09 May 2012, 5:25 pm
Charges wrote:
aghogday wrote:
I had a boss (a long time ago) that said he interfaced with a colleague instead of met with them or talked to them, in an employee meeting; that generated quite a response among the more social/emotional inclined employees, in sarcastic whispers.
I'm not quite following you. From what I can understand (please correct me if I interpret this wrong
), you explained after this point that a certain 'humanness' was necessary for the age of electronic social communication to truly emerge as a part of society. But why did this boss want to interface rather than talk in the first place? Was it because he himself was not much of a face-to-face person?He actually described talking with another human being in face to face interaction as interfacing with another human being. He used a technological term to describe human communication that was not well received, in that human beings don't interface with other human beings in face to face interaction, but they do interface using Information Technology. It's not likely he would have ever said this, had he not been exposed to computer technology.
What is interesting to me is that while computers have been anthropomorphized to meet the needs of human social interaction, humans have adapted through the process of neuroplasticity to interact with others toward the continuum of machine communication as well.
It's an extreme analogy but while computers have become like Frankenstein as a created form of approximated human intelligent life, human beings have become reduced in some ways as zombies, in an approximation of a machine that does not provide the same abilities for emotive communication.
Elements that arise in popular culture, are often rooted in changes in other areas of culture, reflecting discomfort that is not always directly communicated. The goth culture came with the first wave of computer technology and "dark" videogaming. The wave of fascination with Zombies has come with a wider availability of broad band access, immersing humankind in a machine interface more than could have been imagined a few decades earlier.
The movies the "the matrix", and "avatar" was an expression of this as well. Children are born into a machine interface in society today at a very young age. Movies like the "Matrix" and "Avatar", can break the illusion for some that culture is moving in a good direction, with reliance on human/machine interface; moving away the "natural world".
There was a movie called "The Emerald Forest", in the 80's well before widely accessible Computer Technology came along, that was a great deal like Avatar, except it was provided from the opposite point of view, of primitive people's in the rain forest that were becoming encroached upon by modern society.
For me it provided a primal sense of something lost that I never really had. That thing my cat experiences laying naked on the grass at night, understanding from a primal sense of what home really means.
It appears that the movie Avatar struck some people that way in such a discomforting manner, that they committed suicide. It reminds me of an old "twilight zone" show where someone came up and whispered what the real meaning of life was to people, and people went completely mad. In someways we are living in "twilight zone" conditions, but many have accommodated them without serious problems. At least, so far.
