Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Please Refer to the Actual Human Being

My commute today took longer than usual. Think I would have had a meltdown by now if I was living at Witkoppen and having to jump on the N1 as part of my daily bread.

Funnily enough, my last post yesterday (see below) got some reaction (though sadly from none of the individuals it was directed to).

Unfortunately, the gist of GIRLS GONE MAD was essentially this:
I hate sending SMS!
I hate sending emails!
I want to see a human being face to face (or at least talk to them and hear them speak, hear how your days is via your tone of voice.
I want to experience at least one of the other five senses (beyond seeing) with a real live human being.

See, my eyes are starting to adapt to perpetual exposure to LCD screens. Phone and computer and in my car... That means my eyeballs are configured to defocus (mist up) in response to the cotton-ping ponging pixels that I am constantly staring at.

It would be awesome, for a change, to look at a real live human being, in the real world.

When I went cycling with Alex on Sunday I felt a remarkable sense of REconnection. I said, you know today is the first time I've felt a strong sense of the ETHOS of Johannesburg? You don't feel a city or a place driving through it. You get some of it by jogging, but you probably won't cover that much territory. But to cycle through you see every stone and bump and hole in the road, you feel the wind, you smell the barbecues, you hear people shouting and dogs barking.

In the same way we really rob ourseles of a richer human experience by placing a computer and a cellphone as a medium between human beings. We need a trend where people say, Sorry, when you hear the signal the threshold of digital interference will be reached. Please refer to the actual human being for further details.

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