Who needs people anyway?

It seems to me that almost everything new these days is designed to keep us from actually interacting with other humans in person. Every new bit of technology makes it more convenient to just stay away from any kind of interpersonal interactions.

At the rate we are going, I think we are less than a decade away from near total isolation.

We can shop from home for everything but groceries, and some people even do that. We text so that we don’t even have to move up to the intimacy of a phone call (meant to be ironic). We can download our music and our books so that we don’t have to go to the store to purchase them. It’s all digital. Who needs actual friends when you can have so many Facebook friends with no more responsibility than to occasionally “like” the things they type?

And that’s not all.

We’ve got MySpace, Twitter, Tumblr, and who knows how many other social networks. Most companies are now offering more flexibility to work remotely, so we can certainly cut back on our interactions there and most of our business is conducted via email now anyway. Why go to the concert when you can just watch them live on youtube? Gotta avoid those crowds after all. It seems that pretty soon the only people interacting in person will be homeless people.

I’m not a nut. Not entirely.

I’m not a believer that our computers will eat us (although they probably will) and I don’t think we’ll end up in a “Surrogates” type of situation (though I believe most people would go for it). I am concerned though about where we are headed as humans.

Combine the technology with the fear of letting your children leave your sight, and the next generation coming up is only interacting during school hours for the most part. And do we really need to have school in person? Those teachers cost a lot of money. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just do a computer based (video style) educational system? Kids can just learn at home with no parental responsibility to do the teaching.

Texas is safe from complete isolation because our West Texas towns would go vigilante on the world if they didn’t have their Friday night football games.

Just some thoughts. Thought I’d post them on here. More convenient than sharing in person. Eh?