Wed-Da Sci-Non Ext-Ga pt.3!

Welcome, welcome, welcome to the show that never ends. Well, actually, it ends in a couple hundred words. Still... party. Woo.

I saw an article online today about universities starting to ban laptops from classrooms. For some reason people think that they are distracting. As if being able to update your facebook and twitter account in class is distracting.

twitter example:
ghostmorphine OMG, LOL, ROFL smiley face. I can't believe what my prof just said about evolution. Monkeys! MONKEYS!

The thing is though, people don't realize just how goddamn amazing this technology is. Of course we are going to be distracted! (And by "we" I mean college students and not lazy roustabouts who graduated a few years ago but still consider themselves college students)There is just too much amazing shit online for us to pass up. And as a result, we can't be bothered to take notes while we are learning about, you know, stuff and shit.

There were a lot people on the Fark message boards, the place were I first saw a link to the story from, that seemed to be opposed to such a ban. "How dare they" they screamed "take away our right to fuck around in class!" Listen, buddies, I never used a laptop for notes and I found plenty of ways to dick around. From starring at the boobies of any girl that was in sight, to doodling new and amusing mustaches onto a crudely drawn characture of the professor, there are a million ways to fuck off without a computer.

The thing is, and this is what brings us to "Wed-Da Sci-Non Ext-Ga pt.3!", is that people don't even notice that they are actually communicating with anyone on the fucking planet while they are in a lecture.

I sat behind this guy in one of my classes while I was in college who played WoW all the damn time. He was running around killing, you know, World of Warcraft enemies, while half heartedly listening to the lecture. It annoyed me at times because I would let my eyes wonder over to his screen from time to time to see how he was doing, but for the most part it didn't bug me too much. But the thing was that this guy was playing a game that was un-fucking-imaginable just ten or twenty years ago. He is playing a game populated by millions of other players, with some pretty solid graphics, and the ability to be upgraded whenever the developers wanted it to be. And he was playing it on a laptop. In class. And it didn't seem strange to anyone else that could see he was playing it.

My sister got a Nintendo for Christmas one year. I was young, lets say seven, and she wanted one and my parents got it for her. She let me play, too, and I loved that Duck Hunt, as it was the most amazing thing my seven year old eyes had ever seen. A dog pops up every once in a while! Amazing!

She got that present Christmas morning. We played all day. Then it was time for dinner. In my family we have a tradition of using "poppers" at dinner. If you don't know what that is, imagine the cardboard tube inside a toilet paper roll. Now imagine that all the toilet paper is gone, and someone has filled that tube with a few trinkets. Now imagine they have wrapped it in elaborate wrapping paper. Now imagine that someone, for some reason, has installed strips of cardboard attached to what was, basically, a gun powder filled cap. When pulled apart, this cap "pops!" thus releasing the goodies inside the small piece of cardboard. It's supposed to be fun for the whole family.

That year my popper didn't go off. I pulled on it, but it just sort of ripped. So I got my prizes, but I was curious, 'why didn't mine explode?' I kept asking. So I studied it. Remember that I was six. Or seven, whatever I said before. Anyway, I discovered the device inside the tube that was supposed to explode. I carefully took it away from everything else and studied it for a while. Realizing that friction must ignite the thing like a match, I decided I had no choice but to test my theory by placing the device as close to my eye as possible to actually see the reaction the gun powder had to fire.

Later in the evening, as I sat transfixed watching my sister play duck hunt with a large rag filled with ice cubes covering my right eye, I began to understand the effect that video games have on people. I was in what could only be called "ouchie bad bad pain" and yet I still preferred to watch my sister play that video game, as it was the utmost achievement of human endeavor. Or at least thats what it seemed like.

The point of this story is to illustrate two points. The first is that you shouldn't put explosive items near your eye. The second is that video games, internet, social networking, all that crap is highly addictive. I was in real pain, yet I chose to watch someone else play a video game instead of dealing with the pain. Technology has a hold on us, and we are all still amazed by it. We fight for the right to use that technology whenever the hell we want because we simply can't get enough of it. Yet we are apathetic towards it. Duck Hunt was amazing, but now it is so simplistic it wouldn't last a second against current games.

We've lost all appreciation for this level of technology. We feel we are entitled to play stupid games whenever the hell we want. We aren't holding ice bags over our eyes just so that we can stay up an extra hour to watch someone else play a video game. We've lost all sense of proportion. Technology is just to be expected. It does not need be earned. But it can never be taken away, because we have a right to it. We are a society built on a foundation of thinking that we deserve every technological advance that there has ever been.

Tell me now that you don't think we're living in a science fiction novel.