Magical Alpine Adventure

Seeing that I spent a large portion of this week in Lake Tahoe, I am not only glad that my technology use this week was limited, but also happy with how satisfying the vacation was. Even when trying to avoid most electronics themselves, this vacation brought me some interesting insights involving our technology use in the context of this class, the most notable coming from an unexpected but logical source, a science fiction novel. The most notable thing about being on vacation is that you even remain in contact with people while gone. My friends who I was seeing in person all week continued to communicate with me as if I was still 250 miles closer to them. I did my best to avoid the urges to be distracted from my environment and surroundings Dan Simmons's The Fall of Hyperion, the sequel to his previous book Hyperion, he does not utilize technology use as a theme or key aspect of the story, but its projection of technology 500 years into the future gave me some valuable perspective on McLuhan's ideas of the "global village". In the story, characters can "farcast", using portals to travel through space and time at ridiculous rates. The interesting aspect of the story, however, is that a particular robotic cyborg character is programmed to have the exact life experiences and psyche of 19th century John Keats. As a result, although being technically robotic himself, this character is constantly amazed and overwhelmed by the rates at which people can communicate in the story. For instance, he is on a diplomatic planet to start, is transported to a ship via farcaster, airdrops onto a planet, has breakfast with more diplomats, farcasts again to Mars, back to his house, and then wonders if he is hallucinating because the elapsed time was 90 minutes. In this fictional universe, everyone seems to be in constant contact with everything and everyone within his world, an affirmation of McLuhan's theory of the global village. The story also fits in largely with Symes's critiques of the idea, as the AIs in the story does not want to cooperate, and the government uses this constant contact to impose Big Brother-like policy. Overall, I found this fun read to perfectly play along with the McLuhan hypothesis of the global village and its impacts.