Monday 11 May 2009

WE ARE HOVERING


Deb Hill - Cone has become one of our best social commentators. She is delightfully angsty about being a mum, being a nerd and of course being angsty.

Her column this morning about suffering from disconnection
will appeal to many bloggers.

She likens our love of connectedness and lack of interactions with the real community, to the world of Wall - E where humans are dependent on robots to meet their physical needs while they hover about on hover chairs.

Ahh so sad and so true. We are in danger of becoming a hoverer. Well actually, we are already there.

We hate being disconnected - lost on a gravel road somewhere off the information super highway. We feel a new kind of fear - a dislocation and isolation, irrational as that may be when it happens.

We have become part of the machine and we are so happy there.Its a kind of intellectual bliss, it stimulates us in places we did not know we had.

However we can see the dangers and every weekend we hop off our hoverchair and dig some dirt, smell the breeze, walk and watch the changing land, we read from dead tree blocks and we talk to people. We harvest things and we kill to eat.

We worry about the rise of the hover people, Will we see a new generation of hover kids wired into the mirror world of Wall- E with cellphones in their nappies and touch screens smudged with watties baby custard, tiny ears stuffed with buds emitting all kinds of info.

We hope not. We must teach our kids that the information connectedness is part of our world not all of it.

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