Are we truly talking anymore in honest and open debates?  We hear the many voices raining down on us from all sides but we have somehow stopped listening and stopped using our own better judgements to decipher and encode these messages we receive.  The human mind is being assaulted by media and public relation pundits that is embedding through our cognitive logic pathways into our family, friends, and working associations.  The age of the collective is upon us.

The handheld devices we all have used; bringing us closer to media feeds: television, radio, and internet feeds can support a cumulative logic programming that is shaping public opinion.  This in itself is not a bad technology, but I would state that our own ability to think for ourselves is greatly impaired by mass amounts of this kind of programing.  Our reliance of having an internet connection, or having a handheld smartphone device is distracting from how we once used to think; without the aide of such devices!

I’d wager that we have become a bit too dependent on such devices, and that our ability to think clearly without the vast amounts of inter-connectivity is changing our lives.  How we formulate ideas, how we problem-solve, and how we interact on our own recognizance is a diminishing ability especially for the Millennials.

Did you know the average person spends 4 years of his life looking down at his cell phone?
Kind of ironic, ain’t it?
How these touch-screens can make us lose touch
But it’s no wonder in a world filled with iMac’s, iPads and iPhones
So many “i”’s, so many selfies, not enough “us”‘s and “we”’s
See, technology
Has made us more selfish and separate than ever
Cause while it claims to connect us, connection has gotten no better
And let me must express first
Mr. Zuckerberg, not to be rude but you should re-classify Facebook to what it is:
An anti-social network
Cause while we may have big friend lists
So many of us are friendless
All alone
Cause friendships and more broken than the screens on our very phones
We sit at home on our computers measuring self-worth by numbers of followers and likes
Ignoring those who actually love us
It seems we’d rather write
An angry post than talk to someone who might actually hug us
Am I bugging? You tell me
Cause I asked a friend the other day, “Let’s meet up face to face.”
And said, “Alright. What time you wanna Skype?”
I responded with omg, srs, and then a bunch of smh’s
And realized what about me?
Do I not have the patience to have conversation without abbreviation?
This is the generation of media over stimulation
Chats have been reduced to snaps
The news is 140 characters
Videos are 6 seconds at high speed
And you wonder why ADD is on the rise faster than 4G LTE
But, get a load of this
Studies show the attention span of the average adult today
Is one second lower than that of a gold fish

So if, you’re one of the few people or aquatic animals that have yet to click off or close this video, congratulations
Let me finish by saying you do have a choice, yes
But this one my friends we cannot Auto-Correct – we must do it ourselves
Take control or be controlled, Make a decision
Me?
No longer do I want to spoil a precious moment by recording it with a phone
I’m just gonna keep them
I don’t wanna take a picture of all my meals anymore – I ‘m just gonna eat them
I don’t want the new app, the new software, or the new update
And If I wanna post an old photo, who says I have to wait until Thursday
I’m so tired of performing in the pageantry of vanity
And conforming to this accepted form of digital insanity
Call me crazy but, I imagine a world where we smile when we have low batteries
Cause that will mean we’ll be one bar closer – to humanity

~~Prince Ea

I am not a proponent of reversing technology, only one of etiquette!  How we use what is available to us is up to us.  I remember having the conversation with a friend during the reign of advances in file sharing technology.

When people downloaded copyright protected files without thinking anything was wrong because it was possible to do, was during a time when such legal issues were in its infancy.  File sharing did not ask the proprietary question from possibility!  Yes, there is an ethical question involved here.  The possibility for making a transaction over a computer begs the question…just because we can do it, does it make it right?  Before any legislation disrupted Napster’s file sharing universe, Napster did change the way we do business.  The digital revolution single-handedly put tower records and other retailers out of business.

Thus so providing copyright protected proprietaries to further the advances in digital marketing such as Apple’s iTunes platform, we were launched into the full-blown digital music, and movies age.

The point is that just because we can do something technologically, does not always make allowances for legalities, or other ethical issues.  I believe the same argument can be applied to the “torrent” file sharing system still going on today.  The collective stream of technology will always produce something before decisions are made for its agreed upon use in society.  I would also think it appropriate to make the controversy of the F.C.C.’s direction in “net-neutrality”.  This is another frighteningly Orwellian prediction that is shaping before our eyes.  Despite the Edward Snowden disclosures and the Julian Assange Wiki-leaks information we have our work cut out for us to do.

If the government is not here to help us, then the only conclusion is that we are on our own with whatever remaining tenants of the constitution that are still alive.