Technological amnesia

[Magical Realist]

Was there ever a time when we were without cellphones? The Internet? TV's? Radio? Cars? How did we survive without these things?

Every technology creates it's own self-contained era of complete necessity. Technology blanks out the consciousness of the very possibility of living without it. It is as if every hyped gadget that fills the sweaty little palms of every new generation redefines our entire sense of what is important and crucial to our lives. Technology and the unquestioned sense of human dependency. Has anyone taken to teasing apart the fine strands of such an entangled weave? Will we remember this time when we lived complacently without brain-implanted computer chips or google goggles?

[C C]

Each era does seem to have a "Good old days" that its elderly members wax nostalgically about in terms of what disappeared, and as simpler in gadgetry or less fast-paced (sometimes both technologically and culturally / morally). Albeit the seniors of their youth likewise lamented the same regarding an epoch of their early lives.

But I often find it remarkable how similar the world of 40 to 50 years ago still is to the world of today. Part of that may be due to most radical social / fashion changes and upheavals having been introduced back then, so that there have been few if any novel wrinkles in a broad context since (just developing refinements within the trends that had already sprang into existence).

But even technology-wise the same general items are yet hanging around despite their mutating, specific developments. There were mobile communications back then (CB radio, pricey car phones confined to certain metropolitan areas, etc). There were business and government computers and transmission of documents / photos by electronic means; military and academic institutions also had ARPANET as a precursor to the internet. There was color TV / radio; music and video recording, though the latter restricted largely to the commercial sector rather than home. Jet aircraft were around, atomic submarines, satellites, and there was even more distant manned space travel than now. Everyday vehicles of today still travel on wheels rather than fly Jetson-style.

It's amusing to see how Arab or Islamic culture was usually portrayed on television shows of the '60s (even "I Dream of I Jeannie" could be considered an example of what was filtered through that distorted, contorted, stereotypical lens of pop market myth-making). And the obliviousness to a fermenting under the surface anger at the West. Aside from Palestinian retributions against the immigrants that had taken over their land (with international blessing) and later films like "Black Sunday", there never seemed much inkling that some widely distributed theo-nihilistic NationCult would arise in the future as a demented offshoot of that early attention-getting, arguably(?) "freedom-fighting" version of terrorism. And what theological nihilism could do with any eventual acquisition of WMD, so pathologically devoid of reason and conscience about the current or physical world having any importance. That the stimulus for yet another "End of the World" scenario could arise in the arid regions of the Middle East, of all places (apart from the Biblical Prophecy publishing and radio industry of its day continuing a classic beating of a horse that never dies).

[elte]

That thought on religious fanaticism in the Middle East might be tied in with the research article about the apparent brain region linked to two seemingly different things: 1) religious belief and ethnocentrism (dogmatic beliefs) and 2) feeling threatened.  The Middle East is a very environmentally harsh desert land where an inhabitant could be more likely to suffer from a heightened feeling of threat to survival.