vendredi, février 20, 2009

Who Pulls the Wireless Strings?


It's not a localized phenomenum, it happens world-wide: wireless technologies are literally flooding into everyone's life. But are we aware of how they are really impacting us?

Who among us didn't make the acquisition of a new technology device in the last 12 months? Ask the question to people surrounding you, and you'll be surprised. Odds are very high that they did, and you can expect that at least one of their new gizmos is a wireless device of any sort.

Although this tendency might seem to be more acute in our industrialized countries and apply only to wealthy people, it is actually a generalized world-wide trend: poor children get equipped with wireless laptops,
refurbished cell phones are being provided to homeless people...

As technology bursts seeminglessly into our lives, it dramatically changes our ways of living. In just the few last years, maybe without even noticing it, we lost a great level of intimacy and privacy. It's affecting us drastically. But when we accept the "intrusion" of these devices into our life, do we ask ourselves where is it leading us to?

Is there a Plan Superior? Who's will is it serving? Are people asking themselves what is the bottom line of being surrounded by technologic stuff? Is it really beneficial for all of us, is it only for those high-tech companies, or are we only running that race without any concern about the long-term consequences?

It seems that we systematically develop and market new technology products only because it's achievable, without questioning the sense of doing so. Maybe it's an inherent (or natural) tendency of human beings; and thus one might propose that, being dictated by instinct, it obviously follows some 'natural plan'... Maybe we're on the way to a new level of interdependancy between elements of humanity, in which our individual identities will slowly merge into a global being, a plural consciousness, a vast noos in which we will (eventually) coexist in an harmonious metabolism. We might be coming to that point.

On the other hand, I doubt that those mortals who actually pull the industry strings (might they be wireless strings!) are actually concerned about the noos conception... If there is some sort of above-us plan that's being achieved, indeed it's through some sort of quite an ironical fate!