When people think about technology is that is a new media to show people what they are capable of, or even to show themselves that they are better than other people. In this case, the internet has made up a world where we can play, chat, show pictures, create videos, learn, earn a diploma, teach, get a job, and many things more. We can do many of these activities in a computer or we can do them in a smart classroom or even in our own home.
In this case, what authors of dystopian worlds and tech worlds try to show up the reader what we can do with technology. Our purpose with technology is that we can do many things with it, and people use it on an everyday basis. People also make fun of our internet and technology necessity with Maslow's pyramid, where internet is below the basic human needs.
Authors main job is to show people what they are living or what they think it could happen in their world. The perspective of Ernest Cline, as someone who is an 80's fan and someone who has seen how technology has changed, is to show a world where technology is our future, and that our real world is really bad. He was someone who has seen how technology has been going on and how it has impacted our everyday life.
In this case, his purpose was to create an imaginary world, a technological world where people prefer to live in an imaginary world rather than the world they live in. Their world was chaos, and the people who had power on the people and that could maintain peace on Earth died, or couldn't handle it. A similar case is happening nowadays where people depend on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or even Google. We notice the exact moment when their servers fail and we cannot handle these minutes, or hours.
There are some worlds similar to the OASIS, but we do not have the technology (yet) to show them as the author shows. We have worlds like Club Penguin, Neopets, Habbo, LoL, and some others. There we can have fun, do what we cannot, or show what we who we are in a limited space where our integrity will not be affected. This is what Ernest Cline shows, the OASIS is a world where people can do many things (but die), and keep themselves safe.
The integrity that we can keep safe from online is who we are, where we live and what we do. Or that is what we should do if we use technology in a responsible way ( what we normally do not do). The idea of Cline's world is one where they protect people's data with encryption and enough security to show just a bit of who they were, and in the case, someone needed that information ( just like the school), they could have access to it.
Cline's world seems like the perfect spot for escaping from the world they used to live. The problem is that people tried to scape what they were living, their problems as human beings. They were lack of identity as humans, but in the OASIS they showed their better self. This problem could become something harder, something bigger in a psychological way because the worst place to be is in our head when we have problems.
We are human beings and as human beings, we need to speak to other people, we need to have this physical connection with someone else. The OASIS tried to do this, and to avoid that people create some psychological problems by making enough technology and to get it to everyone else in the world, not just for people who can buy it. In our world, we hide in our computers or our cellphones, and when people have mental health issued this happens more. As someone who suffers from this problem, I can ensure that we try to show that we are someone happy, fun and someone who doesn't suffer from these problems. To live hidden makes you suffer more,and if we live in denial, more.
There are many things we can learn from books, and most of them try to show us what we are living in. We should not get to the extremes and live in a world where we live in a happy world with freedom, in a tech world or in a world where people hides to be free to do what they want. As humans, we need a balance in our life with the things that we have around, and we need to fail and to learn what we do. Personally, I think that we need to understand the advantages and disadvantages that we have with technology.
As engineers, we should understand what we are living and how everything we do can affect people. Sometimes we forget that what we do is used by people, and they are not used to handle the technology because we are not born with it, we adapt for it. We forget that people can get hurt, they can hurt someone else and that they can create something bigger than they can handle.
We can see this kind of ideas with our facebook group Inside Tec Cem, where we communicate everything that happens at school and where we get updates from it. In the last few months, we have seen many problems at school, the new buses, the charge that will happen and even a mass shooting thread. In this case, technology and social media created a safe space where we could share our ideas and what we could do. We live in a world where technology and ourselves live together and we cannot be saved by not being here, just like in the OASIS.
I consider that engineers should understand that we are still here on Earth and that we can do something else to help people, and to connect them. In this case, we should find a way to help our planet before is too late. After that, we should help people to avoid the differences between people and to really look forward to the sustainable development goals.
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