security blanket...we no longer need to cuddle a ripped toy or bite off our nails, we can text message instead.

(not of course that I disprove of technology, I'm as addicted to some of these things as the next person...but its an interesting observation, no?)