E-mail:

The main function of e-mail is to connect people, which it has largely done. There is, however, beneficial as the increased communication may be, some totally opposite effects. E-mail has replaced more direct interaction with cheap but detached correspondence. Compare a telephone conversation with a similar (in content) e-mail exchange. Language exists first in the spoken setting, which is its most efficient use. Text can only rarely convey the tone and attitude that a speaker can employ with intonation and emphasis. Thus, a speaker conveys more in the same quantity of words than does a writer. A favored comparison is to projectile warfare. As arrows and slings in ancient days, letters needed a lot of care to make them effective. Range has been increasing ever since. Cruise missiles and ICBMs are currently the projectiles that can cover the world. This is e-mail. The goal is to do the job without risking a soldier’s life in close combat. Those who launch these missiles are miles and miles away from their target, and are fairly safe from having to actually get involved with the enemy. E-mail in much the same way has allowed correspondents to accomplish their tasks, for family members to communicate with each other, without risking the personal involvement that leads to hurt sometimes. E-mail CAN lead to isolationism. The lack of proximity and the correlated lack of recall or accountability lends itself to this digression.

Computer games:

Computer games maybe more than anything else reveal the entertainment paradigm in which Americans live today. The majority of games encourage individual involvement, and for those that do not, the e-mail comments can be rearranged to apply to them. Computer games, like television, are significantly like an addiction. There are two aspects that parallel closely. Computer games tend to destroy other areas of the gamer’s life. Imagine reading good literature instead of playing fun games. Both provide diversion from the concerns of everyday life, but the reward for one in a deeper understanding of life, the other rewards with itself, a shriveled life. The aesthetic and athletic concerns of a person’s life is often forfeited in favor of the game. This mind and body dulling only hinder a person’s pleasure in life. It would be interesting to see how many people who regularly play computer games are overweight and underdeveloped in their social and artistic skills. The second aspect that parallels the addiction model is that computer games tend to consume the time of the gamer. Here my temperment, training, and work ethic are going to show. Imagine how much could be accomplished with that hour or two hours or five hours a day spent playing computer games. At the end of a computer game you have ended the computer game, and have to go buy another. Why not invest in education, occupation, hobby, craft, building a family, learn something, earn something, DO something.

These things were not written merely to criticize the current status of things. They were written to provide a different perspective on the “advances” of our society. I would challenge you to give up computer games and if you are very brave, television. The point of such exercise is not to feel better by abstinence, though you most likely will, but to change a dependent, auto-piloted life.