The Internet is too much with us. It is crowding out the real world, It was bad enough when TV took all our spare time, now Facebook, Google, Twitter, Bing etc have captured what’s left of us. It started with cell phones years ago when I heard people talking to themselves in restaurants and city streets. Now it is a population with their heads lowered to the screens in their hands.
This is the updated social type first labeled in The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman in 1950 as the “other directed”. These were modern middle class people who abandoned traditional inner-directed motives to focus on how others were living, what they consumed, what they did with their time, what their views were, culminating in a personality that was willing to accommodate others to gain approval. So here we are, autonomy has been compromised. Privacy has vanished. Reality and nature have been digitalized.
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty..Hey look, free WiFi!
She was a phantom of delight when first she gleamed up on my sight…Who? What? Where? Facebook?
My heart leaps when I behold a rainbow in the sky.. Look at this YouTube, a horse on roller skates!
What’s that water spout in Yellowstone called? How should I know, Google it. Under what name? Try Old Geezer.
(William Wordsworth contributed to this piece.)
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