Thomas Mallon: "We're Sick of Each Other"

I'm not sure about the bigger, sociological issues, but I do know I find it harder to write a contemporary novel. The problem for me is that the technology is changing so rapidly and so dramatically that descriptions that may be essential to the storyline become dated so fast, and can easily render the description ludicrous.

I just put down a time-travel novel written in 1993, where the MC lives in the 21st century and goes back to the 14th. In an attempt to predict a future just a couple of decades away, where researchers have the ability to go back in time and return to the present, the writer describes giant mainframe computers on a university campus that have to be signed up for by researchers to use. When the campus has to be quarantined, the characters run around putting up paper signs in the lobbies of all the dorms to announce that no one can leave the campus. Oh, and the frantic students who need to contact their families have to line up in front of the pay phones to make calls out.

It was obviously much easier to read the parts of the book that took place in the 14th century. The image of the 21st century minus the internet and cell phones was too distracting for me to keep my head in the story.

Taylor Harbin said:

“The cyber and fiber-optic revolutions have made every person and place on the present-day globe absurdly and instantly accessible to every other person and place. We are, more than we yet realize, becoming sick of one another.

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My 30-something daughter said something the other day about how there's no place for nothing-time in our society. Where an adult just does nothing, like lay in the grass and look at the clouds.

I told her how I'd grown up in a time before FedEx overnight, before faxes, email, text - when nothing was immediate - when there was time and space to ponder interactions through snail mail ...

There is much about technology that I really really like, but yes, being too connected has drawbacks.

Now let me go Tweet that, post on Instagram, tumblr, FB, what else is there ...

juniper said:

My 30-something daughter said something the other day about how there's no place for nothing-time in our society. Where an adult just does nothing, like lay in the grass and look at the clouds.

I told her how I'd grown up in a time before FedEx overnight, before faxes, email, text - when nothing was immediate - when there was time and space to ponder interactions through snail mail ...

There is much about technology that I really really like, but yes, being too connected has drawbacks.

Now let me go Tweet that, post on Instagram, tumblr, FB, what else is there ...

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Agreed and it's sad. I don't have children, but me and my husband both work full-time. I wonder how parents manage time with their kids when they both work often long hours?

Personally, I hate the past. I don't read in it. I try not to write in it. Onward, ho...

Every corner of the globe is not yet mapped out by my personal feet. I don't care about seeing it on the internet, youtube, or TV. It's only real and mapped out once my feet have been on it. This all sounds so very depressing. Like you're ready to jump inside the liquid pod, plug in and become a battery. Life is out there...unless you have witnessed it in the here and now physical touch me touch me way...you haven't experienced it.

Taylor Harbin said:

Every corner of the globe is mapped out and claimed by someone. Is there any mystery left? Any unknowns?

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They haven't found Bigfoot yet ...

Pterofan said:

They haven't found Bigfoot yet ...

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This. Whether or not you believe in Bigfoot, it is a fact that while you can say all of the Earth has been mapped, there are still huge expanses of land (and even more underwater) where humans have never actually set foot in any meaningful way. Places where almost anything could be hiding and where incredible discoveries could be made.

As for the "Nothing-time" I've always believed if something is important, you make the time for it. I just don't think a lot of people really recognize the value of something like "Nothing-time".

Taylor Harbin said:

Glad I'm not the only one feeling this. The frontier is gone. We've been to space. Every corner of the globe is mapped out and claimed by someone. Is there any mystery left? Any unknowns? I can remember a time when the news was three or four times a day, but not a continuous cycle. Once the shopping programs came on late at night, you knew the good programming was done for the day. You had to be rich to afford a computer, and the internet was only good enough for email and bulletin forums.

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There's plenty of mystery left.

As for the rest of it, you're forgetting the importance of the radio for keeping everyone in touch since the 1920s. Anyway, just switch off the television and other devices and disconnect. It's not impossible. And if it is, that says more about the individual than the medium.

History is fun to read about, but I'm glad I'm not there.

They haven't mapped out North Sentinel Island yet. Heck, we can't even use Google Earth to figure out what the Islanders (who may be the last completely uncontacted people on Earth) look like because it's so thickly forested.

But sometimes I do feel like inventing time travel and bringing with me a printout of comments on online news articles just so I can point and laugh Gene Roddenberry's naïve belief that technology would better enable different groups to communicate with one another and soothe over long-standing ethnic/religious tensions. Because I do like about the Internet is that I can supplement my poor social skills with entertaining clips from YouTube and it enables me to communicate via text as opposed to face-to-face interaction (which I'm terrible at), but the idea that humans would stop being assholes thanks to technology making us able to more communicate with people around the world...sorry, Gene Roddenberry but you were wrong there.

I admit that my Series-In-Progress is set at some indeterminate point in the future. I never name a year, because I'm lazy, but said laziness pays off because it's post-Apocalyptic so everyone's mostly functioning at medieval-level technology. No electricity and whatnot...

brainstorm77 said:

Agreed and it's sad. I don't have children, but me and my husband both work full-time. I wonder how parents manage time with their kids when they both work often long hours?

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Stick the kids in organized activities! Every day! Sports, academics, art class, language practice - something, anything. Because if there's no 'nothing-time' for adults, you can't expect them to let kids have any.

And, it gives parents one more reason to wipe their brows and say they're 'busy'. Gotta take one kid to hockey, the other to soccer, then it's band for one, dance for the other, not to mention catechism classes, tutoring, and the occasional organized play-date. Children don't learn to occupy themselves, or to figure out how to do/make things without someone to teach them, or, better, tell them what to do.

If we want a good future, nothing on earth, not even the present, is as important as the past. That's just how it is, how it's always been, and how it always will be.

That said, present technology has put more of us in touch with each other, but 99% of it is pure delusion. Two many believe they actually travel by getting online, and actually know people they have never met. Like just doesn't work this way. So far, all today's technology has given most people as an excuse not to travel, and excuse not to meet and really get to know people who aren't online, and a way of not being themselves.

We aren't sick of each other because we don't really know each other. I suspect what most people are really sick of is the completely fake world of the internet. The internet is a wonderful tool for learning, but it's also an incredibly disastrous tool for truth, and for real human interaction.

But internet or no internet, technology or no technology, the past is where all intelligent people look for answers about the future. Always has been, always will be. When he writes --more than ever before--, he really gives it away. The past has always been far more popular than the present. Not even the future rivals it.

juniper said:

My 30-something daughter said something the other day about how there's no place for nothing-time in our society. Where an adult just does nothing, like lay in the grass and look at the clouds.

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In no small part, this is true also because so many people, especially younger people, have become addicted to constant social connection in a way I can't recall seeing until the arrival of the cell phone. Vast numbers of people just can't stand not to be so connected. I don't think it's going too far to say that this interconnection technology has changed the way people think, fundamentally. Who knows, it might even be changing the physical wiring in our brains.

I have a cell phone, which I use for (gasp) phone calls. I go entire days without using it even once. Sometimes I forget to turn it on. I celebrate a tiny bit every time the thing runs out of power and needs to be recharged. I do things like take long walks in the woods near my house, by myself, with no earphones or similar electronics in play. I do carry the phone, because there are bears and mooses in those woods, so it's nice to have the option. I've yet to ever need it.

But a lot of younger people would look at me doing this and just think I'm crazy. Funny thing is, three or four decades ago, if you saw a person walking around in public talking to no one visible, you'd think that person crazy. Now, with Bluetooth etc., you see it every day and consider it perfectly normal.

caw