It will pay dividends to think deeply about all that has been said, and written, about the so called “Information Age,” and how rapidly it is connecting us to one another, and to masses of information, products, and services.  If we examine life as it was millennia ago  when prehistoric ancestors emerged long before tribes and other forms of organizations, everything learned must have been direct and real.  When verbal sounds took on meaning and primitive language emerged everything changed.  Verbal sounds with agreed upon meaning, and pictographs  drawn in the dirt, were the first substitution of symbols for reality.  Every word uttered and every picture drawn was not reality, but a symbol of it. They may have conjured up memory of the reality behind it, but they were not direct experience or reality.  

When written language developed it brought a huge increase in substitution of symbol for reality.  It no longer required a story teller and a listener.  Any person who could  write could communicate symbolically what was directly experienced or thought with any other person who could read.  It gave rise to literate scribes who could record and transmit symbolic representation of the experience and thoughts of the illiterate masses.  Systems of transporting the written symbols and manual pictographs by various means began to evolve.  At the same time, literacy of the masses slowly increased. 

With advent of the printing press, swifter means of transportation, and more rapid expansion of literacy, substitution of written and visual symbols for reality took an immense leap.  With advent of the electronic telegraph, dots and dash became symbols for letters of the alphabet adding another set of symbols layered on alphabetic symbols.   With the telephone, use of written and aural symbols became endemic taking more of our time and attention.  With the invention of the still camera, pictorial symbols of reality became wide spread.  With invention of the movie camera, theaters filled with people devoting even more time in a symbolic world as people became enthralled with moving symbols replacing real life and the environment.  Then the explosion came.    With invention of the transistor, silicon micro chip, and digital technology computers, visual screens,  and cell phones became ubiquitous, portable, small and inexpensive.  The amount of time people spend looking at screens and hearing audio devices increased exponentially.  At bottom, it was a massive substitution of symbols for reality.           

One’s time is finite and limited.  To connect to anything via electronic technology and modern electronic communications requires disconnecting from something else for precisely the same amount of time.  An essential question emerges.  What are we disconnecting from, in order to provide time to connect to symbols of reality?  Is the hour taken staring at a computer, television or mobile telephone screen an hour disconnected from the reality of a garden?  Is it an hour disconnected to the reality of nature and the environment?  Is it an hour disconnected from the reality of a conversation face to face with other people?  Is it an hour disconnected from family around the dinner table?  Is it an hour disconnected from a quiet walk in the sun or the rain?  Is it an hour disconnected from participation in one’s community?  Even the finest electronic connection is a crude approximation of the complex, sensory, and direct connection to person, place or thing in the context of their surroundings, in a word, the world of nature, and one’s community.   

An even deeper question then emerges.  What is the value of the real things we disconnect from, related to the value of the facsimile of person or things we are connected to?  Are we disconnecting from the richness of reality, for connection to a clumsy facsimile of it?  To a very great extent, it makes our lives subject to manipulation by those who control the means by which we are symbolically connected?   The Googles, Microsofts, Amazons, cable news networks, Twitters, Facebooks, ad infinitum.  There is no way to know how they are manipulating our minds, emotions,  beliefs and behaviors in their greedy lust for profit and power.  We can only be certain they are doing so, and concealing a very great deal of it.   What will it mean to the evolution of the mind, of the emotions, or one’s health?  What will it do to such intangibles as privacy, intimacy, trust, spontaneity, empathy, and confidence?   

Every advance of technology is introduced with exaggerated claims of the benefits to be expected, which are generally accepted with enthusiasm.  In the excitement and pride of every new advance, we tend to forget that the expected consequences may or may not happen, but unexpected consequences always do.  In truth, “virtual reality” is an oxymoron.  There is no such thing.  There is reality, and there is symbolic facsimile of it.  

And so to the heart of the matter.  Are we exchanging quality for quantity?  Are we exchanging substance for novelty?  Are we exchanging the richness of real life, for the poverty of pseudo life?  Are we exchanging gold for dross?  And if so, who benefits from that? Is there any way to measure the value of reality from which we disconnect, and compare it to the value of connection to symbolic facsimiles of it?  Does it really matter?  From my perspective, it matters enormously.   

Will such a second hand life be worth living?