Virtual Cage

Read the news in Tribun Makasar (Dec 21, 2006). It says that recently police, teachers and student council conducted an inspection among the students of Mangkura elementary school in Makassar. This is due to (still unconfirmed) news that one of the student has appeared in yet another improper video-phone recording movie. The teachers claim that they have suggested that students should not be equipped with cell phone, to minimize excess like this and stealing. But the parents refused, reasoning it will be difficult for them to pick the students after school or control their whereabouts.

While the excess is truly a concern, I can not help wondering on the reason mentioned by the parents. Is that really that difficult to coordinate pick up without a cell phone? I mean, they just have to wait at the gate don’t they? Unless of course, they’re just too lazy to get out of their car.

This is I think the curse of new technology. While it makes your life so much easier, at the other end it creates a new need. Hardly a need actually, but the convenience brought by these new tech has pampered us and we become attached to it. There’s a feeling that it’s something we can’t do without. The truth is, well, it’s just a feeling.

Having been a late embracer of new technologies and hi-tech lifestyle, I could not fathom the gravity of that problem. After all at some periods in my life I lived without sophisticated gadgets and I was doing just fine. Let’s see the things I regularly use now and when was the first time I used them:

• CD Player: 1997
• Cell phone: not until late 2000
• E-mail account and mailing list membership: 2001
• Yahoo Messenger 2004; Friendster: 2005; Blog: late 2006
• Cell phone with blue tooth: not until a few months ago
• Flash Disc: 1 month ago

However, the fateful last week of 2006 has changed my view. You know, that quake in Taiwan. When I am writing this it has been the fourth day without access to most of the important sites I visit regularly—including this blog. I have no problem with information and entertainment. There’s always TV, newspapers and books—just finished 2 books this week. But still something is missing: I’m not connected to the world. It’s like watching things passing by from inside a cage—virtual cage that is.

That attachment! Now I can empathize with those parents. Those technologies have been an integral part of our life that we take them for granted. It’s remarkable that a species who successfully inhabited all corner of the world by 5,000 BC using mostly stone and few iron tools, now can’t function well only because they can’t peek on the world through internet windows.

In the ice-age, some animal species became extinct after deprived from their source of food. Considering our dependency on advance technologies (and correspondingly how quick we de-learn to do basic stuff), is it possible that in the future our species may face extinction when cut off from them? Mmm... anybody still remember how to prepare rice without rice-cooker?


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