"Television has become our eyes, the telephone our mouths and ears; our brains are the interchange for a nervous system that stretches across the whole world..." I don't know about you guys, but this analogy is extremeley disturbing for me, especially when I think about just how true it is. Although to say that technology has become a lifeform of its own may be a bit of an exaggeration, I believe that this statement is not that far from reality. When you think about it, we do most of our socializing through e-mail, on instant messenger and over the phone and most of our cultural exposure comes from television and surfing the internet. As a society, most of our relationships are really with technology, not with people . Even our most intimate relationships are essentially driven by technology.
Ironically, although we see each other four days a week, most of us could probably only pair a few names with the faces of our classmates. We would, however, recogonize most of the names from The Blog. We do virtually all of our communicating through this website despite the fact that we spend four hours a week sitting in the same room. Could there come a day when we won't even be doing that? When we'll be sitting in our rooms on our computing chatting online about the material? It's entirely possible. The question is, how would that affect our traditional interpersonal networks?