Week 9 - Technophile in 2020

A guy wakes up to the sound of MGMT from his ipod nano 7.0 (he always did like old school music) and does the 4 move dance that the motion detector recognises to switch his alarm off. Sleepily he realises he only has 2 minutes before his lesson starts. He quickly switches his laptop on and makes himself a cup of tea, waiting for his ‘post new-media cultures’ lecture to start. He adjusts his webcam and voice recogniser that makes the lecture fully interactive and settles down to the video link and taps away at his laptop. He starts a discussion with his friends through the multi screen option before the lecturer starts to talk about how education was 10 years ago, astonishing the students as to how different it was. He can’t imagine his course mates being in the same country as each other, let alone the same city. He laughs when he gets a text from his friend who is going to claim his equipment is broken for that extra couple of hours of sleep, maintenance won’t be happy!

After his lecture, he decides to pick up the newspaper he ordered online last night. The papers are still talking about the possibility that the internet will run out of space within the year. People are frantically culling sites they feel are old, pointless or unused in order to save the economy and the education system. He shrugs, this is probably one of those millennium bug scares that happened when he was a baby, he thinks that it’ll sort itself out.

He starts to think about what his lecturer was saying about the students 10 years ago, and all the changes that have happened in the last decade thanks to technology. He finds it galling that they had to sit in a lecture together and write things by hand, its years since he wrote with pen and paper in school. He then realises that a large majority of his friends are people he has never seen before or spoke to directly and imagines that it would be nice to sit with friends in a lecture and socialise with them in RL. He can’t quite figure out whether the huge changes in the world were for the better. Things are a lot more convenient, he can’t deny, but he feels isolated by his lack of human interaction that he seems to remember being a lot more apparent when he was younger. Maybe in another 10 years they will reach a happy medium?