Technology Into the Future

There is no doubt technology plays a bigger and bigger role in my life with each passing year. Growing up, technology was a nearly nonexistent part of my childhood. My family had television, but no cable, and my summers were filled with playing outside while I usually read and went to bed early during the school year. In middle school, however, I started getting into surfing the internet, my family finally got cable, and I got my first cell phone. Things took off fast from there, and the coming years brought a lot of change for my family. We went from basic cable to premium packages, bought laptops and a new flat screen television, and I upgraded to a smart phone with unlimited data. Going from virtually zero technology my first twelve years or so of life to finding myself dependent on the information and entertainment it provides in just six years is a frightening testament to the appeal technology has.

Knowing this, it isn't hard to imagine the level of dependency Shteyngart's society in Super Sad True Love Story has reached. Giving up real talk ("verballing") for interaction via their apparats is the social norm much like foregoing calling or face to face interaction for texting is common today. Shteyngart's extrapolation of today's technological advances to a future society is very reasonable. People find comfort in technology and view as a way to ease the tensions of actual social interaction. This is true in his novel as it is true today. One of the scariest parts of the novel, however, is how the government exploits this technological dependency and uses it for surveillance purposes. Just reading through some of the articles listed that touch on surveillance and spying makes you wonder just how close to Shteyngart's society we are. Email is no longer private; Google has claimed any email sent to Gmail as their property, and the NSA issue might as well have come straight from the book. While we are still a ways away from our government detaining and interrogating us for staying off the social network grid (like the fat man in SSTLS), just the fact that the government is recognizing our private social interactions as potentially valuable to the government's security means that a situation like the fat man's isn't inconceivable in the real world's near future.