Short Circuit

First posted: 30 december 2009

I was sure to live in the new century, after the end of the twentieth, the era where technologies should be our daily routine and our own “food”, the time when all of us can get used to managing innovations, present and upcoming.

I’m looking around, lost…

We’re just entered into a university class where we have to follow a lesson about HTML codes and so we need to use computers. A young girl, that I know (she’s about twenty years old), comes near a pc station, she looks at the computer screen and she decides to move into another place, changing her seat and position. I asked her why she had changed her mind so she replied: “The computer doesn’t work”. I said that it was just turned off but she didn’t try to turn it on, she changed her position and she was happy.
This is just one among a lot of examples that I have noticed over the years.
We are all convinced that young people passively accept all the technologies and that they interact more easily than older people, but I’m not entirely sure.

I think that the predisposition and the inclination to learn how to use technologies could be an individual frame of mind rather than a matter of ages: Michelangelo Antonioni, a famous italian filmmaker, when he was old, loved and tried to explore, new technologies concerning the new frontiers of innovation and progress in the movie realization, industry, production; he seemed to be interested in that, feeling the same pleasure and excitement of a child while playing with snowballs in his early years.

Perhaps the main problem is not technology, but it’s the difficulty in understanding it, and I’ll try to explain it in a better way: today, our society “teaches” us to seek immediacy, we haven’t got time to lose in the effort to understand how something works, we should cope with factual things, with situations, etc. achieving our goals with personal skills (acquired and improved by studying, learning and analyzing all that we need), because, unless we try to do that, we could fail, trapped(like “innocent”, unaware, dull victims) of time passing by and of oblivion, burdening our capacity to link our actions to reason and common sense (with a grain of salt, we should say). Or should we fall into the collapse of thinking and logical tought?
For this reason, every time that the majority of people, both young and old (and, believe me, they’re more than you can imagine), should approach some new technological inventions they’ve got only two choices: they can avoid the “obstacle” prentending not to see it or they can take the instruction manual and try to understand (with a dramatic sensation of hard working) where is the start button that, (that is usually placed just under their fingers moving all around,directionless), but this last solution is the least popular and potentially it’s taken only when they’re forced by circumstances.

Everything is becoming a waste of time, we try to run so fast that a flow freezes our thought, fantasy, or relief, swallowing us and, in this way, making us “neurotic”.
In this way, even the technology that, on a theory level, should help us to lower the intensity of stress becomes our worst enemy but, also, becomes a status symbol, a sort of password or “passpartout” to be given infinite access to the “empire” of a “new eden” where just wealthy persons could afford to own technologies, thus feeling the power of social differences, discriminations, classes discrepancies: how many people, for example, buy a Mac laptop without having any idea about how to use all its potential only because it’s a trendy and “cool” thing?