Information Blinking on a Screen...Lights. Flash. Zip. Rush.

I am a bit wary of all things technological. I find it quite useful at times, but in the shaping of society, I find it quite frightening. Why? It "unifies" an entire culture. When technology (usually in many different forms of entertainment) become our universal way of relating to each other (for those who actually do relate to people outside of the internet), a strange identity is formed. It isn't that I'm stuck in the past or glorify the past "before all this technology business" as if that was what should always be...no, it isn't that.

What we have now is a shallow veneer of meaning. In fact, I wouldn't go so far as to describe our society a culture, primarily...or even a society: We are a market. The appeal to pleasure is what typically determines any given decision we make...whether we're voting, "choosing" a religion, making friendships, pursuing relationships...whatever. We are geared toward pleasure. The end result is a culture with no particular definition or way of cohesion except by way of one word we've been trained by images to adore: Pleasure.

Almost forgotten are the times we would spend talking...tasting a glass of wine and allowing the result to be a more meaningful conversation as one's heart is gladdened. Instead, we don't converse: We spew words at each other...we talk of what we saw on the television and who's popular in Hollywood...we may gather in groups around alcohol, but it is simply for the sole reason of becoming inebriated.

Here are some poignant snippets from Fahrenheit 451:

Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending...School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?

More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don't have to think, eh? Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee....

Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texan...the bigger your market...the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean...Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course...It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick...Thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time...You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? Well aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.