What is your outlook on technology?

[POed_Ex_Repub]

[nickgutierrez]

1. That thing can do WHAT!!!??

Option #1 :).

[AZCat]

2. I have spent WAY to much time thinking about this

I am an engineer (and a grad student) and have serious issues with our cultural approach to technology.

There's a good book, "Machine in the Garden", by Leo Marx, about how the progressive movement in the 1800's folded technological progress into the idea of social progress. Sure, there have been developments that have helped us as a society, but how much of it is part of the "Red Queen's Race"?

My major complaint about technology is that it has worked to separate us from each other over the last hundred years. There have been exceptions, but the inventions that caused serious shifts in social structure: the television and the automobile, have created a culture of parallel isolation - where we all have experience the same thing but as individuals, not a group. I see this as intimately tied into the sort of ideology that fuels groups like the Republicans that we despise. Fortunately, the exceptions in the 1990's - the explosion of the internet and the cellular phone - have worked to reconnect the severed social ties. We are social creatures, and I feel that the best elements of the progressive movement represent a genuine love of our fellow humans. This love can only develop in an atmosphere where we actually interact with others, as opposed to the isolation that we have all felt when on the freeway during rush hour. How much less stressful would traffic be if you could actually give feedback to the other drivers, as opposed to fuming in your car and contemplating giving them the bird (or worse, as happened many times)?

I know this is fractured, but I am tired and not thinking clearly.