When I was a child, nothing beeped at you. We were left to
our own devices to figure things out. When we spelled something wrong, no
wiggly red line appeared beneath the word, nor did a green one appear should we
use improper grammar (or rather, something Microsoft Word thought to be
improper grammar). We were just supposed to know. The struggle was real.
Things were different in our day. You knew if your car door was
open because you felt a breeze and it was kind of noisy. No need for a beep. You
knew your lights were on because it was bright. You knew your seatbelt wasn’t
fastened because—hey—nobody wore a seatbelt back then.
Microwaves weren’t constantly providing annoying reminders
that they had finished the task you had assigned to them because there weren’t
any. Perhaps computers beeped back then, but I couldn’t say for sure because, like
most people of my generation, I had never seen one.
Games didn’t beep, they unfolded. Games didn’t make any
noise at all, unless you count the sound of the rolling of dice or the spinning
of a spinner. People made noise back then while playing games, it was called
conversation. Believe it or not, games were something you played with other
people. Sure, people occasionally played solitaire, but if people were caught doing it, they would explain their behavior by saying they were bored.
Boredom, for those of you who are younger and unfamiliar with the term, was a
state of mind that existed prior to deciding to get up and do something useful.
Again, to explain to those of you younger than myself, solitaire was once
played with a deck of cards rather than an electronic device. The cards did not
beep.
Boredom was once a signal that something was not right in
your world. It was a feeling of discontent with the situation you found
yourself in. It was a necessary stage in the evolution from being unproductive
to finding some activity that really absorbed your attention. I’m not sure that
boredom exists anymore, we have replaced it with anxiety. Like a child who has
dropped his nook, we are never really satisfied without a digital distraction
nearby. We are never really satisfied when in possession of a digital
distraction either, but we are to distracted to notice.
When I was young a song was not only a song but part of
something larger, which we called an album. An album had an overall tone to it,
quite often having an overarching theme. Songs were arranged in a certain way
to provide an overall feel, the way flowers are arranged in a vase or gems
mounted in a ring. The overall impression it made was far more powerful than
could be made with a single song.
An album was not merely a sack filled with songs, it was a
statement. It was an artistic expression—at least to those who knew and
practiced the art—that captured the zeitgeist of both technology and cultural
understanding. It was immersive: you put it on your turntable and then
experienced it as you gazed at the artwork and read the lyrics. It brought you
on a journey, the peak moments making you close your eyes in order to
experience it more fully.
We don’t have time to take a journey like that anymore. There
is always a beep to drag us back to the here and now, away from the timeless.
I remember visiting my grandmother who lived in a small town
and all the stores being closed on a Sunday. My father told me that’s the way
it used to be in most towns, though by the time I came along such a thing was a
rarity. My parents also never allowed me to cut the grass on a Sunday. Such
notions were derived from Christian tradition, and I can understand how, with a
decline of a strong Christian majority, such practices fell to the wayside
(though I still never cut the grass or do anything outdoors that is bothersome
to the neighbors on a Sunday). While I understand the change, I still can’t
help feeling we’ve lost something in no longer observing a day of rest and
refraining from commerce. We need to set aside time for what is important, and
slowing ourselves down and giving ourselves time to reflect is important.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and with the receding of Christian values,
a new set of values assumed cultural dominance: the idea that progress is both
inevitable and always preferable. It was not simply swapping out the sacred and
replacing it with the secular, it assumed religious overtones itself. Technological
progress was not merely an idea, it became a faith. Sure, we always seemed to
lose something in the exchange, but the promised rewards were too great to
ignore. So we set aside the way of life we used to know and stepped aboard a
train that promised to keep going further and faster. It did not disappoint, in
fact it took us further and faster than any of us could have anticipated. It
took us on such a dizzying journey we haven’t ever had a chance to question the
initial assumption that technological progress will always make us happier.
When something came along that made us stop to think—like losing a job because
of technology, or losing the ability to engage in meaningful contact with
friends and neighbors—we only had enough time to repeat the mantra that
technology is inevitable before moving on to something else.
We once lived on human time. Then we created machinery and
were to a degree forced to live on machine time. Alarm clocks woke us up, traffic
lights told us when we could proceed, and lunch whistles told us when we could
eat. Now we have created microchips and live on digital time, where everything
is broken up into fractions of seconds. We have become anxious we might miss
that new message, the next “Breaking News” story on TV, or a response to
whatever we just posted on Facebook. We have adapted, but it is not a conscious
choice we made. The excuse is—it has always been—that progress is inevitable. I
would suggest that what takes us away from feeling and experiencing life more
fully is not progress. I would also suggest that nothing is inevitable except
that which we resign ourselves to.
Technology is fashioning our behavior, we are not fashioning
it. We leap to the sound of the beep the way a dog is trained by a clapper. I’m
not suggesting this is some nefarious plot devised by a secret cabal, though I
could certainly see the danger of it being used in that way. I’m simply positing
that it is a trap that we have fallen into. It is a habit which has spread
across society, not unlike the way smoking did a century or so ago. And like
smoking, we can gradually come to see how it adversely affects our wellbeing
and discourage the practice.
Technology is a tool we created to make our lives better. We
are its owners, its masters. It exists to serve us. It has no will or drive of
its own. It is up to us to decide what we want it to be. I would suggest that
we have forgotten that truth. We have abandoned our choices in the matter and
now we have virtually everything we do being recorded digitally through cameras,
cookies, or a myriad of other digital footprints we knowingly or unknowingly
leave behind. More than most any other invention of mankind, digital technology
has the potential to both help and harm us. If we do not pay it sufficient
mind, if we are too busy checking Twitter to take control of the digital world
we daily live in, there are assuredly others who will shape that world the way
they see fit. Now if you’ll excuse me, I just heard a beep.
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