Also as you add layers of technology, communication is lost. A good amount of communication is non spoken. Tone of voice, Body Stance, Eye contact, etc... Sure we have analogs for these things in the internet, but AM I EXCITED OR ANGRY OR JUST HAVE MY CAPS LOCK ON? On top of it, the analogs are defined. X means happy, etc. In a sense we pigeon hole our body language so that others can try to understand what we are saying subliminally. Thus communication on line (like a forum!) is more... certian, scientific, translatable. Where Human to human interaction is not.
hehehe denyasis, you'd make an excellent dystopian writer (or a sociologist!). specifically what you're describing kind of reminds me of a book by the marxian cultural theorist Herbert Marcuse,
One-Dimensional Man, but reading that wiki link won't give you much of a hint as to why. sooo.... (dystopic busts out his copy):
"Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but
what can be chosen and what
is chosen by the individual. The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative. Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear--that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls."
now, that's a dense enough quote to begin with, and its relevance is also tied into a lot of my own observations and opinions about modern society. before i go on, i want to make something clear. i do see a plethora of problems in modern society, but i don't seek to blame. i might discuss the government, for example, in great detail when i talk about some problems, but i don't see "the government" as any more to blame than everyone else. this is society, and to some extent it includs everybody. so if there is blame to be assigned, in my mind everyone's at least partly responsible. but blame isn't my game. i don't care about how done it, i care about making it better. in my own way, i guess writing (and eventually teaching) are the best ways for me to pursue the goal of betterment for everyone; these are my greatest skills.
so, now that i'm done with the histrionic disclaimer, back to technology and the dehumanized society. i think it's interesting that you use that word. one work in that quote above that has a lot of charge in marxian rhetoric is 'alienation'. for marx, if you can't control the work you do in your own life, you become separated from it. but because it's the external proof of your existence--your measurable impact on the world--you also see yourself reflected in it. for marx when you don't have control over your own work, you lose an anchor to the immediate, physical world. but there's more. human empathy is based on the ability to see oneself in others, and see others in oneself. not being able to see yourself in your work, you also lose a lens through which to see others. it's no great shock that people bond at work and over work. the terms by which you know yourself are the terms by which you know others. and it's from that emotional relationship that we develop a sense of group identity--be it tribal, religious, national, or simply "human."
the think to understand marx, you have to understand what he thinks of work. marx looked at everyone who's ever lived as enslaved. at first, we were slaves to nature and our basic needs--and ultimately, that's the cause of all slavery. but as society's developed, we've learned to produce more than we need to stave off hunger, disease and the elements--yet everywhere, at least some people are still hungry, sick and homeless. and for marx, that's because now there are human slave masters. whatever you think of that, don't make a final decision until you think about his contrast. he publicly denied it, but i think marx was a bit time utopian. in his mind, if people weren't slaves to something, we wouldn't be lazy creatures. he believed that leisure activity was primarily something we do as a means of escaping the harshness of slavery, but if we weren't slaves, we'd spend the majority of our time working productively on... something. whatever made us happy, i think he's say (if he were drunk enough to admit his deeper, emotional pattern of thinking). i hope you can see the influence these notions had on the world of Star Trek, for example. but falling short of that, we exist in a condition marx referred to as alienation.
this all may or may not interest you, but i do have a point. this is at least a third of the reason i started writing science fiction. a few years ago between my 4th and 5th years of college, i was staying at home for the summer with my mom and working part time. i was thinking about marxian alienation. i was also thinking about the 1960s, a curve if not a turning-point in American cultural history (with antecedents in Europe as well). some call it the postmodern era, though if it's a truly unique era is a matter of some debate, but people generally agree that western society was more highly characterized, in one among several ways, by a general malaise that could be called alienation. that period also sees a sudden and exponential growth in the number of reported alien abductions, UFO sightings, crop circles, etc.
