Technology: The double edged sword

My last blog focused on the joy Netflix brought to my life and how it caused me to swear off cable. Well, this past weekend, I was a little put off by it when my fiance decided to check out all the bells and whistles that our Wii had to offer.
Well, one of the features she got into was the news section on the Wii menu. As I sat in the other room of our apartment reading the wild antics of Hunter S. Thompson, she began to tell me all the awful news going on in the world.
Well, being a naturally curious person, I had to check this out and I too was shocked. Not by the bad news, but that stories from The Associated Press were streaming on my videogame console!
My first thought was “Wow, I can spend my nice, relaxing weekends staring at a screen and reading the news. Oh, wait. That’s part of my job five days out of the week!”
I went back to our living room and went back to my book as she continued to read off the screen all the terrible things going on in this work a day world.
She then asked me how I can read these horror stories all the time for work and still have a brain that functions, instead of melting into horrified jelly.
I could have explained that I was trained in college on how to mentally train myself for such things or how I have been fairly desensitized over 29 years of living in this weird world, but I just shrugged. Some people can handle bad news and some cannot.
Another thing that has bothered me for years is how more isolated our culture is getting through technology. i-Pods being used to ignore people on the go. Social networking sites to pretend to talk to friends. We are basically being encouraged by commerce not to leave our homes.
And through technology, language is changing—for the worse. Instead of calling people and talking to them, we send electronic text messages full of incomprehensible acronyms that cause me to look them up on Wikipedia just understand what people are trying to tell me.
And the acronym thing is used on social networking sites, which to me is crazy. If you are to lazy to write out “Ha Ha” and just put “LOL,” then why even bother?
I never thought I’d see the day when people have to use acronyms on a keyboard and even use them in blogs. That is just a bowl of fail right there.
We also live in a time when nouns have become verbs. “I’ll ‘google’ that,” and “I’ll ‘Facebook’ you,” and “I’m ‘Skyping’.” It all sounds like a bunch of crazy gibberish or a stream of made up words that only Charlie Sheen could come up with.
Despite these aspects that annoy me to no end, I’m still in favor of the fast pace evolution of technology. It allows me to not be a slave to cable TV and all the lame commercials it forces down the gullets of millions of Americans.
Sure, technology is sort of making us hermits who speak cryptically in acronyms, but at least I can watch the first six seasons of “The Office” anytime I want for ten bucks a month.