The Times We Live In and the Future We Face

The Times We Live In and the Future We Face

No one watches where they are walking anymore. People at Loyola, and around the world, step one foot after another, with their heads buried in their cell phones, oblivious to the world around them. They are either texting their significant other, rather than speaking to them face to face, or they are playing a game like angry birds or candy crush. I often hear people say that phones can connect us to people around the world or people that we may not have normally been in connection with, however is it worth the cost of being disconnected from the people and the world immediately around us. Make no mistake, I am just as guilty as anyone else, of accidentally walking into someone or accidentally ignoring someone because I am on my phone. I merely am pointing out that phones do not connect us to the world but rather they isolate us from it.

I must admit, at the onset of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, I was skeptical of the world it presented, that is a virtual one. What is remarkable about the movies the Matrix and Inception, both which take the viewer through an alternate reality, is that they are clearly fantasies. What makes Ready Player One both unique and terrifying is that it is disturbingly possible. In 2044, human beings could actually play a video game to escape from reality, they could meet people and judge them based off of their avatars, never seeing them in person and they could communicate only via internet chats, never through actual conversations.

In the novel the virtual reality replaces actual physical reality and virtual time replacing actual time. All of this begs the question what people should value. The objectives and achievements only made possible through a video game or should people value the relationships and interpersonal connections which can only occur in physical time and space. Ready Player One is brilliant as a novel because of its ability to keep the reader turning pages, facing the struggle between real life and technology in their own minds, as well as in the pages on the novel.