semester 2, blog 2

Bob Mondello claims in his article, Our Media, Ourselves: Are We Headed for a Matrix? that “the media in people’s lives are supplanting the people in people’s lives”. Is this true? Would we as a society rather sit behind a computer and talk to our loved ones or old friends on Facebook or see what they are doing on twitter rather than talk to them face to face?

Unfortunately, yes. This is extremely true. Our society today relies entirely too much on media and technology, especially when it comes to talking to one another. We now use Facebook and twitter to talk to each other when we are on the go. We move at such a fast pace nowadays that we use social media to connect with our friends without ever actually having to see them. You can see what they did in the past weekend, even in the past month or year, without ever even having to talk to them. All you have to do is click a couple of links on the computer and there you are, looking at, a now distant, friend’s pictures. Pictures are worth a thousand words, but wouldn’t you like to have the story told by the one who actually experienced it, rather than looking at the pictures and making up your own?

“‘I want you to come and see me.’ Vashti watched his face in the blue plate. ‘But I can see you!’ she exclaimed. ‘What more do you want?’ ‘I want to see you not through the Machine,’ said Kuno. ‘I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.’” This is a conversation that Vashit and her son, Kuno, are having in the short story titled, The Machine Stops. Vashti is moving at a fast pace, she makes it seem as if she has no time to come see her son. The blue plate (media) is replacing the face to face time that a mother and a son should have.

Mondello says “A friend told me the other day that she had no CDs in her house anymore. All her music was on her iPod. She still has books, but she’s not buying as many as she used to. From the kid stuff in the entertainment center you’d guess she’s a Disney stockholder. But as her family outgrows those videos, so will her living room. And her kids’ll be growing up in a world without hard copies of a lot of what members of their mother’s generation use to ‘define’ living spaces and to tell people who they are.” Mondello’s friend is becoming modernized, like the rest of the world, by technology. We use technology everyday now in our society; and technology is how we get our media.

Some people love the social media aspect of our lives, they say that it does bring us closer together and connects us. While that may be true, it is not a true interaction, it is not the one on one, face to face conversation and interaction that we should be having.