so reflecting on all this, i became drawn to the 'alien' as a potentially powerful symbol in writing. alien = extraterrestial. alein = cultural disenfranchisement. alein = an interesting and robust part marxian theory. it did result in a roughly 12,000 story, though i'm not enamored with the idea of sharing it. it became... strange. i wrote it for a "novella" (short novel) writing workshop about 4 months later, but it evolved into something at the behest of my peers that, in retrospect, isn't what i wanted.
in any regard, back to marcuse. he was writing in the 50s, 60s and 70s, and he believed one of the ways
enslavement and
aliention (i put them in italics to indicate that he was definately thinking of these terms along marxian lines)-- he thought one of the ways those things had developed during the 60s was into a paradigm of he called "operationalism." the widest definition would be something like, "the reduction of unique ideas, feelings, experiences and beliefs into uniform terms of exchange, function and operation." is that vague enough for you? it's vague because he saw similar things happening in government, business, academia and culture in general. in government (both U.S./capitalis and Soviet/communist blocs) he felt that bureaucracy had become so expansive that statecraft was less about policies and actions and more about workflow. in business and the workplace, he similarly felt that it was less about
doing something and more about passing it on to the next person (even factory labor had become so piecemeal that what you actually did in the assembly line was less important than getting things on to the next people, since companies could afford to throw away defective models -- he called that, and the general and rapid out-dating of things, 'the production of waste'). he saw similar trends in academia, where it was becomming popular to reduce ideas to mutually compatible terms. in practical terms, the liberal arts had become and remain bogged down in didactic jargon, while the hard sciences consist mainly of input/output labwork without much regard of the consequences and benefactors of scientific discovery.
he didn't dwell much on general culture. he was a theorist, so he got his ideas from reading. when i say general culture, i'm talking about what this huge tangest started off with. today's 'general culture' (in those places and for those people affluent enough to enjoy certain parts of it)---the way people act to one another today, the "rotf" and "happiness rating 7" kinds of things you mention, that could be 'operationalism' as well.
take myspace as a perfectly horrid example. i was hanging out at a friend's house (well, i'm hoping he'll be more than a friend
also part of the reason i haven't been meeting my writing goals
), and his roommate made some side comment about how someone doesn't return his myspace comments.
that was interesting. there were just the three of us in the room, myself, "A" and "J" (anonymity for others was trained into me as a sociologist). i myself have a myspace but don't use it much. i definately don't respond to more than a third of the comments and messages i get, not including spam. A is apperantly similar. but A is also a phone junkie, both text messages and talking to people. i don't think i've spend more than a couple hours with him not being on the phone for at least 10 minutes. i barely talk on the phone. the few people i can
stand to talk with for very long are a few of my loved ones i don't see often, but only my mom gets anything like a regular phone call. for that kind of emotionally rewarding interation, i prefer to spend time with people in person. but obviously enough, but intellectually stimulating interaction, i can do online interaction pretty consistently (thus the reason i'm not on myspace very much--i said
intellectually simiulating interaction). J doesn't use his phone much either, but he's apperantly a bit of a myspace junkie.
so, three modes of communication. internet, cell phone (which is 2 if you count text messages separately), and direct communication. what
is the proper etiquite for each? i think this relates very closely to what you said about communication being lost when you add technology. is it rude to stick to brief, 'operational' messages when text messaging with someone? (that's meant as a rhetorical question, but my own personal, humble answer is "it depends on the person"... i don't text my mom because she can barely work a cell phone as it is, and i don't text my friend T because she hates text messages, but A seems to prefer them because he spends his freetime playing City of Heroes).
i think there's a deeper part of your question. the rate modern technology is advancing is exponeitally faster than it's ever been before. while this might not change certain core parts of human nature, it can be as you so simply put, very dehumanizing. a lot of the 'need to keep up' (at least in the realm of pop culture) is manufactured by advertising. sci fi is the perfect realm to explore the limits of that trend, and in a sense, of the limits of human psychology.
whew, sorry for the uber long post.
