Digital Distress

Aldous Huxley once said, “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”

Technology is supposed to make your life easier. That was the plan. I find that technology is increasingly creating more work and making us more stupid.

Last month, a few friends and I went to visit Quebec. In the good old days, when we had an analog camera, we would buy 3-4 rolls of film and be very conservative in taking shots. Find the best spot. Get the lighting right. Stand straight. Say cheese. Snap!

Now equipped with a digital camera and gigabytes of card space, nobody has any patience any more. Every 5 steps you take a photo. It does not matter what it is. It may be a great scenic location, or a mundane statue. It may be a beautiful rose or an ugly duck thinking you are its father. No more rolls to burn. So keep on snapping!

If there are 2 people, first you take the photo of Person A. Then you take the photo of Person B. And then give to a stranger to take both of them. Oh yes, I forgot. Now you can see how the photos look like before they are developed. Zoom to see if there were any blemishes. And if so, repeat the process again.

And so, literally you take hundreds of photos on one trip. I would not even call it a “trip”. More like a modeling engagement except that your photos never get published.

I am sorry. Did I just say those photos never get published? I was thinking about the old days when your photos go into a carefully stored photo album and only looked at by a handful of people.

I forgot about social networks like Facebook and Orkut. Nowadays, you have to be extra careful when you pose for a photo, because anyone with a camera, essentially anyone, can post your unflattering moments online for everyone to view. My looks are not that flattering anyway, but I have my pride too.

I also look at our inclination to keep hoarding these bits and bytes. Every year, each one of us adds thousands of photos and videos. And our friends do the same. To actually look at them would take hours, maybe even weeks.

I recently read an article where a person boasted that he had 20,000 hours of bootlegged music and video. Very nice! The problem is that it would take the person two and a half years to listen to that music if they did it 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.

While technology is making it easier for us to do various activities, it makes it also easier for us to do too much of them. For examples, airports are among the most dangerous places in the world not because of terrorists, but because you never know when someone using a Blackberry is just going to crash into you.

Blogging made it easy for every person to publish their sorry diary, but today it gets even better. You have micro-blogging with Twitter where you can write all day long about “What are you doing?” and follow hundreds or thousands of other people doing the same.

The lesson we can derive from this is that technology has subjugated us. We no longer have any free will. We all need to need to take a deep breath (go ahead) and look at how we are utilizing technology. And become its master once again.