I used to think a telegram was a pretty high tech thing. There were only a couple that ever came to our house when I was growing up in Zululand, South Africa, and that was good, because usually it meant someone in the family had died in a far distant place, and then there’d be weeks of subdued grieving on the part of our parents.
They didn't talk about things like grieving. This was their way of protecting the children. |
I can see already that 2019 is going to be a year of technological learning challenges for me. Now we have holograms suddenly starting to appear in new forms, and I’ve absolutely no idea how that works.
A tiny bit about holograms
Have you ever thought what makes them different, say to a photograph? How alive they seem to be, and why? Photos are nice, but the light in them, no matter how good they are, just can’t compete with the saved light of a hologram. Photos are two dimensional, just flat pictures. The kind of light used in a hologram is not your usual mixed up rays type that lets you see photographs. Instead, it’s the straight line laser, and all those laser beams, when arranged in particular ways can form a lively 3D hologram.
This is all very complex stuff, and can be a bit boring, so I won’t go into it too much here. I’m more interested in the human aspect of life. So you can just imagine how aghast I was to find out holograms are a whole new social scene now., Combine them with artificial intelligence, like the robotic AI Alexa voice, and you have such a winning combination that folks actually prefer them to the “real thing” - humans!
It’s nice when you can do just what you want, never argue about anything, just focus on your own interests, talk to someone else only if you want to, and know once you’ve paid the initial ‘dowry’ your chosen partner will ensure you never feel lonely again.
In Japan 70% of young, unmarried males, and 60% of young unmarried females are not involved in a relationship. This does not bode well for the birth rate there, or for the retirees, but that’s another story too. I have grave suspicions this will become the case in several other countries too. Something the psychiatrists call fear of intimacy syndrome has morphed into what I call only room for me in this world attitude. Admittedly that doesn’t work too well with human relationships.
Suddenly weddings have made another gigantic leap in technology. There are restless stirrings of pseudo romance in the hearts of would-be romantics, who love the idea of marriage, but only in a limited way. You can’t get better than to draw the lines of a relationship so they’re all about you! It’s a dream come true. One of the first people to try this out is a young man who has married a hologram of his choice.
Japan isn’t the only country dealing with this lack of interest in the opposite sex. It’s another deep subject, but USA, Denmark and Singapore are also starting to be concerned as their birth rates plummet, and their seniors get older. Women prefer to focus on their own lives and their careers. They find men “just can’t be bothered” with personal relationships. The men often find women to be “scary”.
In a study about emotion-related communication, the subjects were able to decode different emotions just through touch. This seems to underscore what’s missing when you decide to set up your forever relationship with a hologram.
I like my money holograms, but the jury is out on the wisdom of a hologram relationship!
I’d love to hear your views on this.