Help: Held Hostage by Ads and Electronics
One question came to mind while watching the ads during the Super Bowl. Have we lost our soul? The ads were machines, power cars, animation, animals, technological fiction. Have we turned into a nation of cartoons and robots? Have we allowed power and speed and metal to identify who we are? Do we create the Admen or do they create us? This is another chicken or the egg puzzle.
Let me share some simple observations: When was the last you time you conversed with teens? Do they give you eye contact? Or do they impatiently turn their eyes back to their machines? They look uncomfortable looking at me in the eye. Have their addiction to electronic devices replaced the basics in how we connect with real people?
I observed a family of three at a restaurant. Mother and daughter were busily texting while the father sat, just sat. What would the Waltons do? Remember John Boy and his sibs? Remember their conversations around the table? Family meant more than being physically together in a room. A friend of mine raised her two sons with this rule around her dinner table:
Each member of the family shared a story or two from their day. The children accepted this as a way of life. They learned that their parents were people with the stories they shared from their workplace. The art of conversation was nurtured and they continued to speak in long paragraphs instead of grunts and abbreviated thoughts. There are no LOL, OMG, or 
I know, because I recently had lunch with one of the children. There were no silences or a question and answer conversation. We had no electronic interruptions. We laughed and talked like real people do.
While mentally ranting on this subject, I came across the following from Charles Pellegrino’s book, Return to Sodom and Gomorrah: page 10.
“The most frightening lesson I have ever been taught came from ancient Babylon, where cyclic collapses of civilization arose not from extreme and science-fiction collapses of the environment but from economic collapses brought about with chillingly simple ease at the earliest stages of environmental degradation ( usually triggered by new technologies, including better irrigation channels, which at first allowed more profitable exploitation of the environment but led finally to over-exploitation). Looking around and seeing an increasingly interlinked global economy and deteriorating soils, forests, and reefs in every direction, it becomes possible to believe we are on the verge of replaying Babylon’s mistakes on a planetary scale.”
Add human race and humanity to environment and soon, we will all be saying, “What have we done? “ when we see those ads replicated in our own children. I see the slow exploitation of technology creeping into our humanities and our young people are already showing effects of this slow kill. Wake up, people, before it’s too late. Isn’t it our responsibility to retain and preserve this humanity in our young people. Look at what we’ve done to our planet. Inventions are man-made, so we’re in a self-destructive mode.
Back to the ads, when I was teaching, we used TV and radio ads to explore the grammatical and lexical resources of English by analyzing and classifying attention-getting devices used by ad writers. Students examined various linguistic techniques, such as rhyming, punning, alliteration, sound-spelling relationships (We and Wild), figurative use of language (Dip,Dip Hooray), deliberate breaking of grammatical rules ( The Uncola), animate/inanimate switch ( The Friendly Airline). As a final activity, students wrote and/or performed print ads or TV and radio commercials using one of more of the featured linguistic devices and reported on the marketing research they had done. We could use ads to study our language because that’s what admen used, language.
Where can we find these linguistic devices in green geckos, ducks and a pink pig zipping by? Or in cars that only spell power and speed? Or ads that warn us not to use their drugs because they might kill our organs? I have a suspicion it has already happened, our ADmen are robots.
Ads and electronic devices are keeping us hostage until the day we no longer recognize ourselves as caring, compassionate, creative, humans beings who are also aware of others as fellow human beings. Someday, archeologists will be digging up another Babylon. As that character in Without a Trace shouts, “Is this what you want?”
To understand the importance of what you are saying, Frances, your readers might want to read today’s post on my blog, “Relationship the Therapeutic Process.” It is a clear illustration of the pay-off to prioritizing family relationships. The address is http://www.soulmatetips.blogspot.com.
Now this is a quality rant! As I read I could not help but agree with what you said, but then a thought occurred to me—I suppose our parents cast the same doubts upon technological advances when we were children.
I can’t imagine how the phone would have been construed to be a bad thing, but what about radio and television? Pulp novels and comic books? I’d bet the latter were railed against in the Bible Belt of the South.
When I was growing up we saw the advent of Pong and Atari, the TRS-80 and Commodore 64. I still got out and played basketball and rode my skateboard.Conversely, I would also sit in my room and listen to my music with headphones on, and sit at my desk and draw weak representations of spaceships and other alien worlds.
And yet as a family we rarely ate at the dinner table; more often we used TV trays and watched TV together while we ate. A truly American (haole) form of family time.
The key is balance.
You know the school of thought which claims that technology will save us. Tech can do many things, and has proven time and again that it can and will. But it cannot begin to replace the human touch.