via: Nokia BlogSo I love technology, that’s why I brand myself a nerd or a geek. I don’t really know which one I am, but it doesn’t really matter. I just know I happen to find myself in the “culture”. Anyway, since I love tech, I try to follow the trends and the latest news news, and I’m finding a pretty scary trend. Technology, and everything that comes with it is just ruining us as human beings.
Nowadays, it seems we rely on computers and Facebook and the internet to pretty much keep track of what’s going on in the world around us. People even say that social networks have brought us closer together. They’re even saying people who play video games online, on XBL or PSN, are actually pretty social people who get along well with others and know how to talk to others. Of course, if its just yelling out a bunch of profanties and tea bagging people after merc-ing someone in Halo, then I guess its true? Okay, that was a little harsh, not everyone is like that, because not everyone has a headset and mic.
But the issue isn’t with video games, its with all of it. Where would you be without Facebook? How would you know what’s going on with your friends, and your “friends”? And without smartphones (and practically everyone has one now), how would we be able to update people on where we are and what we’re doing? How did people survive when everyone wasn’t connected to the internet? I don’t know how I did. I am on my phone or on my computer almost all day long. And if I still had a subscription to World of Warcraft, I know what my weekends would be looking like.
Maybe with all that you can see the trend I was talking about earlier. We are inundated with tech, so much so, that everything in our lives revolves around it. And that’s prorgress, but what about our personal lives? Everyday I’m hearing how something in the world of tech is ruining relationships, destroying couples, and eating away at the very foundation of what makes relationships more worthwhile. With technology, we’re somehow falling back into a primative state.
Thanks to Facebook, more and more people are connecting with old friends and that somehow leads to more divorces and somehow leads to more cheating. Thanks to smart phones and texting, we can share secret love notes to each other without anyone ever being the wiser. With webcams, sex and sexuality becomes nothing more than bouts of masturbatory indulgence, as more and more people seek out porn and “camwhores”. And that’s probably just a fraction of the problem of what’s causing difficulty in relationships. There’s still cyber stalking, sexual predators, and so much more that has plagued us because of the internet. And I’m not saying I’m not grateful for the internet and I’m not even insinuating that this stuff didn’t exist before the internet, but it sure has made things a lot easier.
So that’s why I think dating will become obsolete. Who needs to date when you can have virtual “dates” on World of Warcraft and Second Life? Who needs to go for miles to meet the love of your life when you have Skype to bridge the gap? Again, these can be considered good things, but I guess I miss the old nostalgia of what made relationships back in the 80’s, and 90’s so much more…meaniningful? Again, not to say that they’re not meaningful now, but from the way researchers and the news portrays it, couplings are just passing fancies.
Not to say that there’s isn’t good coming from all of this. There are plenty, but they’re being drowned out by the bad. I guess I am just “old school”, and it just looks like that the future will just hold a virtual everything. We even FIND our dates online, and people get married in game, and its just so fantastic yet so scary at the same time. I’ve even mentioned on Geek Love Radio and maybe in the blog, that even the Kinect may show a more virtual sex environment where it’ll be toys that give us pleasure, instead of people. I guess, with everything I’ve learned and talked about, from guys not needing women anymore due to all the porn freely available to them to how we can pretty much stalk when a person’s out of a relationship through Facebook, that I’m becoming a little cynical about the future of dating.
With all this talk, I must confess. I’m getting closer to that point when I’m ready to go out on the dating scene again. I’ve gone through healing, through moving on, to having fun, and now I think I’ll be ready to plunge back in. I don’t know when that will be, what I will do, and how I’ll do it. But as you can tell from the blog and the podcast, I’ve learned a lot and approach life from a different, more positive perspective. Okay, maybe you don’t know any of that because you didn’t know how I was back in the day, but I refuse to fall into those tech trappings, no matter how tempting they are. So that’s why I’m thinking about the short comings of tech and love, because who knows what’ll happen to me when I step back into the dating world, and roll that dice.
