Themes Gleaming Darkly Part 7 - Technology
I’m a little embarrassed that it took me this long to cover this subject, but onward! As you can imagine, given the overall subject matter of Futures Gleaming Darkly, I have a thing or two that I believe when it comes to Technology. I write technology with a capital T here to signify its importance.
Technology has become a cultural term like “the media”. A sort of broad blanket to throw on top of anything with buttons and wires. A term used to sell things and scare old people. Its definition is ambiguous, as tires, for example, are technology with decades of science and innovation, but it is not Technology. For our purposes, capital T technology means the gadgets, gizmos, and machines of the present and future, whatever time you happen to be thinking of.
For example, Fundamt features my idea of a retrofuturistic Technology utilizing a television. At the time period of the story, televisions were becoming more common and I imagine that many people in that time thought it was the future. And they were right, of course.
However, there were plenty of very vocal detractors against the television. It was called “the boob tube”. It rotted your brain. If you sat too close to it, you’d fry your eyes. The Idiot Box, it mesmerized anyone who would chance a glance at it. Even now, people accuse parents of letting the television babysit their children. And by extension, their smartphones, their tablets, and their laptops. Whatever new Technology becomes available, there will always be those shaking an angry fist, babbling about the destruction of some virtue. Pencils were the death of chalkboards, chalkboards were the death of quill and ink, and so on backward through time.
And this brings us to my feelings towards Technology. I am a gleeful, optimistic psychophant of Technology. I will sing its praises until my dying day, especially those of the internet. We are now more connected than ever as a world and as humans. The internet has brought us access to endless heaps of knowledge. It provides us resources to learn languages and skills. Its old name, The World Wide Web, which lingers in our URLs and brings back cringe-worthy memories of 90s interpretations and marketing, was perhaps its best one yet to illustrate its power.
And of course, you can choose to see the bad in it, as any Technology. You could say that social media is a bubbling cesspool of misinformation and toxicity. And you’d be right. But that’s the truth of Technology and most anything, really.
It is only as good as the person using it. However, i believe that the majority of Technology’s good outweighs its bad. For every troll and ne’er-do-well on Facebook spreading hate, there’s someone talking to a long lost relative, a person discovering things about themselves on a video game, and someone else finding the words to help describe themselves. And then again, someone’s just looking at pictures of cats.
That is why I chose to represent Technology in a relatively ambivalent manner in Futures Gleaming Darkly. I want to highlight the wonders and possibilities, while showcasing that its general use can be profound or mundane. Take Selves for example. I have been a big fan of binaural ASMR for years and when I had written that story, I had stumbled across lots of “hypnotism” videos (again, the internet is wonderful and weird). Through sounds and speech, these creators illicit feelings and images. In the couple’s case in Selves, the Technology is this amazing thing that lets you feel the physical touch of someone miles and miles away and the protagonist believes it’s the solution to their problems.
However, we find that the user determines the experience and I believe this to be the case for most all Technology. You can find comfort in your phone but might use it as an unhealthy coping mechanism. An online community can make you feel welcome and not so alone, but that community may not be made of great individuals. You can get online and read the classics, or somebody’s ramblings on their Goodreads blog :P.
Technology may cure a symptom, but not its cause. It’s up to us to use Technology for good, even if it’s not its intended purpose. I trust us and therefore I trust Technology.
Technology has become a cultural term like “the media”. A sort of broad blanket to throw on top of anything with buttons and wires. A term used to sell things and scare old people. Its definition is ambiguous, as tires, for example, are technology with decades of science and innovation, but it is not Technology. For our purposes, capital T technology means the gadgets, gizmos, and machines of the present and future, whatever time you happen to be thinking of.
For example, Fundamt features my idea of a retrofuturistic Technology utilizing a television. At the time period of the story, televisions were becoming more common and I imagine that many people in that time thought it was the future. And they were right, of course.
However, there were plenty of very vocal detractors against the television. It was called “the boob tube”. It rotted your brain. If you sat too close to it, you’d fry your eyes. The Idiot Box, it mesmerized anyone who would chance a glance at it. Even now, people accuse parents of letting the television babysit their children. And by extension, their smartphones, their tablets, and their laptops. Whatever new Technology becomes available, there will always be those shaking an angry fist, babbling about the destruction of some virtue. Pencils were the death of chalkboards, chalkboards were the death of quill and ink, and so on backward through time.
And this brings us to my feelings towards Technology. I am a gleeful, optimistic psychophant of Technology. I will sing its praises until my dying day, especially those of the internet. We are now more connected than ever as a world and as humans. The internet has brought us access to endless heaps of knowledge. It provides us resources to learn languages and skills. Its old name, The World Wide Web, which lingers in our URLs and brings back cringe-worthy memories of 90s interpretations and marketing, was perhaps its best one yet to illustrate its power.
And of course, you can choose to see the bad in it, as any Technology. You could say that social media is a bubbling cesspool of misinformation and toxicity. And you’d be right. But that’s the truth of Technology and most anything, really.
It is only as good as the person using it. However, i believe that the majority of Technology’s good outweighs its bad. For every troll and ne’er-do-well on Facebook spreading hate, there’s someone talking to a long lost relative, a person discovering things about themselves on a video game, and someone else finding the words to help describe themselves. And then again, someone’s just looking at pictures of cats.
That is why I chose to represent Technology in a relatively ambivalent manner in Futures Gleaming Darkly. I want to highlight the wonders and possibilities, while showcasing that its general use can be profound or mundane. Take Selves for example. I have been a big fan of binaural ASMR for years and when I had written that story, I had stumbled across lots of “hypnotism” videos (again, the internet is wonderful and weird). Through sounds and speech, these creators illicit feelings and images. In the couple’s case in Selves, the Technology is this amazing thing that lets you feel the physical touch of someone miles and miles away and the protagonist believes it’s the solution to their problems.
However, we find that the user determines the experience and I believe this to be the case for most all Technology. You can find comfort in your phone but might use it as an unhealthy coping mechanism. An online community can make you feel welcome and not so alone, but that community may not be made of great individuals. You can get online and read the classics, or somebody’s ramblings on their Goodreads blog :P.
Technology may cure a symptom, but not its cause. It’s up to us to use Technology for good, even if it’s not its intended purpose. I trust us and therefore I trust Technology.
No comments have been added yet.
Writing Sundries
A collection of my thoughts on writing, including descriptions of my own personal methods and advice for what helps me write.
- Clinton W. Waters's profile
- 52 followers
