by April Phelps

Created on: May 28, 2008   Last Updated: May 29, 2008

Remember the good old days when Coleco-Vision first came out? I do, for my brothers and and I would spend hours just sitting in front of the television in the early 1980s. Those were the days! We would fight over whose turn it was though, especially when playing games like Burger Time. We would actually get mad at each other; too, if one of us thought the other took too long on a turn. A more vivid example is when my teenage son got mad at me, because my character on Mouser wouldn't die. The ironic twist is he plays the strategy and mmorpg games! Case in point is today it seems the conundrum of a turn is getting ridiculously out of control, given the amount of time we spend on media like computers, television, cell phones, and Blackberries. We become obsessed with making sure we meet our schedules and check our email in a paranoid frenzy, but is the panoramic media eye fit to watch over us? Most likely not.

This mode of babysitting is dangerous and can incite people to a panicky paranoia, as they start to believe their emails boxes are constantly filling up with tons of messages. There is even a commercial on the air, in which a woman in a crowded airport checks her email while sitting on a bench. She appears oblivious that life is passing her by as she concentrates on her email. As ordinary as this would seem to us nowadays, frightening is when the woman says she has been checking her email account since the 3rd grade. The point is as a race, we should be fighting more for tomorrow and more for our kids, than throwing a laptop in their faces. That isn't parenting people! It just gives us leeway to run away and avoid our responsibility as adults, for it is a convenient escape goat and release valve. This inclines me to wonder who the parent is.

Yet back to my example, the scene is unnerving as the lady sits there absorbed. Although this is an insurance commercial, it emphasizes the arresting nature of media. It inclines me to wonder what could happen if we get sucked into the technological void. It can be dangerous to go about our personal lives with a gadget forever in our face, like some sort of steak. Yet I doubt anyone wants to be compared to Pavlov's dog. Further a person cannot receive the nourishment s/he needs to stay alive from a laptop, so it questions the nature of the reward. This state of society can also be likened to a scene in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, with Tom and Jerry forever running because they are trying to catch the carrot forever in their

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