Our media, ourselves: Are we headed for a matrix?

Photo caption: The cool sterility of 2001: A Space Odyssey is just one example of how pop culture expresses an anxiety that's seemingly about technology, but may be as old as time.

[Editor's note] I heard this awesome story on NPR last night and just ran into it on Google+. I think it speaks clearly about my personal apprehensions to the digital age.

Bob Mondello reports:
When Hollywood imagines the future, from Logan's Run to Avatar, it tends to picture living spaces as sterile and characterless, without any cultural clues to the person who lives there. No record library, no DVDs, no Hemingway on bookshelves ... often no bookshelves.

And here we are, catching up to that vision of the future. Sales of physical books dropped 30 percent last year, while e-book sales more than doubled. Sales of DVDs fell during that same period, while online streaming rose. And in 2011, for the first time, digital music downloads overtook sales of CDs. It's as if we're deciding en masse that when it comes to the arts and entertainment, we can do without the actual object that is the object of our affection. Who needs real-world clutter in an age when everything streams?

In short: "Welcome," as Morpheus put it in The Matrix, "to the desert of the real."

In that film, as you'll recall, people interact in a reassuringly cluttered but virtual reality. Actual reality is barren. No stuff at all. Nothing physical to establish that one person is different from another. It's a horror story in which humanity has abandoned all of what makes us human.

Once you've felt the comfort of society, you worry about losing it. So to remind yourself of how you're connected, you gather things around. And you cling to them, not so you won't lose them, or lose what makes you you, but so you won't lose the connections they represent. The fear is of emptiness — but of emptiness inside us, not of empty rooms.
You can and MUST listen to the whole story at NPR.

Comments

Jessica said…
"Be afraid of the future." thanks for sharing this

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