The Way Our Society Goes These Days

In the age of cellular phones, Facebook, Twitter, and all, is it too easy to neglect the human being the maker of it all? There was a time when transferring messages between distant places was highly inconvenient. A letter could take months, even years to reach its destination. With the advent of technology and faster traveling, distant communication is drastically ameliorated. Now, we have the wireless. Google is out there mapping every inch of our planet. Nothing is too far or too isolated. Just pick up a cell phone. In few seconds one is talking to another at the end of the world. We should infer thus that men have so much progressed that they have consolidated their environment into a one-world-community.

Is it so?

Our astonishingly progressive technological advancement may have caused us to neglect certain social responsibilities and norms. We are stuck on our computers, cell phones, and tablets; and, we are paying less attention to our kind. A certain article reads, “Alabama Woman, 78, Lived With Dead Husband for Weeks…” What happened? The old woman suffers Alzheimer. Her husband died in his bed. She was left alone in the home with two dogs until the police finally checked on them four weeks later “at the request of relatives.” What may we infer? These two senior citizens were obviously forgotten within the quagmire of our world of electronic. Nobody checked on them during the one month that the husband was lying there dead in his bed and the wife suffering the stench.

This is no surprise. People are no longer so busy with people around them. It is a virtual world. We are chatting with whom? We don’t know. Perhaps we are keeping communication with an alien way out in Siberia. Who lives next door to us? We don’t know! And, we keep our eyes transfixed into our portables. We walk; we sit; we lie down with our machines. We don’t pay much attention to people. We talk less; we salute less; we see less.

Where were the children? Where were the grandchildren? Where the social services? And, where were the neighbors? They must have all been busy with their latest technologies or something like that. That’s the way our modern society goes. Our friends on Facebook are keeping us busy. We don’t know the neighbors who sleep in the apartment next door. And, this is big city. People should not care about one another’s business anyway.

One of the neighbors of the old couple that had known them for decades lamented, “To think that all of us live right here, this close, and none of us knew anything about this.” This neighbor must be feeling really bad. She is very likely advanced in age too and probably not so much hooked up into our wireless craze. Still, she must have her television. She was not so connected with her neighbor to take a little time to check on them. It is a virtual world. Also, the police discovered the two dogs died of starvation in the home as well. 

By E.C. GRANMOUN
E.C. Granmoun is the author of "The Social Worker" ebook on amazon.com
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