A Digital Apocalypse

Note: This is not to be graded. This post is so horrid that I am considering deleting it. If you grade it you will cause extreme strain to my highly vulnerable ego.

In an eccentric movie being shown in TOK, I realized that humans have an innate need to make everything complex that even when they try to make things simpler, they unconsciously complicate it in the process.

Its human nature, after all.

Technology is paramount to our development. It serves as a backbone to the functions of our world. Conglomerates such as Intel, IBM, and the Japanese giants shape who we are today. True, the extent to which we are capable of innovating is admirable, and what we've come up with over these past years are in fact joys that I delight in – for heaven’s sake, I’m writing in the offspring of human innovation right now.

But past a certain extent, our indulgence on these good things might as well be our self-imprisonment. Because after all, as we find ourselves further and further taking advantage of the technologies we have at our expense, we are involuntarily making ourselves reliant on these things. In fact, technology has become so crucial to our lives that a relatively skilled hacker could take down an entire country from the comfort of his personal computer. In our pursuit of making life easier, we have instead chained ourselves unto this digital web of binary codes and iThings that our world has been morphed into a gigantic maze of circuitry.

What can I say? We are naturally self-damaging.

Cellular messaging, online messenger clients, and social sites such as friendster and facebook have been deemed great inventions that bridge communication gaps. Miraculous isn’t it, how people on separate ends of the world can be connected by a simple click of a button? Clicking and typing have now become comparable to making friends. Lovely.

Yes sure, communication on a superficial level has become as easy as getting a drink or taking a piss. But in reality, have we become more social creatures through the aid of these so-called social “tools?” Are we so much more social than our parents, or our grandparents – old folks who have no remote clue of what the world-wide-web is? Or have some of us instead become overly dependent on this system that without it, we are rendered socially dysfunctional?

Because nowadays, in our pursuit of taking advantage what is there for us, there’s a long, gradual, unnecessary process involved in socializing. First, meeting randomly through friendster or facebook. Next, when things become more comfortable, chatting. After that comes SMSing. This is then followed by calling. Only then can people become comfortable enough to meet in person.

Long gone are the days when socializing is the way it’s supposed to be – frank, straightforward, simple. In fact, for some, it’s impossible to go back to the way it was. They are so adapted to having a digital social life – an artificial social life – to the extent that face-to-face communication becomes a nervous chore that is impossible to do without that dreadful awkwardness and an unforgiving urge to urinate. It truly is ironic how something that was designed to help people socialize have instead caused social retardation to some unfortunate ones. Marvelous, isn't it?

In the domestic household, communication has become so easy that the use of a phone or a pager is parallelized to staying in touch. Members of a family feel free to come home late and not meet their siblings or parents as long as they’ve made contact during that day. Familial union is slowly becoming nonexistent as parent-children interaction is based on radio frequencies.

In this digital era, our digitalization is inescapable. As we reinvent, we reform our world into a prison of encryption plague-ridden by the fear of malicious codes. As we restructure society, we make human interaction artificial. As we try to connect, we instead disconnect. As we play into this symphony of irony, our intentions backfire, our control is lost, and our self-sufficiency becomes just a mere shadow of our "primitive" past.