Friday, August 2, 2013

140 Characters to Compromise a Generation

Dearest Friends,

I work as a technology consultant. Don’t tell anyone, but I don’t know that much about technology, don’t have that much of an interest in it, and quite frankly, much of it scares me. The truth is I have learned much about technology, particularly SAP in the past year, and for the knowledge gain, I am grateful. There are other things that interest me of course, such as dogs, photography and dog photography, but no one is offering a direct deposit for me to take pictures of their dogs right now, so I’ll stick to tech.

Technology scares me for many reasons.

I hate politics and don’t want to talk or blog about them, but in my mind this is a relevant point, so that  mention it. I have long thought that presidents of late have lacked some core personality or developmental element. Presidents of early America, I believe, were much more grounded in many ways. Those men were physically involved in the battles and struggles which they fought.  

The world has changed largely in the years since the American Revolution and the wars since. Today we can release a missile that can kill an entire region of a country with the click of a button (assuming the proper user authorizations). Presidents and their advisors can sit safely behind their books piled high from law school and with a remote control take the lives of others.

Isn’t that really scary?

Technology is scary.

Technology allows you to drunk dial your exes when you should be doing no such thing.

Technology is scary!

Not only is technology scary in the prior regard, but I think technology is scary in that it has somewhat limited the self expression of our generation.

If any of us has formed a full thought it the past few years, we have chopped it down, sliced it into 140 character segments, and tweeted it for most of the world to see. We read buzzfeed articles with minimal words and maximal pictures of things letting us know that are from whatever decade they have written the article about.

In the past few days I have been overwhelmed by the world in strange ways, both good and bad. I have started to reevaluate the way I spend my time. I will start trying to expand my thoughts. I will write full sentences. I think this blog is the first step for me, though I don’t want to contain my writing to this keyboard. I want pencil and parchment, but most of all I don’t want any technology or social construct to interfere with my full development of thoughts or process of writing.
Also, a delightful little article from Medium, which after reading was the push for me to take this post from word doc draft to real world blog post.

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