Personal Computers. We call them PC’s for short. Have you ever noticed how your PC personally reflects who you are?
We make PC’s our own when we set up their design. From selecting specific desktop backgrounds to how we organize random bits of information, we give them our unique thumbprint. The way it looks and the way we tend to interact with our PC’s often fit our personalities. They have become a part of us.
When the power goes out, we are shamefully aware of how disconnected we feel from the world and from ourselves. Some of us experience a deep sense of loss. In this day and age, we are dependent on, if not addicted, to our PC’s.
It’s the same thing when we lose a term paper, a photo, or someone comes and messes up our personal settings, we flip out!
In my own family, my husband, son and I each have our own computers. However, only my computer is hooked up to a printer. This means any homework projects, maps and directions and other things that need to be printed will have to use my PC. As a result, my PC is the family PC, and not entirely my own. Grrrrr…
This means that I have to frequently check the SafeSearch Filtering on my preferences, weed through my son’s Nintendo and YouTube bookmarks to find my own faves, delete stuff that is inadvertently gunking up my system with shareware, and try to figure out what new program, software download or firewall is that my husband just installed on my PC — without asking! Sigh.
I read an article recently about a college law student who said he had no problem giving a robber his wallet and guitars, but when it came to his computer, he drew the line. When the thief asked him to hand over his laptop, the law student wrestled, punched and pummeled the robber to make sure his laptop was safe!
“I basically grabbed him and threw him this way, and he held onto the bat so it threw him to the ground,” he said. . . . “It’s my baby,” he said. “Don’t mess with my computer.”
Remember the story about the thieves who mistook a 3 year old boy’s Cochlear Implant for a cell phone headset? We are a society obsessed with technology. And why not? “Technology is fun, it keeps us in touch, it provides us with a link to our loved ones no matter how far the distance,” says RBChallenger in his article, Is America obsessed with technology. “…you can carry on a conversation with a person half way around the world and feel as if he/she is right next door.” I think many of us agree that technology has not only made our lives more enjoyable and easier, it has changed our lives in ways that are too numerous to count.
People like Jordan Pollack believe that “ultimately we will be wearing our computers as part of our bodies.” Pollack goes on to say:
“We’re coming to the age of wearable computers in the age of wireless, and I’ve been waiting and watching that for a long time, since I fashioned a one-hand keyboard in 1985. I think the new devices like the Blackberry and the PDA/Phones are really the beginning of wearable computers. You’ve seen people with cellphone buds in their ears all day long. These wearable computers are not what the pundits and nerds said that they would be, but people are carrying them around all day on their belts, using them all the time, and they will evolve into something approximating the science fiction communicator, voice together with videos, MP3’s, fax, and e mail. It will all be something that you live with all day long, and we’ll become untethered as a society.”
And yet, there is still the ongoing pro/con debate about that little piece of technology that is surgically inserted inside the skulls of many deaf children and deafened individuals around the world today.
A comment left on Deaf4Life, an online UK forum in the deaf community, sums it up:
“It occurred to me, that never have I ever known such a spirited defense of a piece of technology like the cochlear implant. It is obsessive, and proselytising. It’s a frigging religion…. I’ve used hearing aids all my life, while they are useful, I’ve never been obsessed them that I felt the need to endlessly pontificate about them. I’ve never known Deafies or deafies to worship them, the way the implant is.”
We all know that technology changes fast, and that it is human nature to fear and resist change. Yet due to economic pressure technology keeps changing whether people need it or not. Are deaf people being steamrolled into using something they don’t want or don’t need? Or, are they being lead toward understanding and using technology that might bring about extraordinary changes to their lives? It’s an ongoing debate.
They are just tools, we managed without them before, we would again. I don’t do facebook or any of the social site things, while I have a mobile phone, I rarely use it, I just blog or do the occasional e-mail. Both I can do just as well albeit slower via writing… The thing about being electronically dependent, is it is fine until the power goes !
Left by MM on December 1st, 2008
AMEN to the Deaf4Life comment! There are two reasons that could explain the obsession with the CI: either it works better compared to hearing aids, or the industry has been whipping up expectations and proselytizers. In today’s highly commercialized climate, I suspect the latter.
I do believe those who have CIs and sing their praises, more good wishes to them. But I also see those who are disappointed, and feel they are not being counted enough. As a piece of technology, it is dependent on its owner to make use of its limited capabilities, like a computer. As a gadget, however, its a flawed one.
Left by Dianrez on December 1st, 2008
I think there is a very real difference between a box of gubbins like a computer, and an cochlear implant, a CI can improve your quality of life way beyond what any computer will do in the real world, unless the entire social aspect of your life is simply FB or Bebo…. . As a contributor to Deaf4life, I know most deaf people are from the cultural area, so it is par for the course they will demean the CI, most wouldn’t know a CI if they saw one ! all they know is they don’t like them. It is ignorance mostly. If there are those for whom it is a real boon good luck to them celebrating that, after all, sign language using deaf laud that and culture every minute of the day… far more it has to be said than that of the CI implantee…
Left by MM on December 1st, 2008
I believe that for a good reason that deafies get dependent on advanced electronics nowadays is that they get included in everything that they cannot hear anywhere they go! And it closes the gap between the hearing world and deaf world.
Even with CI, you don’t pick up conversations, sounds, etc. that are happening around you whenever you go.
For hearing people, I would say “no excuses!” Ha…
Left by Nita on December 2nd, 2008
Well I hardly think the use of sign language on the street provides us with much access either. In the UK I have yet to meet a neighbour, a shop keeper or a bus driver etc that knows any sign or would use it. So I have to lip-read there is no alternative. As a result I never use sign outside the home…. what woul dbe the point ? A CI perhaps WOULD give me an ‘in’ in that it would assist my lip-reading better… It’s practicalities really, culture is a luxury I cannot afford….
Left by MM on December 3rd, 2008