Technology: Today's brave new world or logic's foe?

By HEATHER ROBBINS
Winnipeg Sun
Aug. 09, 2006

In 1932, English author Aldous Huxley wrote the novel Brave New World, a tale of an individual's struggle to fit into a world where people lived by mindless entertainment, pill popping and blind faith in the government.

Huxley's utopia was cold, foreign and while a satire, it's a prediction of our future that's closer to us than we acknowledge.

Technology has brought new possibilities. We can cure and prevent diseases. We can receive information, music, videos, pictures, opinions and contact millions of people anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds.

Crime solving has been taken from guess work to a precise science. First World societies have all they could want at the touch of a button and little to complain about.

Why should I complain? After reading Brave New World, I realized our world is too close to Huxley's novel. As great as modern conveniences may be, these gloss over the idea that our technology has gone too far.

How can that be when life is so great? Well, life isn't so great. Though some diseases have been wiped out, AIDS and vicious cancers have replaced them, killing millions more than their predecessors.

Technology has harmed, rather than helped poverty. In many cases, it has unemployed more people than it has employed and inventions such as iPods threaten to create more unemployment. Technology has done nothing, except creating weapons that can effectively kill.

Our pursuits in pleasure have made us blind to the problems technology causes for the most vulnerable, the children. Studies have shown that children, who grow up in a household where a television is always on, are more likely to have attention and behavioural problems as they grow up. Most of the people I know who spend large amounts of time with movies, TV and computers are more restless and more disruptive in class.

Most alarming is our struggle for the unreal idea of perfection. We see manipulated images of others and easily find our own imperfections. Unlike those in the past who enhanced their assets, lessened their flaws and accepted what they couldn't change, we are now told, "Why accept when you can change or remove what you don't like?"

Now that plastic surgery is popular, people have begun saying, why can't we change our mental imperfections?

Drug companies answered the demand and now we feed billions of dollars every year to the pharmaceutical monster that bombards us with messages like: Don't like the fact that your child's hyper? Don't bother changing his diet, just get your doctor to prescribe a pill and don't worry about those nasty side effects.

Think you're suffering from too much stress? Don't bother eating healthy or exercising, just get a pill.

Think something's wrong with your husband? Why take a chance, get some pills for him too.

People have predicted this sort of messing with natural brain functions for years, only the government didn't have to instate it for mass control, we did it ourselves. We demanded drugs to make us perfect. We responded to ads for 'prescription highs' for drugs that would only create more barriers, not solve our feelings of be unfulfilled and thinking we needed them. They never believed Ray Bradbury when he said we would be more concerned with the trivial than the actions of the government.

We need to re-examine where we're going. For every technological step we take, the more logic we lose.

I realize the irony in that I couldn't have been able to write this without a computer and I'm not suggesting we should turn off all of our machines.

I'm saying we need to be conscious of the power of these magic boxes.

If we continue this way, we will be a brave new world, chanting, "A gram is better than a damn."