Renegade Rip

Issue date: 11/30/05 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: Dotty Burns

New-fangled technology is helping to breed a legion of schizophrenics cut off from each other and their families, friends and foes. Or at least it appears to be that way; people talking into cell phones appear to be talking to themselves, or rather, to disembodied voices much as schizophrenics do.

Obviously, cell phone users are completely detached from their surroundings and from the people in their environment; they appear withdrawn. Strangely,

I still have a tendency to turn around and look at what I assume to be a demented person muttering to himself/herself, and I see that he/she is not actually talking to himself/herself; rather he/she is talking to someone or some entity over his/her cell phone.

Cell phone users appear to be so out of touch with their environment that if the apocalypse struck, they would not notice.

A recent article published in the Sacramento Bee suggested that technology is creating a huge chasm between the generations.

However, the modern technological situation goes even further than that; technology is creating a communication chasm between individuals.

In this era when many people feel that the world needs to be on the alert for a cataclysmic terrorist threat, it seems ironic that many of those same people bury their attention into an object that clearly distracts them from matters of greater universal concern.

One irony of the telephone is that it was probably thought to be a device that could bring people, particularly people in rural, agrarian communities closer together; there was a time when the United States consisted mainly of such communities.

It is clear that the adaptation of the cell phone by consumers defies that purpose. It mentally and emotionally separates individuals from other individuals.

If the observer goes by the article that says technology separates one generation from the other, then the cell phone would obviously create a rift between parents and children. However, the purveyors of technology, i.e., TV moguls, modern "businessmen as buccaneers," as novelist Theodore Dreiser put it, would have the consumer believe that cell phones bring families together.

One commercial featuring the wonders of cell phone use, showed a family in a mall and the one thing keeping them together, although all the members planned to scatter into different areas of the mall, were the cell phones each member had.

Continued...

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