When I read "The Ilustrated Man", by Ray Bradbury, there was a chapter that called my attention. Its name was "Marionettes, Inc.". To make the long story short, the chapter was about a company that produced robots that resembled the costumer and could be activated to fulfill all the tasks and actions that one would carry out during the day or, at night. The story narrates the case of a man that acquired this service and used it to cover that he always goes out at night. He even goes on a trip, leaving the robot at home pretending to be him and his wife does not even notice it. One day, when he returns from the trip, he is preparing to go out again, turns the robot on (in the explicit sense, not the dirty one) but this time, the robot does not want to be stored by dawn. During the time the husband was out, the robot grown to care for the wife, and he wants to stay awake. I'm not spoiling the end.
I would like to relate this story with the concept of "dehumanization". First, it was the mass production in the big cities that restricted the human being to an object-wise role in society, everyone is expendable and no one is really important, everyone uses the same mask to resemble each other, in order not to differentiate from others. Relations tend to be weak, insignificant. Before the advent of the industrial revolution it was not like that. However, the future came so fast that people did not even realise that they were living it already. Same has happened to us. We used to watch "The Jetsons" "skyping" thinking that it was a far future, but here we are, many more futuristic things other than Skype have been invented so far. It will not be long before the stories of Bradbury come true. When we no longer care much about establishing real relationships, when being human is almost a forgotten concept. We will be wandering the world just like J. Alfred Prufrock, with a mask on and being afraid to show the rest that we are different, that we still care about face-to-face relationships in a world that has given in to the meaninglessness, to the vast nothing of emptiness.
It reminds me of something we discussed in our English class regarding technology and how it has brought meaningless. What is the point in having so many "virtual friends" on Facebook if you do not really know them all and , in turn, you do not intend to know or care about these people? How can one click on Facebook mean friendship?
ResponderEliminarAlso, we came up with the idea that at some point in time people might start missing their privacy, might start missing face to face communication, might start valuing other people and relationships and might go back to communicate in the old way, following the theory about the gyres.