We’re Stuck With the Cyberworld

by Kay MacPhail

Interacting with the physical world is slowly becoming less and less of a necessity in most activities. You can buy almost anything you want online, including groceries. Places such as The Mevlana Museum# allow you to take a 3D online tour of their galleries. Google is working on augmented reality glasses# operated by voice command so you can do stuff like look things up on the Internet, talk to your friends on Skype, or anything else you might think of as you walk around town, and it’s on a screen right in front of your face so you don’t have to stop and look down like you might do with your iPhone.

We are slowly trying to cram all we can from the outside world into the Internet. News, shopping, basic human interaction, you name it. Chatspeak, a lingo invented to make texting quicker and less tedious, has leaked into everyday human speech. More than once, I’ve even heard my brother—a barrel-chested teen with a shaved head and a “no-homo” attitude—say ‘OMG’ out loud, to his male teenage friends, with not an ounce of irony in his voice. There are hundreds of online social platforms where anyone can express their thoughts about anything at any time they please. This leads to a lot of shared information that the rest of us either don’t care about in the slightest or didn’t need to know.

Prince might have declared the Internet to be an outdated fad, but as someone tangled in it’s thick net, there’s no doubt in my mind that this Internet technology will advance and alter our culture with every step.  And make us even less inclined to go outside.