The plot of the movie is that seven hundred years from now humans will leave planet earth because it will be too contaminated to live on. Wall-E is a robot whose purpose is to clean the planet. He roams the earth making cubes of trash and piling them high in the forms of actual buildings. Wall-E is able to learn and communicate through electronic things. If he wishes to describe a feeling or emotion he plays music. If he wants to learn how to do something he will watch the television and copy what he sees. One example of this is when he learns how to dance. He watches a dance routine from an old movie and copies what he sees the characters doing. When out collecting trash during the day he keeps his eyes open to see what is useful to him and what is not.
It’s funny how Wall-E has been able to create a personality for himself despite the fact that he is alone and that he is a robot. He is able to do this through the interacting he has with technology. We can also see this in our own society today. Through the television, computer, cell phone and radio, we are able to create and change our own personalities based on what we see and hear through these mediums. I think that the cell phones play a bigger role in this than any other electronic device because of its easy access and universal use. Anybody can have a cell phone. It doesn’t matter if you have the best one or the cheapest one, a phone is a phone. The other day when I was working I was shocked to a 2 year old with an iphone in her hand. I watched her for a few minutes and it was amazing to me how she knew which application to press on the iphone to get to youtube and watch Sesame Street. Anyways, I feel that I would rather text someone then call them because for some reason I get nervous when I talk on the phone, even if it’s with my friends. I think my personality is a lot funnier when I text and that I am a lot more relaxed and calm. I will even see that someone is calling me and not answer and then text them back saying “sorry I missed your call, what’s up?” I know that this is weird, but I also know that I am not the only one who does this. I think that the computer allows people to change their personalities even more. Facebook, myspace, eharmany, and whatever else there is out there let’s you create an image for yourself that you wish you had. Not all people do this, but it happens often enough. I am guilty of doing this on a certain level. I have put pictures up of having a great time at a party, but in reality I was super tired at that party, I am grumpy from overworking and sad because I miss my sister who has moved to Arizona. However, people don’t see that in my pictures. All they see is me dancing and smiling and thus they think that I’m having a great time and life is good. Cybercommunication can be misleading and I think it’s important to not take things to heart right away. Being aware can really change the way you interpret things.
Just to briefly touch on the humans in the space ship. I thought that they were incredible funny and I hope that we are not actually like that in 700 years. Everyone was overweight, obviously because no one ever got out of their chair and spent their entire time in front of the screen. They communicated with each other through their screens, even when they were right next to each other. It is possible that in the future we will lose the potential for face to face interaction because of cybercommunication. New technologies will take away from that type of communication. We see it today but on a much lesser level. I will give an example of this further on. In addition to becoming an obese society we will also lose much of our abilities to cope with life. The ways in which we deal with stress, love, heartache, sadness, will change. I am reminded of a movie that I recently watched called Surrogates with Bruce Willis, were their real human bodies don’t actually do anything but their surrogates live their life for them. The humans stay in their rooms the entire time connected to their surrogates through a machine. A character in the movie would not leave her room because she had lost a son and could not handle the stress of having to deal with his loss and the separation it had caused between her husband. I imagine that cybercommunication has the potential of taking the role of avoidance. We can use technology to avoid certain things in our lives. Things that hurt us, things that we want to ignore, and things that we would like to see changed. I think that cybercommunication allows us to change our realities in any way we like and to appear different then we truly are. If used the wrong way it can hurt instead of help mankind.
I fear that like Postman says in our textbook there is not a decade that goes by when new inventions aren’t made. We are making great strides in the areas of technology and communication and it is always evolving and changing. I don’t know if any of you are familiar with the new iphone4 that just came out. It has the ability to video call someone, so much like Wall-E, how people can talk with each other and see each other on the screen at the same time. The new iphone4 has this same ability. I see this as a slight glimpse as what is to come in the future. Bacon said that science and invention are to improve the human condition. But after reading this blog you can see how this is not exactly so.
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