Is technology and obsession with youth ruling our lives - Essay Example

Is technology and obsession with youth ruling our lives? Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Steinhart tells the story of Lenny Abramov, a thirty-nine years old man who falls in love with young Eunice Park. The story is told around Lenny’s diaries and Eunice’s posts on hers Global Teen’s account. The country is falling apart economically and it is being governed by the The Bipartisan Party and the American Restoration Authority. It all happens in a future America, where people are obsessed with youth and social media. It is possible to compare the book with our society in the XXI century as the mature share of people nowadays has to keep up with the constant changes in technology and digital media in order to fit in society and also to compete with the millennials, especially in the job atmosphere. In the future America from the book, people do not care about being intelligent or reading real books, they actually despite it, and that can be seen when Precious Panda say to Eunice that “looking good is the new smart” (147). The characters are just interested in their äppärät, their attractiveness level and credit ranking. In Shteyngart’s distopyan America people lose their ability to interact with one another in the “real world”. The population is superficial and only care about what they can show through media and also what other people thing of them regarding of their exterior. Those are behaviors that we are already experiencing in our society, even if it’s not that extreme. A common phenomenon in today’s world is older employees being substitute for younger ones, almost all the time with the excuse that they are not fitted for the company anymore. When Lenny comes back from Rome and returns to the Post-Human Services he questions one of his old colleagues, Kelly Nardl: “So who’s still around from the old gang? (…) I didn’t see Jami Pilsner’s name. Or Irene Po. Are they just going to fire us all?” (59). In a world where technology increases in such a high speed, people have to be able to adapt just as fast. Therefore, some companies want to hire people who grew up in this new environment, as they are more adaptable to such changes. Posting pictures and videos on social media such as Snapchat and Instagram became a must in the XXI century. When Lenny meets with his old friends at a bar, one of them, Noah, starts recording their reunion. Noah declares “Get out your butt plugs and get ready to groove. This is a ‘Noah Weinberg Show!’ exclusive. (…) We’re streaming at you live, folks” (83). If you do not have an account in any type of social media, you are considered an outsider. And even if you do, and don’t post at least a picture/video per day, people lose the interest to follow you and you stop getting “likes”. In a society where you are judge based in how many followers you have, that is a big deal. It means that you have to try harder to get accepted. We are living in a world where the use of books and any kind of printed media keeps declining. Still within the meeting with Lenny’s friends, when they see his profile and it shows that he spends quite a good amount of money in actual books, Vishnu states: “You’ve got to stop buying books, Nee-gro. All those doorstops are going to drag down your personality rankings. Where the fuck do you even find those things?” (90). What is happening is that we started looking for information in search tools such as Google when once before we had to read actual books and stay hours in a library to find the piece of information that we were looking for. With the rise of internet and the immediate need of having everything within few seconds, going through the old way of research became outdated and non-efficient. It is much easier for us to take twenty minutes looking up for something online than to actually go through and academic source, for example. In the article Is Google making us stupid? By author Nicholas Carr he states “(…) what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. (…) Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy in a Jet Ski.” This can relate to the book because as the story is told around a future America, you can assume that this problem of having difficulty to read a five-page article it is bigger than ever and now books became ancient history in this community. We can then argue that we are increasingly running towards this, as our ability to read printed media keeps getting more and more compromised and we can find ourselves almost always skimming through a long text. The desire to stay young as long as possible always existed, but now is aggravated. When Lenny finally introduces Eunice to his friends, Grace – Vishnu’s girlfriend – points out “She’s to young for you”. (153). He replies saying he is worried about dying and she asks him if Eunice makes him feel young. Lenny then declares “I guess in some ridiculous way I think Eunice will let me live forever” (154). This illustrates a common scenario where an older person gets in a relationship with someone younger to often make themselves feel better and forget that age actually comes to everyone. This is a reflection of a society where looks and exterior matter more than actual knowledge and life experience. Today we spend more time in our smartphones than having actual conversations, face-to-face and this become something totally normal. After a month since the connection went down, Lenny finally writes in his diary “Four young people committed suicide in our building complexes, and two of them wrote suicide notes about how they couldn’t see a future without their äppärät One wrote (…) [that] he needed to be ranked, to know his place in this world. (…) We are all bored out of our fucking minds” (270). This need to be always connected is already something we live; it is not just in the future as it is in the book. We are constantly checking our messages, looking if there’s any gossip about someone famous or if there is a sale happening in some department store. In the episode The Entire History of You of Black Mirror when the woman called Hallam tells that she doesn’t have the grain (the device that records everything through your eyes) and that she actually enjoys it, people in the room say that they could not do it, that she is very brave. The majority of our society got used to being dependent of their “äppäräts” and do not know how to live without it, as if live would be meaningless. To conclude, it possible to suggest that our nation is worried with keeping up with technology and that we can not live without it anymore. Our brain got used to having information easily and in question of seconds, so it keeps losing the ability to absorb more condensed types of printed media. Social media also plays a major role in today’s society, as something that we use mostly to feel that we are part of a group, of something bigger. As everything has a good side - in this case is the facility of having everything in the touch of a button - it also has the downside: the competitiveness between the mature people and the millennials, who wore born in this century so for them everything is much easier and more accessible. That can make them more valuable in the eyes of the employer and prejudice the ones that are not so familiar with all the technology we have nowadays. Work Cited: Shteyngart, Gary. Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel. New York, Random House, 2010. Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, 2008. “The Entire History of You” Black Mirror: First Season, written by Charlie Brooker, 2014. The Purdue OWL. Purdue U Writing Lab, 2016. Read More