technology without the communication

Like everyone else, I am fascinated on how technology paved the way to better, more efficient communication system we have today. Gone were the days when we would wait for weeks for aletter sent through air mail from a friend – although of course the novelty of such act is still well loved until now – for we just need to send an email and receive a reply almost instantly. Landline phones are not the only way now for real-time conversation but now we have webcams and the latest cellular phones. For a non-techie like me, technology's greatest and most-utilized contribution is improved and innovative communication – reaching out to people I care about. So what's the use of techonology if there is no one to communicate with?

I have been so bothered with this querry since watching the much-hyped suspense-thriller “I Am Legend” almost a week ago. In this movie, the protagonist, played by Will Smith, is the last person on earth. Literally. Because of a virus outbreak, most of the human population died, and the rest became vampire-like zombies. He is the only human left, and it has been three years already!

Sure, he has access to all the conveniences in life – a nice normal house with everything he needed – and the latest technology, with a whole basement laboratory with computers that seems capable of doing anything he needed for such a gargantuan goal: to find the cure. He may have all these and more, but the movie shows him going out of his mind and it is because he is alone. So alone. His only companion is his dog; he talks to the bitch (yes, the dog is a girl) but of course she cannot reply; she is not human! He talks to mannequins, but of course they do not reply; they are fake humans! He records videos of himself on his computer, but it is not like there is anything else left to happen after that, for there are no other humans left.

The setting of the movie is the near future and, for sure, advances in technology then will be greater that what we can even imagine now. But technology is not just computers and phones; that is only half of the equation. The other half of technology is us humans, we who make this technology work. Without us, what is technology for?