Your Old Road Is Rapidly Agin'

Welcome to the technology generation, and an era of social connectivity. Now, right there someone might say that technology has greatly disconnected social interaction. But this could not be further from the truth. It's just that the old farts do not want to get out of the new road because they can't lend a hand.

The argument I am accustom to goes a little something like this : "Children just sit inside and play on the computer... they don't go outside and play in the neighborhood with other children. No one meets in the public square anymore on a lovely spring afternoon to chat with a lifelong friend... they'd rather do work in a Starbucks." It's not like they are being antisocial. Humans are social creatures and we won't let something as silly as walking to California stop us from interacting with someone in LA.

Nothing in the ways of social interaction has changed, only the form in which interaction takes place has changed. Rather than children playing cops and robbers over at Jimmy and Sally's house, they play WoW and kill monsters with Jinn in Korea and Hansel in Germany. But what a double standard youths of this era face, they are told to get off the computer and go play in the neighborhood... BUT, keep your cellphone (with GPS) on, and call your mother when you get to Jimmy's house, and make sure mother talks to his parents so she knows you're not lying and out doing drugs behind the Kroger where men in vans with candy might kidnap, rape and kill you and leave you bound in electrical tape on the side of Highway 17. And be back before 5:30 or mother will have to call every parent in the neighborhood to find out where you are!

When I grew up I could go anywhere in the neighborhood and my parents didn't have to know where I was or what I doing, so long as I was back by dinner. My mother used to tell me how she would ride her bike into another county, and didn't have to tell my grandparents where she was so long as she was back by sundown.

Technology has allowed social interaction to take on a whole new dynamic form, as it always has. I can express this with a little mathematical endeavor. Let's say I had to have social intercourse with someone in California, but I live in Boston. Thousands of years ago I would have had to walk, which would have taken about 3 months to have this little social interaction. We can call this distance with respects to it's time to transverse that distance A. Upon the advent of the car it only took 3 days to drive to California. Now the distance didn't change, but the time to transverse that distance has. Now in a 3 month interval with the car I can travel approximately 30A (or 30 times that of walking). Now that we have internet and cellphones, I can just conference call someone in California and instantly start talking. The distance is still the same, but the boundary of time is extended way further. We can now say the cellphone provides GA, where G is a finite number, but very large number (since G would be based on radio waves, so our distance of time boundary would be 3 light months).

The problem isn't the technology. It's that the older generations don't want to see the world change. Technology allows us to extend boundaries and create social interactions in new ways, and most of them would have been impossible back in the golden days (whatever that means). Seriously, I would had to pay hundreds of dollars to fly to California, book a hotel room, rent a car, and purchase tickets for a TED conference if the golden days were still in effect. Thankfully they are not. Now I can chill out, eat a bowl of cereal in my bath robe while I watch it for FREE on the internet. Forget the golden days.

Now of course there are going to be drawback (everything has a drawback), namely that children can become exposed to violence and porn on the internet, and think that that is the way things actually are... that is why there are parents around. If a child really thinks women like to be bound and gagged with a 12 inch black rubber dildo, then what does that tell us about the parents? But, then again, how is it any different from children finding where their buddy's dad keeps his vibrators and graphic porno magazines are stashed at?

Of course, how are children suppose to grow up without being given the chance to be wrong, to be hurt, or to experience tragedy? The greatest tragedy that could occur would be if there were no tragedies at all. What a naive and depraved society we would be.

Social interaction... only not with the person next to you :