Pyschotech Nation
There’s over a billion technology blogs out there in cyberspace. My God, don’t any of us have lives? I remember attending the myriad tech conferences in the mid-1990s in San Jose and other parts west, people were just giddy with excitement with anything that had to do with the computers and the Web.
Now fifteen or so years later, in the midst of a major recession, a tech job is still the island in a sea of employment desperation. I may not be overspending at the local mall but I’ll still be stealthily buying my way into poverty on Amazon.
When I was a kid (a very long time ago in Internet years) one of the biggest expenses was the seven dollar a month AT&T phone bill. You were middle class if you could afford to opt out of a party line, which we were finally able to do when I got to eighth grade. An American wage earner in those days made about two dollars an hour, and for some people just a simple phone was a luxury whose inclusion into the family’s life was debated over many a kitchen table.
Today nearly everyone has a mobile phone, cable television, a land line, and high speed internet acess. A majority of those people have an Xbox, PlayStation or Wii. Monthly communications cost have raised from AT&T’s seven dollars a month to over $250 a month; assuming a household of three and everyone has a cell phone. A number of studies seem to indicate that Americans are more internet connected than have TVs, more than half of all cell phone users use a smart phone. The average U.S. wage today is around $20 per hour, so that tells us that American families are willing to forgo retirement savings, healthful food like fresh fruits and vegetables, paying off credit cards and paying for their own healthcare in order to play angry birds, catch up on our friend’s kid’s birthdays via Facebook and/or watch last night’s Daily show. We’re in a national psychopathic obsession with our technology.
Our economy’s going to hell, we can’t find work, but God forbid we go without 4G connectivity on our cell phone! Every four years our election process shows us how ignorant we are and still we can’t find a few bucks to pay teachers better. We bitch and moan about paying ten cents more for organic carrots, and simply freak out when Netflix wants to raise its prices to a third of the price of basic cable.
I’ve always been a fan of technology, though this rant hardly supports that claim. Believe me it’s not any single techno wonder that’s will do us in, rather it’s the simple fact that we seem to have relinquished our role in the real world for the Call of Duty in the cloud. – Krotchett
