Man or Machine?
Confusing Ourselves with Our Technology

People are very social creatures, and our propensity for language alone is proof of that. It is my belief that so much of the feeling of meaninglessness or emptiness that the average American endures are a symptom of feeling disconnected from others. Outside is a whole world of hustle and bustle that seems to go on and on without referencing the individual, without needing "little old me".

Reasons for this are undoubtedly complex, and I don't venture to completely outline such things in this brief commentary. Instead, what I want to express is a rather specific phenomenon that deals with man and his popular technology. Man has, in many ways, become dependent upon his technology in this modern world, and without endeavoring to make hasty judgements about this state of affairs, we can make some general observations.

More and more often, it would seem, our idea of interacting with society has come to rely upon a 'middle man'. This 'middle man' is not actually a person, though, which is precisely why it presents a curious state of affairs. That 'middle man' is an electronic box, made of wires, tubes, and speakers. It is a package of circuits and computer chips. We let our world come to us through flashing boxes of colors that we call 'televisions' and 'computers', and we speak to others through tiny recorders we call 'cell phones'.

Now, it is often said about these technologies that they make the world a smaller place. Huge distances, we say, are covered in the blink of an eye. Never before has communication been so simple and so far-reaching. In many ways, this is true. However, the paradoxical aspect to this 'shrinking of the world' is that it would seem that the ordinary person feels more and more distanced rather than intimately involved. So often our act of interaction is a purely passive observance of a screen, something which bombards us with flashing images and sounds, but which has no smell and no texture. You can't feel it...you can only observe it. So, too, our act of speaking with others occurs through a package of microphones and speakers, which reduce our companions to scratchy sounds. To the plain sight, a person speaking on a cell phone is not actually talking to anyone, instead barking away at a little piece of plastic and wires that he believes can speak to him. Our idea of a world where we can all be together more easily reveals itself, in fact, as a world where we free ourselves by all means possible from actual interaction.

We believe that these technologies bring us closer together, but in practice, they tend to serve as substitutes for 'flesh and blood' relationships with one another. All of this is reflective of ourselves, you see. That is, it plainly reveals what we believe a human being, and thus a human relationship, to be in its essence. Is a human being an image? Is a person a picture? Is a person a voice? Is a person like a tape recorder? Are we really the electronic creatures that seek to come closer to one another through electronics?

When you look at the things we hail as bringing mankind closer, you would get the idea that a person amounts to little more than an image like that of a television screen, a speaker that spits out audio, and a microphone on which to record everyone else's speaker. That is the reflection of the way we feel that we confidently build into our technology, and it is that mode of consciousness which honors these advancements as bring us together.

Frankly, the irony of the whole situation is that as we place more and more reliance on these means as expressly comprising our communication -our communion- with one another, we reinforce in ourselves this vision of mankind as little more than a conglomerate of mechanical and electronic parts. We create for ourselves a world where we are inadvertantly expected to behave like circuitry, and this is, in many respects, a dangerous proposition. Man is little more than a picture in our field of vision which makes sounds through a speaker and records them through a microphone. It is difficult to imagine a concept of humanity that is so fundamentally contrary to life and to living, breathing people. Consequently, our world expects us to perform more like a computer than a person, more like a machine than a man...and perhaps that feeling of emptiness is really just that aspect of ourselves that seems to be left behind as we push forward into a world where a person is defined more as a jumble of pictures and sounds than organic and human.