Future looks bleak for Woody and friends

While clearing the accumulated junk of my past out of the garage, I come across an old treasure.

Icy, my penguin soft-toy. Still so velvety to stroke, still with that gleam in her eyes - but untouched for years. My mind zaps back to the time when she'd have such adventures with her friend Cloud the koala and her husband Speedo the boy penguin.

I was reminded of the Toy Story movies - that wonderful trilogy made for my generation - not only because the main character, Andy, grew up with us, but because it perfectly embodies the differences between "then" and now.

For instance, there was no hint of a computer, or anything more electronic than an outdated camcorder in Toy Story 1 and 2, yet in the third movie the toys are searching Google Maps and video chatting with each other. Andy also unhesitatingly ditches his old toys for his shiny new cellphone.

I can see the parallels in my own life. Eight years ago, we didn't even have a computer. The internet, from my experience at school, was only a tool for checking the availability of books at the library so I could finish researching whatever project I was doing at the time.

Nowadays: huh, who even needs books? If you want to research something, just Google it. Encyclopaedias are for internet-illiterate dummies. Cool people use Wikipedia. Much faster, far easier and a good deal less sweat and blood.

The efficiency of the internet has taken over everything, imprinting the indisputable dictum of today's world in all minds: Turn your backs on the libraries for books are a useless remnant of the past. Virtual databases are the way of the future, and children will one day peer at museum displays of dusty tomes and exclaim, "Wow, is that really how they used to Google?"

But books aren't the only things that have been replaced by the internet. Old-fashioned face-to-face conversation has also been done away with. No longer do Woody and his friends have to hijack a rubbish truck to visit a next-door neighbour. No, all they have to do is hop online and bingo! Instant communication with a fellow toy.

The same goes for humans. Face-to-face conversation is no longer mandatory for social interaction. Instead, things like internet chat and online social networks (ahem, Facebook) rule the earth. People meet their "other halves" online. They find jobs online. They find out the latest gossip online.

What's even worse is that these online interactions are filtering into everyday face-to-face conversation: "Dude, you remember us on MSN last night? You were so crack-up ..."

One wonders what the reaction would be if the reply was: ``Yes, I do in fact remember that we had a conversation last night through the transmission of little black pixels that somehow translate into witty speak, and FYI the only reason I was so witty was because I had time to think about what you had just written then research a clever and perceptive reply on Google before I finally responded.''

But of course nothing of the sort happens. With "instant" chat, the average human needs 30 seconds to think up a snarky reply, 10 seconds to type it and another 20 seconds to edit it for maximum impact; and no one can afford an entire minute to reply in face-to-face conversation. So instead, we respond with grunts and snorts of affirmation, the originality of our spoken words a shadow of our apparent written wit.

With the slow but steady march of technology, the world as it was is dying. As the world wide web replaces local libraries, as Facebook replaces face-to-face interaction, as Andy's cellphone replaces Woody and his friends, one can almost hear the plaintive cries of the past, beseeching us to look back - but we never do.

Cherry Ngan, Year 13, Hillcrest High School