coberst

Technology: The Modern Pied Piper

The Pied Piper of Hamelin is a story by Robert Browning detailing a legend regarding the abduction of children from the village of Hamelin in 1284.

The town of Hamelin was rat infested and the citizens hired a man, who described himself as a rat catcher, to rid them of their rats. The man accepted their offer and used a musical pipe to lure the rats into following him. He led them into the river where they drowned. Despite his success the town reneged and refused to pay him.

The man later returned to town one Sunday morning; while the citizens were in church he used the musical pipe to lure the town’s children into following him out of town. The children were never seen again.

Technology is our modern day version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Technology has enchanted the Global village, especially the young, with hand-held gadgets and various kinds of digital technology to the extent that reading and intellectual growth has become seriously hindered.

Sapiens seek titillation and seem to find it foremost in trivial pursuits; technology facilitates those pursuits while simultaneously facilitating a more comfortable standard of living.

Our lives are filled with clusters of goals to be achieved and means devised to reach those goals. We have proximate goals and ultimate goals that we try to make coherent throughout our lives.

When we focus our mental prowess on goals and the means for achieving those goals we come face to face with the fact that we spend great quantities of our intellectual energy on means and very little intellectual energy on long range ultimate goals.

Economics dominates our thought processes in matters of defining goals. We give insufficient intellectual energy toward moral values that will help us set useful long range goals.

When we examine the matter of means and ends we discover that we have become enchanted with technology as our Idol, it becomes the means to achieve whatever goals we might decide in the future. Technology, however, provides little help in establishing goals that can alleviate our most stressful problems.

forester814

Coberst, like all tools and innovations, today's technology carries with it both good and bad. The potential for use, and for abuse.

Kids don't just pick these bad habits up from nowhere. Too many parents have turned to TV, video games, DVD players in the car, etc., as an easy alternative to the stress and responsibility of active, conscious and present parenting.

As for long-range goals, I'm afraid they have all but fallen by the wayside under the combined forces of instant gratification, laziness, and the corporate "do whatever you have to do to make the shareholders happy this quarter" mentality.

On a lighter note, I never noticed this before regarding the Pied Piper story. Why weren't those kids in church with their parents? Seems to me there is an underlying message there about false piety. Thoughts?

coberst

forester

It has been a long time since I read this tale, perhaps I may have some details incorrect, it might have been a Monday and a school holiday.

coberst

There is a level of technology that becomes very dangerous for the species. It is that level when we humans have the power to easily destroy our self without the intellectual sophistication to prevent that from happening. We have long ago passed that point.

We do not allow children to drive because they lack the intellectual sophistication to handle such a dangerous situation. We are adolescents with far too much power for our level of sophistication.