Chrisonomicon

Tuesday, October 15, 2002

Alan Lightman discusses some of the less agreeable symptoms of our Wired World—a world driven by technological progress as an end in itself instead of a means for improvement of the human condition—in his lecture The World is Too Much With Me (from Caterina):

1. An obsession with speed and an accompanying impatience for all that does not move faster and faster.
2. A sense of overload with information and other stimulation.
3. A mounting obsession with consumption and material wealth.
4. Accommodation to the virtual world.
5. Loss of silence.
6. Loss of privacy.

Even though it utilizes the very technological ties that Lightman points to—the Internet, electronic connectedness, as a spoke in the hamster wheel of "production, demand, consumption, and work"—keeping a record on this website has helped me maintain a sense of inner self. It's not nearly as anonymous as it was when I started a few years ago but, when I sit down to type out my thoughts, I'm alone in front of a machine that facilitates my contemplations. If anything, technology has enabled me to develop my writing skills and practice creating and sustaining a private life that is separate from the rest of the world I experience daily.

Granted, the majority of people in our Wired World do not use the Internet to develop personal spaces. It is a justifiable fear of Lightman's that this loss of a private, inner self may lead to a world that we really don't want to live in, and he poses the questions:

Sometimes, I picture America as a person and think that, like a person, our entire nation has an inner self. If so, does our nation recognize that it has an inner self, nourish that inner self, listen to its breathing in order to know who America is and what it believes in and where it is going? If citizens of that nation, like me, have lost something of our inner selves, then what of the nation as a whole? If our nation cannot listen to its inner self, how can it listen to others? If our nation cannot grant itself true inner freedom, then how can it allow freedom for others? How can it bring itself into a respectful understanding and harmonious co-existence with other nations and cultures, so that we might truly contribute to peace in the world?