some short and simple words about advanced industrialization

Of modernization I wish to say a few words.

I have never been completely happy with the electrification of the modern world. I have never been completely happy with the cars, the televisions, and the computers that keep so many people attached to screens as if they were literally wired into the circuits behind the screens and inside the processors. I have never been happy, that is, except for my childhood obsession with TVs, computer games, and electric circuitry. Since then I have learned about the damage they can do to one’s personality. But I obviously now have found solace in these devices because I use them from time to time with great pleasure. They allow me to do things that I could otherwise only dream of.

The wires are strung throughout, and along the roads of, the countryside of Japan. For many here technology is integral to their way of life. They are as ugly as they are beautiful, as ordinary as they are alien.

My biggest fear about technology—and I think that is a sentiment I share with many well-educated mothers who have young children—is that it somehow strips away the imagination and trivializes the world around us. It is almost as if the mundane originates from the use of technology. But this was hardly the case with me, so why should I hold such a view? Moreover, the experience of the mundane is an almost inevitable aspect of everyday life.

When I was a child the films I saw on television helped broaden my imagination and allowed me to explore so many places in the world and so many imagined fantastic landscapes from the comfort of my own living room and my favorite black vinyl chair that slowly disintegrated as the years passed from toddlerhood to teenagerland. But I attribute the good effects of the TV to the fantasy (like The Neverending Story and Return to Oz) and sci-fi (like Short Circuit, Flight of the Navigator, and The Empire Strikes Back) that were so prominent in the eighties and early nineties. There were also great shows about primates and movies about chimpanzees like Project X. Maybe I just romanticize these things because they helped to make up my childhood... I dunno.

So I guess what I really fear today has more to do with the degradation of our culture (which seems to be happening on many levels, but this could be a mirage of some sort or a passing phase) and less to do with the prominence of electronics and advanced industrialization. Not, however, in the cases when the advanced industrialization is destroying the environment (then it is an evil in an entirely different way). But I have some faith that eventually we will develop more sustainable technology—it will eventually be the only option other than reverting to the traditional life.