sweep

Think how much faster we are able to both create and destroy. Think about how quickly we are becoming a global community (rather like mega-city one in 2001AD). How long will it be before i can move to Australia in less than an hour?
Efficiency has changed our perception of time- technology has made these exchanges possible.

now i haven't though about this for a while, and i don't know where this will go (it's up to you), but i would like to know if any of you have thoughts on this matter. What are the implications in the way that life is speeding up and saving time in the process. Is this only a process, is it turning us into machines, are we out of control?

In some instances we are- efficiency takes away skill, it takes away care. how many of you eat takeaways, have refridgerators, microwaves? At the processing plants, the places where raw cows go, people are essentially machines, performing highly stereotyped operations, all in the name of speed and profit. We have become lazy because of efficiency, and we allow ourselves to be stimulated by machines, well at least I do. And the consequence? People can't concentrate, they can't think.

side note: The news controls us: war again! FEAR, be happy with what you have or the bombs will drop.

Thousands of years ago, baby humans would experience relatively few stimuli. Today there is so much to absorb people can't sit still for a minute without wanting (instant) results. Stimulation now; no time to breathe. my mind is filling up so fast, but how much of this can i understand?

I see my mind as an empty dance theatre, there are doorpersons there ready to collect tickets but the party people (bits of information) rush in too quickly and I don't know what to believe- I become confused. how much of this is crap? i have to be careful - so many implications, many different focal points, all input welcomed

Infinity Lover

The way technological advancements allows us to preform various task faster and more eficiently, gives us the fake impression it'll free up time and offer room to breath. Exactly the 'salespitch' with witch we all ended up investing in this wave of the future. Unfortunately everybody's well aware how all this new technology decreases the time needed to preform tasks, thus our demands increased along with it.

Ultimately this alledged freeing up of time only resulted in us having to work our asses us off harder and making overall life more draining.

We try to beat the clock, only to have the clock beating us silly in return. Time is motion, so in reality you can't win time, only lose your sanity if you don't get your much needed rest.

Long live progress!

(Good topic to bring up btw)

[ August 28, 2002: Message edited by: Infinity Lover ]</p>

Infinity Lover

N.M. (replied with quote in stead of editing early post.... MAN! the pace is KILLING ME!)

(Logging off... chilling out, reloading the battery, sucking up some culture )

[ August 28, 2002: Message edited by: Infinity Lover ]</p>

sweep

wow! that's exactly what i think. WE need the things to make our lives easier, but if it wasn't for the things, our lives wouldn't be difficult in the first place- how daft is that?

Infinity Lover

Well, on the other hand, I don't feel inclined to become Amish just yet.

sweep

what happens when we rush: problems occur. I can think of one. Microwaves- cancer? free radicals?

there must be an expert here?

another example: houses- smaller (space) cheaper (efficient) built quickly (time)

bleh&gt; does that make sense ?

Infinity Lover

The real beauty is, that because technological advancement allows us to preform tasks faster, subsequently creating the demand to get more work done within the same timeframe, there's a market for inventions that'll allow us to preform tasks even faster...

...there must be a point where our brains simply can't keep up with the pace anymore. You already see a lot of that. Burnouts, people calling in sick, granny having a world of trouble programming the v.c.r.

the problem isn't wheter it makes sense to you or me...

...but rather that there's a whole lot of people who somehow think it makes sense to them.

You can't gain time, you can only lose rest.
Coffee?

sweep

Infinity, you've gone on a total posting frenzy over the last couple of days. You only had about twenty-four less than a week ago, what is going on in that head of yours? you must be really happy.

that one really tickled my funny bone

What about our value as a race? there are so many people and were only worth our weight in skill. Innovation and progress has become more important than living. whooaa... doom, doom, doom! all around us

Infinity Lover

Or how about all those people who are too busy to put in their two cents in this thread.
It's not like this isn't affecting their lifes.

(Forget about my postingfrenzy, you've been keeping count???)

NialScorva

I agree with your assessments for the most part, but humans have a quite clever trick up their sleeve that isn't immediately obvious. We are completely language driven creatures, and we're *very* good at creating new forms of language. As a primitive example, consider addition:

1+1=2
1+1+1=3
1+1+1+1+1=5

The it gets out of hand quite quickly, adding the same number over and over, so we can now introduce a new symbol... "*":
2*1=2
3*1=3
5*1=5

We've simplified the notation by adding an element to the language. We "black-box" things so that we can deal with them as discrete elements and not have to consider the complexity inside them.

I think the problems you not are not expressions of how much we can adapt, but how much we are trained to adapt. I read an article a while back calling people under the age of 28 or so the "thumb generation", due to their playing of so many arcade and console games that made heavy use of thumbs. What's interesting is they did some research into it, and found that the under-28 crowd used their thumb as their primary digit, while the over-28 group used their index finger. The manual dexterity in the under 28 group's thumb was significantly greater than the over-28 group. The effects of this is that the younger group is psiologically better equipped to deal with small devices requiring thumb control due.

Consider how much the world has changed in the past 100 years. Someone born 200 years ago would not have the requirements of manual dexterity and linguistics changed dramatically in their lifespan. Today, kids are used to the rules changing within the space of a year or two. I wonder if a lot of problems you point out are a result of the ramping up, where during thier youth, our parents didn't have the degree of change that we have now and aren't as equipped to deal with it, where the kids of today are having to learn ways of encapsulating language and compartmentalizing the information just to survive day-to-day.