on The Veldt
Technologies are often seen as the extension of our lives. Presented as system built into the every-day-use devices in our lives like our phones, computers, wearables, cars or houses. These all should be used as extensions of our lives, but do they?
In The Velt we see that the house of Hadley's was very well programmed to know how to do things we usually do ourselves. Their house was supposed to be an extension of them, in order to live a better life. The basic assumption is, that if you don't have to do the chores like cleaning, washing, cooking and ironing, you have more time to do the meaningful stuff. But what actually is meaningful in this case? As we read the story we see that Hadley's realised that they didn't really invest into what was important. What I see as important except their relationship as husband and wife, are their kids. Instead of focusing the spare time and energy into developing a relationship with them, their kids were allowed to spend hours in the artificial nursery.
As the psychologist later pointed out, they let the nursery replace parents in the lives of their children. It's because their kids built their emotional relationship with the nursery rather than their parents, parents were no longer needed to meet their needs.
This might be very extreme example on how technologies can replace people, but we see it happening. People are looking into their screens despite the appeal not to look into their phones in metro, buses, cafeteria and all other places. It's not surprising that this habit can lead us to create relationships with our devices. They might not be completely emotional as our relationships, but they are stimulating.
Since technology takes a big part of our lives, it has several consequences. Not only we are spending more time with devices than with actual people, these relationships are no longer superficial. They might have been lacking the emotional charge before, but because of the data collection they are starting to have very strong emotional undertones. As the “Everyware” is able to collect all kinds of data about people, we are having “a better picture” of the others. It is as if we were changing the resolution from 720p to 4K rapidly. This might expose us to initial discomfort and awkwardness (Everyware, thesis 35) but eventually we will get used to this “data sharing”. With these datasets, we're creating pieces of ourselves online, other selves in different dimension. We are slowly building the houses as in The Veldt, that do everything we would do but better, without being tired or complains.
Captivated in all of this we might fall into the same assumption as Peter ”I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else
is there to do?” (The Veldt 7). What else there is for us to do? The real danger therefore lies in us becoming children sitting in the artificial nursery, because there's nothing better to do.
