Beyond the Web - Savage Chickens

One wonders if people will realise it....

4 of the most timewasting, social de-provement things

Human Technology - as what Finnish mobile gadget manufacturer would coin it; is not really improving human lives if you look at the other side of the coin. A myriad of technological advances in mobile and connectivity technology has spurred human dependence on gadgetry to go along their daily lives - successfully isolating everyone on individualistic islands away from more 'humanly contact'. Here are a few things which ultimately waste your time, suck your leisure, kill relationships, and commit murder on your social circle.

1. Smartphones - Smartphones enable an individual to connect anywhere at anytime. Wouldn't it be nice to receive emails and pdfs of charts and proposals whilst on your week long holiday in the Maldives; and be expected to reply because your job says so? Technology supposedly alleviates stress by providing quick, one-touch connectivity; but would ultimately become our prison - enslaving us to our jobs and bosses forever. Sucks doesn't it?

 To add to that, in the advent of widgets, customizable and downloadable games through open-source programs and pre-made digital boredom-killers - we soon become individuals who only know how to interact via weird gestures with a mobile in hand. How many people have you noticed staring intently at their 3.5 inch liquid crystal screens, making poking & swiping gestures without a care in the world? For instance, I had a scenario where a friend called me out for a cuppa one night and all he did at the cafe was molest his mobile to no end. "Hey man you didn't just call me out to watch you give your mobilephone a jerkoff session right?" Put those down and talk like what our human mouths are designed to do!   

2. Satellite / Cable TV - How many of us own satellite or cable TV? Statistics have shown it to be at least 7 out of 10 people. How many of us find ourselves glued to the idiot box for hours to end, surfing channels programme after programme to wild away the day? Don't lie, I'm sure some of you would be guilty of that. TV sucks the soul away, putting us into a trance-like state where we can't pry our eyes from the pixel-filled screen even when a volcano erupts behind us. As our bodies remain idle for long periods, and our brains remain static from no human interaction; we will soon become a species of zombie-like husks who survive on commercialized liquids and junk food as we give praise and offerings to the TV God. 

3. FaceTwit - These things have been beaten to death by numerous articles already so I will cut it short: Farmville, online stalking, and announcements of your toilet duties will not bring you very far in life. I kid you not.

4. MMORPGs - Holed up in a dark room filled with light-emitting boxes, only moving your index and middle finger and mashing away on the WASD keystrokes for 18 hours a day will land you in the corner as a socially-awkward, weak-willed outcast of nature. MMORPGs are notorious for murdering time, raping the lives of many young impressionable kids. Yes they seek to fit in the social strata, yes they need to obtain instant gratification and a sense of achievement - these games in fact do offer them, albeit only in a digital world. MMORPGs are not substitutes for a real social life! Wake up boys & girls, there is a big big world out there for you to conquer! It's called REAL LIFE.

Blogging taken over by Microblogging?

You know the buzz.

Blogs seem to be experiencing a slow and painless death with the advent of more and more attention given to microblogs. Twitter has revolutionized web publishing in a way that enables people with short attention spans and bad writing skills to appeal towards a wider scope of readers.

Previously, blogs would garner readers through insightful articles, photos with captions that tell a story, or just plain inane rant that has some entertainment value. Most blogs were carefully crafted to reflect the personality of its author; creating a persona and online presence that can mirror (or even replace) newsfeed websites or fullblown corporate online entities. It seems that we humans reel from all that brain activity and now divert our energies to simple, more condensed versions of internet publishing - maybe because people are just too darn lazy to read anymore, or just too darn lazy to type.

Twitter, with only 120 words max for every post - forces people to shorten every bit of information and cram it all into a one, sometimes badly written sentence. In the next few years to come, and probably a breaststroke towards the future; news and communication would just mirror those bad one-liners your get in B-grade direct-to-video popcorn flicks.

We are Robot

It's here. Though it may not resemble what the media feeds us in shades of 'The Matrix' and shapes of 'Minority Report', or even the dystopian future where 100% 'meatbags' (unaltered humans) are a rarity in 'Ghost in the Shell' - we have already reached the age of technological symbiosis.

Look around you. Eyes glued to laptops. Minds focused on their smartphones. These devices are gateways to the Internet. Ask most users of these mobile devices whether they can live without their nifty gadgets. 9 out of 10 will tell you that they can't and the last singular one can only remain 'disconnected' for about 3 days - max.

Unlike the anime Ghost in the Shell where human brains can be uploaded and downloaded due to alterations of the cerebral cortex with artificial enhancements (or in some cases the entire brain is replaced with an artifical one where memory and mind are digitised), the laptop and smartphone act just like that except that it is a remote device outside of our meatbag selfs which is regarded as an extension of one's brain; allowing one to connect wirelessly to the Internet wherever and whenever.  

