Rational Insanity
Going gaga over electronics
For the past five or so years, people have been going crazy over handheld gadgets. Almost every Filipino, nowadays, owns a cellular phone. Most executives own a personal digital assistant (PDA). 'Smaller is better' is the trend among portables. The more features you can pack into a smaller gadget, the better. This inevitable affinity to portable electronics, however, has also caused the scale of income to tip. Now, most professionals always allocate something related to their portable gadgets from their pay checks. This isn't really a problem for those who earn a lot, but it is for the small scale negosyantes. We may not notice it, but when we buy fruits from a fruit vendor, the price of the fruits that we buy includes what the vendor pays for load on his/her cellular phone as well. The weird thing is, here we are, blaming the government for the rise in prices of commodities, when in truth and in fact, it is us, the consumers who brought this upon ourselves - what with the additional expenses we allocate to maintain or even just ensure the existence of our techie-mania? Had we not been hooked on technology in the first place, we would have more in our pockets to balance the rise in prices; but there's no stopping technology now. It has crept even into our most simple every day chores. About seven to ten years ago, I would not even go near a computer. Now, the internet has become quite a necessity that even government agencies encourage the public to go about government transactions through the internet. What has this made, us, Filipinos?
The other day, I was at the gym, and there was this fat lady doing twists with a pole. When she was done, she didn't even bother to stand and replace the pole on the rack just a few steps away; instead, she put the pole on the floor and kicked this so that it rolled towards the rack. She did not even stand up! That lady is a classic effigy of how indolent we, Filipinos, have become. Of course, indolence has been in the Filipino culture even before cellular phones and PDAs, but it has become worse with the advent of technology.
Students today don't bother to compose a paper on their own when asked by a teacher. They would just log on to the internet and cut and paste portions of articles they would find on line. Grammatical skills suffer from technology as well. Most writers would simply allow the word processing program on their computers to edit their work. The result is a sanitized piece, and sometimes even with more grammatical errors than it had before it was encoded. The editing program of word processing systems are based on programmed grammatical rules devoid of creativity. Writers, creative writers especially, should not trust the computer to edit their work because what may be acceptable in creative writing, the computer might detect as 'wrong'. Imagine young kids learning grammar from a computer - terrible!
Aside from this, there is also the spelling plague that is consuming most regular text users. For instance, 'texting' is not proper usage. The proper phrase for this would be 'text messaging'; but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Many students today cannot spell properly or compose a proper sentence correctly because they are so used to the 'telegramatic' type of language used in text messaging. Admittedly, I sometimes unconsciously cut short my words when I write poetry because I also send text messages quite frequently.
While it is true that technology has been a very big help to us, let us not become slaves to it. Let us not throw away our years of education just because we need to hop on the band wagon of technology. It is frightening to envision this world ten years from now when everyone has become total slaves to technology. Perhaps when that happens (knock on wood) all we do when we want to smile to someone is wave a liquid crystal display with our smiling picture on it, or maybe when we want to hug somebody all we would do is send a -hmmmmmmm- message with a 'that was a super tight hug' at the end. What a stupid, pathetic, emotionless, sanitized society we would be then, and I hope I am no Nostradamus.
Be rational; be insane...every once in a while!TTFN! Hello to my dearest readers, to Jenny, Am-am, Dot, Verona, James, Sheen, Hellpen, Anne, Mary Dale, Chan,Michelle, Zarthus, Jonald, Mr. Bobot, Vic, Vincent, and Rex, Alex, Arvin, Corz, Jim, Kiara, Malikh, Audrae, Franz, Hendrick, Janice, Jay, Jim, Jonathan, Mark, Marz, Mel, Pres, Nhonoy, Niel, Piper, Rheavil, Joey, Alma, Rodolfo, Ecker, Ryan, Roni, Ian, Narle, Sunny and to Anuj of CMC, I love you all! Byers! Salamat gid sa mga walang-hintong text and reactions nyo! Catch Rational Insanity in TNT's online edition, check us out at www.thenewstoday.info, text me at (0920)9254269, or email me at prague@eudoramail.com. Byers! Mmmmmmmwah!