One talked about how she enjoys having a second home in Brooklyn, even as she continues to work and live for the most part in a town four hours away.
"The two mortgages are tight ... sometimes I feel like I can't ever go on a real vacation. But, then I reach Brooklyn, and my friends are right across from me, and I am happy," she said.
"Yes, ultimately it is all about the human-human interactions, right? It is not really about the vacation travels."
People increasingly seem to be forgetting the importance of the human interaction in real time and space. They fail to understand that virtual is not the same. It is like my favorite example that you can't eat a virtual cake. It is only real water that quenches the thirst, not the virtual.
David Brooks writes in his column that "Online is a place for human contact but not intimacy." But, people seem to be mistaking one for another, and fail to understand the difference between contact and intimacy, between acquaintance and friend.
There is no turning back. The virtual will increasingly be the preferred choice, even as people know within that it is the real that they truly seek.
And then one day in the future, humanity will run into the very scenario that E.M. Forster wrote about years before all these developed:
There is no turning back. The virtual will increasingly be the preferred choice, even as people know within that it is the real that they truly seek.
And then one day in the future, humanity will run into the very scenario that E.M. Forster wrote about years before all these developed:
"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind."Cry is all we can do!
She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit.
2 comments:
The theme of the quote from EM Forster has been explored in science fiction a lot. Future generations forget that it was men who invented all those wondrous machines that run much of the world. Themes have been explored wherein the world reduces to only a few hundred individuals who live virtually eternally and don't ever meet another human being.
Well, who are we to say that one future is better than another. Sure, we would value human interaction today far far more than mere inane tweets, but as for the future ? Que sera sera
Yes, even the way we live now will be way too much of a science fiction for humans from even two hundred years ago. Our present will be unrecognizable to them, and they perhaps will even wonder why we call ourselves human!
These kind of inquiries will continue, as long as we have no clue what happens to us after we die and as long as we have no idea how all these came about. The questions, and concerns about what it means to be human, are not really about us being human but more about the mystery over the beginning and the end.
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