Title: The Circle
Author: Dave Eggers
Genres: Dystopian
Destinations: Silicon Valley, California, The World in the Years to Come
I have been wanting to write a review / comment piece about this book for awhile. I read this book a couple months back and it really resonated with me. But now I work at a tech company and some of intricacies have been striking a lot more chords.
While many would say that Dave Eggers's The Circle is an extreme look at what technology and social media will do with our society, I believe that it is a warning as to how ridiculous we, as a society, have become. Some of the events described in the novel will probably never happen; politicians starting to wear cameras 24/7 to promote transparency and the fact that they have nothing to hide. We are, however, creating a world that will become just as ridiculous. We are living in a world where "if you didn't share a picture, it never happened". It's sad because I too have fallen into the trap of must-share, must-like and must-comment in order to feel validated and recognized by my peers.
Privacy and the increasing lack of it is the at the center of Eggers's predictive novel. Privacy used to be something so cherished. What has happened to the times when our deepest emotions were written in a 7x7 fuzzy pink notebook with a plastic lock that we hoped kept our siblings at bay. (Come on, those things never worked.) Those days are gone and now most of us will use Twitter and Facebook status updates as outlets in the hopes that some follower will notice and offer a virtual shoulder to cry on. I do, however, believe that social media and the Internet have provided an amazing place for lonely & misunderstood individuals to find friends and more importantly find happiness. But we are moving to an age where face to face interactions are becoming a thing of the past. This, is what the Circle is trying to warn us against. We shouldn't care how many "zings" (likes / comments at The Circle) we get, we need to care about how many smiles we can give, create and receive out in the real world.
With that being said, I have been a proponent of using books to escape the real world. However, books are not real people that you are avoiding in real life, they do not have quotes you can like on the spot. They are temporary reliefs from our day to day stresses, not an omnipresent world that you can escape to from a phone, tablet and computer (yes I know ebooks, but I hate those things so I pretend they don't exist). Books do not train us to become emotionally dependent on status updates and 160 character posts through fiber cords at the bottom of an ocean. Are there extreme cases on both ends, yes, but as a society we have not all become obsessed with dragons and awkward teenagers. We are obsessed with having our Facebook pages a click distance away.
The Circle is a great book that uses some extremes to warn us of the monster we are creating. Read it and form an opinion for yourself!
(A great book to read as a follow up to this is Ready Player One, it could possibly be the world Dave predicted)
