Jessica Copi
12/5/16
“A Future Love Story” by Marcel Van der Drift
This story is a commentary on how we engage with technology and how that impacts how we engage with other humans. A man throws his phone into a river in an attempt to disconnect from the technology that binds him. He didn’t want to be “wired up” in the first place, so this act of rebellion is central to his breaking free of the thing that everyone else is doing. The story ends by the main character, Steve, realizing there is a woman who has also thrown her phone in the same river. This speaks of our apparent inability to meet people and make intimate connections without the help of Tinder or OkCupid, and this chance meeting based around their shared disgust with their phones gives me a bit of hope.
“He didn’t need any software to tell him how he felt. He was depressed.” page 28
I liked this quote because I feel like it gets back to the root of self-reflection and self-reliance. That we don’t need machines to do everything for us 24/7. That we can think and feel independent of our phones, computers, facebook, etc.
Questions:
- Do people feel addicted to their machines? If yes, how do we remedy that? (Goes along with our brief discussion around antidotes for the plague that is social media)
- How do we find the balance between using technology to make connections, and using it to avoid connections?
