WALL * E
I watched "Wall*E" today. It's that Disney Pixar movie. It was extremely entertaining and the animation was amazing as is usual for Pixar films. I heard an interview with the guy who wrote/direction "Wall*E" and he said he didn't intend for the movie to be any kind of political/social commentary. I can respect him for that point of view, but it's hard not to see some parallels between what we are currently doing to the planet we call home and what the Earth looks like in "Wall*E."
Additionally, the current trend of the ever-increasing role technology plays in our everyday lives is a plot point in "Wall*E" that is hard to ignore. The character Wall*E (pronounced "Wall-ee") is a garbage compactor robot. In the future (cir. 28th century) the Earth is completely covered in trash and debris. It is Wall*E's job to make cubes of the detritus and stack these cubes into orderly piles. Without giving away too much, Wall*E ends up getting blasted into deep space where he finds himself on a space station called Axiom. Axiom is where all the humans from Earth have been living for the last 700 years. Originally, the humans had left Earth on a "five-year cruise" so that Wall*E and his trash-compacting robot bretheren could clean the planet up. Needless to say, the robots failed and the humans stayed out in space. That's all I'm going to say about the main plot because it's a great movie and I highly recommend everyone see it.
All the people who inhabit Axiom are extremely obese. Their lives are extremely sedentary, composed mostly of sitting in front of video screens doing "virtual" activities (even golf and dating are done virtually), never leaving a sitting position. At one point Wall*E accidentally turns off the video screen of a woman and she appears stunned at what she sees, as if she has never taken her eyes off the video screen to look at her surroundings. When she sees a swimming pool (which nobody is swimming in, but by which many people are lounging) she says, "I didn't know we had a swimming pool!"
I feel like that woman sometimes, especially when I'm on the social networking Web sites Facebook and MySpace. Those sites put me into a sort of trance state wherein I am totally engaged in the site to the exclusion of what is going on in the physical reality around me. My girlfriend, Alana, calls it "getting lost in cyberworld." If I'm "lost in cyberworld" and Alana comes up and talks to me or asks me a question, I usually have to request that she repeat what she said because I have to refocus my attention from the computer screen to her. When she calls out to me to let me know dinner is ready it isn't rare for her to eventually have to make me up a plate and bring it to me at the computer. If I say I'm going to turn off the computer it typically takes me 15-20 minutes to wrap up what I'm doing, sometimes longer.
I was watching Charlie Rose the other night and the two founders of MySpace were on as guests. One of the guys, Tom, who those familiar with MySpace know as the very first friend they had on the site (because he is automatically your friend if you create a profile), said that they are working on making it so that MySpace will be everywhere in the future, integrated into nearly every aspect of peoples' lives where they interact using electronic means, be it a cell phone, a laptop, whatever. As a society our lives are filled with electronic gadgets and some, like the cell phone, are so ingrained in our society that it's hard to imagine a world without them. If you've seen recent iPhone commercials you have likely heard the term "App." App. is short for application, a program that runs on the iPhone platform. iPhone users can download these apps to do virtually anything (I saw one in a recent commercial that makes the iPhone into a construction level, complete with the little bubble that indicates if a surface is flat in relation to a another surface). They call iPhones, and phones like it, "smart phones." Tech industry folks I've heard interviewed predict that the vast majority of cell phones will be smart phones within the next ten years. I predict it will be even sooner than that.
With all the technology we now have in our lives that keep us "connected" to each other, I feel like sometimes personal, face-to-face interaction gets lost. For hermits (read homebodies) like myself you would think that such technology would be viewed as a godsend because it means not having to go out and see people as much, but I find that it only makes me feel more lonely and isolated than before. I crave personal interaction with people in the real world, but everyone, including myself, is so distracted by their electronic gadgets that it is difficult to make new friends in the real world, especially for a person like me who can be socially awkward at times. Despite the writer's claim that he did not intend for "Wall*E" to spark any discussions of larger social issues, his film may well turn out to be somewhat prophetic. I certainly hope human beings can figure out how to allow for our long-term survival on Earth without destroying the planet in the process.
Additionally, the current trend of the ever-increasing role technology plays in our everyday lives is a plot point in "Wall*E" that is hard to ignore. The character Wall*E (pronounced "Wall-ee") is a garbage compactor robot. In the future (cir. 28th century) the Earth is completely covered in trash and debris. It is Wall*E's job to make cubes of the detritus and stack these cubes into orderly piles. Without giving away too much, Wall*E ends up getting blasted into deep space where he finds himself on a space station called Axiom. Axiom is where all the humans from Earth have been living for the last 700 years. Originally, the humans had left Earth on a "five-year cruise" so that Wall*E and his trash-compacting robot bretheren could clean the planet up. Needless to say, the robots failed and the humans stayed out in space. That's all I'm going to say about the main plot because it's a great movie and I highly recommend everyone see it.
All the people who inhabit Axiom are extremely obese. Their lives are extremely sedentary, composed mostly of sitting in front of video screens doing "virtual" activities (even golf and dating are done virtually), never leaving a sitting position. At one point Wall*E accidentally turns off the video screen of a woman and she appears stunned at what she sees, as if she has never taken her eyes off the video screen to look at her surroundings. When she sees a swimming pool (which nobody is swimming in, but by which many people are lounging) she says, "I didn't know we had a swimming pool!"
I feel like that woman sometimes, especially when I'm on the social networking Web sites Facebook and MySpace. Those sites put me into a sort of trance state wherein I am totally engaged in the site to the exclusion of what is going on in the physical reality around me. My girlfriend, Alana, calls it "getting lost in cyberworld." If I'm "lost in cyberworld" and Alana comes up and talks to me or asks me a question, I usually have to request that she repeat what she said because I have to refocus my attention from the computer screen to her. When she calls out to me to let me know dinner is ready it isn't rare for her to eventually have to make me up a plate and bring it to me at the computer. If I say I'm going to turn off the computer it typically takes me 15-20 minutes to wrap up what I'm doing, sometimes longer.
I was watching Charlie Rose the other night and the two founders of MySpace were on as guests. One of the guys, Tom, who those familiar with MySpace know as the very first friend they had on the site (because he is automatically your friend if you create a profile), said that they are working on making it so that MySpace will be everywhere in the future, integrated into nearly every aspect of peoples' lives where they interact using electronic means, be it a cell phone, a laptop, whatever. As a society our lives are filled with electronic gadgets and some, like the cell phone, are so ingrained in our society that it's hard to imagine a world without them. If you've seen recent iPhone commercials you have likely heard the term "App." App. is short for application, a program that runs on the iPhone platform. iPhone users can download these apps to do virtually anything (I saw one in a recent commercial that makes the iPhone into a construction level, complete with the little bubble that indicates if a surface is flat in relation to a another surface). They call iPhones, and phones like it, "smart phones." Tech industry folks I've heard interviewed predict that the vast majority of cell phones will be smart phones within the next ten years. I predict it will be even sooner than that.
With all the technology we now have in our lives that keep us "connected" to each other, I feel like sometimes personal, face-to-face interaction gets lost. For hermits (read homebodies) like myself you would think that such technology would be viewed as a godsend because it means not having to go out and see people as much, but I find that it only makes me feel more lonely and isolated than before. I crave personal interaction with people in the real world, but everyone, including myself, is so distracted by their electronic gadgets that it is difficult to make new friends in the real world, especially for a person like me who can be socially awkward at times. Despite the writer's claim that he did not intend for "Wall*E" to spark any discussions of larger social issues, his film may well turn out to be somewhat prophetic. I certainly hope human beings can figure out how to allow for our long-term survival on Earth without destroying the planet in the process.