Laputan Machines

Spot on, kid. (Source: Reddit)

So a friend recently shared a story about one of his vacations with college-folk at Anawangin Cove. He noticed that instead of actually enjoying the place (which I imagine is what a lot of people actually do), most of them were glued to their phones (for social media purposes) or their Blackberries (looking at work-related stuff for that company, which in itself is a part of a very long epic, but that's a story for another day - far in the future).

On a related note, we were having a discussion a few weeks back about how children seem to intuitively know their way around modern gadgets, even more so than the actual adult owners. Heck, I see that in my younger brother, who we tend to ask help from whenever we needed the sound system set up or something similar.

I guess I now know how our parents must have felt when they saw us tinkering with the computer all those years ago and being better at it than them, even if they've been doing it for years.

It's odd that I'd even post something about being too attached to technology, since I am guilty of it most of the time. I could say majority of my online time is spent juggling browser tabs - for starters, there's Twitter, Cracked, the KoL forums, other blogs I'm subscribed to and the occasional Facebook trolling browsing, and that's not counting the things I do on the phone (like Instagram and such) - as if it's even used as a phone nowadays.

I guess people have an obsession with having to have proof of every minute detail of their lives these days, given the ease that modern technology allows us to do so. We could blame this packrat tendency on the sheer cost of living nowadays (because if it's expensive, you're probably only going to do it once), on the need for a virtual scrapbook that we don't have to lug around wherever we go, or maybe even on sheer vanity.

Maybe there's no helping it, just as there was no helping the surge of popularity of mobile communications all those years ago.

Then again, isn't merely enjoying the view for it's own sake worth anything anymore, even for just a little while?