Have we turned into a nation of receptors?

'Receptor' is a term used in bio chemistry to class a molecule that responds to an outside stimuli and then does what it is told.

A relation asked me this week,  “Where are the riots?”. I responded with, “What riots?” Exactly she said. The last two occasions in this country where we had riots, they were triggered by the death of a young man. The riots were frightening. Yet they made their point, you cannot kill someone without a good enough reason.

The death in London of a young soldier did not see riots but the outpouring of grief through giving money to ‘Help the Heroes’.

Why the difference?  Does it mean that we have at last turned into a nation of pacifists or are we now mere receptors, sitting in front of the box in the corner waiting for the next instruction?

Are people, en mass, losing the ability to be pro active in their own life. Yes nature is bigger than us, yes we are the microcosm in a macrocosm, but surely we should be pro active in our thoughts and reasoning?

Telecommunication has a lot to answer for. Until the telecommunication revolution, which must have started with the telegraph, the radio and then television and the internet/mobile phone, communication was face to face.

Remember when the old lived amongst the young. Remember when someone old could watch the young playing in the street; could sit outside their own doorway and watch life go by.

Now the telecommunication revolution has interrupted that flow. We are brought pictures and sounds from all over the world in the blink of an eye. We can communicate with people thousands of miles away and see them as we speak. But to do this we must interrupt our daily lives with a machine. We must go through a machine and so miss what is happening within our peripheral vision.

All those people conversing with other people they will probably never meet. We are told that our worlds have opened up but we cannot see what is before our eyes for our eyes are trained on a screen which relays our minds to somewhere else.

So what of our daily lives; what of those children who can no longer play in the street; they are all in their little boxes staring at screens. Is this healthy? Will those children lose the art of communication face to face?

For a long time ‘Care in the Community’ has been a key factor for bringing people out of institutions and helping them to live in the larger community, as an integral part of it. People spend their time helping these people, often with learning difficulties, to manage in the outside world, to fit in with it and hold their own in the world at large.

Yet those people who do not have learning disabilities are willingly cutting themselves off from their own neighbors as never before. People are being alienated from the people they live amongst. On the trains and buses over 50% of those under the age of 40 have a mobile phone, Kindle or some other communication device in their hands with the result that they do not see around them.

Are these people ‘receptors’ who have no original thoughts but will listen to or read whatever is relayed to them rather than think for themselves.

Why are people flocking to this type of existence? Where will it end?

Is this the reason there is so much disinterest in what was once the ability of people to have a voice, politics? Once people fought for the right to vote, now apathy, brought on by people not being pro active in their own lives but acting as mere receptors to the media, no one can be bothered to vote or care who does what.

While their minds are being fed by the media, while they have no interest other than being led to Twitter or Facebook, where everything happens!, then they are not pro active in what is happening outside their own front door. 

Yes I believe people are being turned into ‘receptors’.

They await the next instruction and follow blindly without thinking for themselves. The human mind is easily duped it seems and can be trained in many ways.

Eyes forward, brain switched off, we have you in our sights, you do not need anything else, relax, big brother is looking after you, close your curtains, switch on the box, we are here for you, outside your front door is boring, just stay here with us.

When is this country going to wake up?

And now it is official. Governments are keeping tabs on people through Facebook, Google, Skype, Yahoo in fact through nearly every server which operates on the internet.

“In one slide, the presentation identifies two types of data collection: Upstream and Prism. Upstream involves the collection of communications on "fibre cables and infrastructure as data flows past." Prism involves: "Collection directly from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple."
www.Guardian.co.uk

Those people who see the internet as the freedom they have been waiting for need to think below the surface. Facebook has denied  it, yet Barrack Obama, President of the US has admitted it. Your information on the internet is monitored, you are watched and big brother is here to stay until you get back out into the real world. 

See the Guardian website for full details and watch the scandal unfold, but George Orwell must be turning in his grave, he could have done a follow up to 1984 and called it ‘Operation Completed’, the end of the human race as we knew it.

Please await the next instruction, in the meantime look at your screens and close the curtains, we are here for you, always.