When The Web Almost Killed Me Analysis

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth” - Albert Camus. In many science fiction stories, technology is always prevalent in the theme. It has either helped rebuild a nation or destroyed one in a matter of seconds. Even though it has helped in some stories, it has, more often than not, destroyed mankind as we know it. However, since it is fiction, most people haven’t payed attention to the theme and have denied that it will ever happen. I, however, believe in the words of Albert Camus. Even though the theme is in fictitious pieces, it has become more prominent in society today. For one, technology is causing lives to be lost. Now, during war and battle, it is causing people to perish. In the article “Taking the Warning Signs of

It masks what is really going on in society, and causes us to lose awareness of what really matters. In the article, “How the Web Almost Killed Me,” the author states that he was “living in the web” in a world of “virtual living” where everything wasn’t as it really was. His contact with reality was being lost, and even he knew it. “I’d long treated my online life as a supplement to my real life. But then I began to realize, as my health and happiness deteriorate, that this was not a both-and kind of situation. It was either-or. Every hour I spent online was not spent in the physical world,” said Andrew Sullivan, a victim of technology’s ability to mask reality. And it isn’t only him. Many people will venture online, only to disappear “down a rabbit hole of links” and come back to reality hours later. This doesn’t seem to bad, but most people don’t even know that they are using technology that much. A study conducted in 2015 showed just that. Many young adults were found using their phones or other devices for five hours on average every day. However, the young adults “thought they picked up their phones half as much as they actually did.” This proves that they had lost contact with reality, because they had no clue how long they really used their devices. In addition, in the story “There Will Come Soft Rains,” Ray Bradbury also felt that humans had lost contact with reality in their hour of destruction. In the house of the family, a nursery would transform into a wild jungle during the time when the children would play. Animals would form, but these animals weren’t even like animals in the real world. There were “blue lions, pink antelopes,lilac panthers...and iron crickets” that would come together to form a world full of fantasy. Since the humans did not depict the animals as they actually were, it shows that they were losing contact with reality, making a dream land that