This is not necessarily bad in any way but it is not long before we start truly 'plugging' ourselves into the world wide web; which in turn will spell the end of that age-old line which divides what is real, and what is not.

Goodbye Saturday night meets at a friend's house for a game of cards, darts and beer
Hello virtual meets in cybespace over a game of kill me, kill you with digital swords and mana potions

The human disconnect

If you frequent Starbucks alot, the first thing you will notice is that people don't actually go to Starbucks to 'meet up for coffee' anymore. They are there as singular individuals totally devoid of their companions in favour of their snazzy shiny glossy laptops, plugged in and wired to the Internet via wi-fi. Their eyes are glued intensely at their screen, giving the notion of an intent work-in-progress. But in fact - they are just on Facebook. And this is not just a few people, its almost everyone. 

In less than a decade, online social networks have become very much part of our daily habits. To some it is habitual to spend each leisurely moment on the internet checking their Facebook accounts for updates on their networks. I remember very clearly a few years back when the 'Friendster' craze was hot and new. Now it has been taken over by Facebook, which is a much more powerful platform that allows users to interact far more than its predecessors. Besides Facebook, there are many other online social networks like Myspace, Bebo, Hi5, Tagged....the list goes on. All of which make the world a much smaller place. We can connect to anyone across the globe in a matter of seconds, liquidising borders and distance means nothing anymore. But has this really helped people in a way? 

We are becoming less and less connected in a 'human' way. Because of the convenience offered, keeping up with your network would 95% of the time be done looking at a liquid crystal display and frantically pressing plastic keys. What ever happened to the "let's go out and hang out?" What ever happened to "Hi, I'm just calling to check if you are still alive or not." "Of course I am! It's good to hear your voice anyway". 

We have grown to interact on such a faceless and disembodied manner that nothing is 'personal' anymore.  We converse not with real humans anymore, just virtual entities of what we perceive to be human (eventhough they really are actual humans, behind the interwined digital web of anonymity). Our social skills lack, we can only react by sending pixels that form a 'smiley face'. How many people have you met in the last year which can't seem to comprehend an absolutely normal human conversation without giving web references and splutter? 

So we 'think' we are connected. But think further into it. Besides the usual people that we see (collegues because we are stuck at work for the most of our waking hours, immediate family because they are the closest to you and you prbably live with them anyway, and also your very close friends because those are the ones that your have the most in common with), how often do you take the first step to meet up in REALITY?

Yes the world has become a much smaller place,  but it has made us humans very much further away from each other. 

So yea, enough of this ramble. 

Time to collect my coffee now. 

Brain drain

Knowledge is garnered through experience and the proactive collection of informative material. In the days before computers and the Internet, we sought for knowledge through dusty books in libraries, journals, 4-inch thick encyclopedias, 9 o'clock telly sessions of Discovery and National Geographic, newspapers, magazines, and the grapevine (word of mouth) - to further enhance brain capacities. Information sharing was far slower as we need to be more physical, and manual with our reception of messages. I remember obtaining an Internet line way back in early 1996, running on a 'superbly-quick' 14.4 kbps dial-up modem that made funky beeping noises when it was connecting the lines. This was when everything in the world started to change significantly. 

The way we consume information is entirely different now compared to that of 20 years ago. Now we can look up and learn about something faster than making a cup of instant noodles in a microwave. All it takes is a little curiosity and flicks on plastic keys to know something new. Stroke of keys. Zap. I know more about alien dolphins, and that Aristotle died in 322 BC. 

Kids nowadays however, through my somewhat unbiased observations and non-prejudicial predispositions; have concluded that they are getting dumber (in the sense of general knowledge) than the average kid of the same age, 20 years ago. Tech has been so interwined with our lives that we take for granted its capabilities. For most of them as what I have observed, do not take this new age channels of intellectual material. A lot of things can be learned at much greater speeds compared to what we used to have in the past, but alot of it is wasted on hours and hours of wasted kilobytes of redundant games which bring one nowhere except impaired social skills, less vitamin D, and probably a level 73-sword of 'superbly-awesome-killa-of-digital-monsters'. 

I am not saying that it is essentially bad to use the Internet for gaming use, but excessive durations till one holes themselves in dingy, semi-lit rooms which hundred of other like-minded zombie-ish, bloodshot-eyed individuals is not exactly aligned to the meaning of the word healthy. Use this new method of communication and information to good use. Find out more about the world. Learn things about the past, present and non-existant. Increase your general knowledge. The web is a vast and endless continuity; use it to your advantage. 

Learn something new today, and everyday.