Hi. So
here I am again. Blogging. Is there anything more quaint? Asking people to read
more than a few words? Who do I think I am!? If our current culture had a name,
it would be 140 Characters. This is of course what you are allowed in a tweet.
The fine folks at Twitter must have determined this is the absolute outer limit
of most human attention spans in the 21st Century. Facebook does have unlimited
character ability—but for no apparent reason. People routinely only read
headlines of articles before proceeding to comment, often asking questions
answered in the article or making statements contradicted in the article. But
no one seems embarrassed, they just move on to the next headline to comment on.
And as each day passes, status updates seem self- indulgent and laborious. It’s all about the
meme. Usually two sentences (or sentence fragments) with pictures!
The
dumbing down of America is complete.
But in
a stunning upset, I’m not sure if people are dumbed down by advertising or
reality TV or Sharknado 6 (at least those things didn’t seal the deal) but by
their newfound, unlimited ability to comment. We’re not being amused to death;
we’re commenting ourselves to death. Is an apparent freedom actually a noose? What’s
more, we are often not commenting on desktops or laptops anymore, but on
smartphones and tablets, so even if we did have a nuanced, thoughtful,
measured, insightful thing to say, it’s just too freaking hard on a
virtual keyboard so you might as well stick to, “Lock her up!”, “SMH”, or
“Look, pancakes!”.
Maybe
the Internet really was the worst invention ever. I know, “The Internet is only
a tool. It’s as good as bad as people make it”. True. But what if some tools
tend to bring out the best or worst in us? And what if the Net is a tool that
brings out the tool in us?
Take
an example from two minutes ago. A Facebook article was posted saying Hillary
Clinton had to leave a 9/11 ceremony due to being “overheated” but she is now
feeling better. The comments? “Feel better, Hillary”? “Man, this humidity has
been a killer”? “Boy, these two year campaigns must be so draining on these
poor folks who just want to serve”. Yeah right. A
sampling of actual comments from her fellow Americans: “I guess the guilt was
overwhelming”, “What a joke overheated??”, “Too bad she didn’t die”, “Time to
show those medical records….NOW”, “Way to make the event about her”, “From what
I hear it isn’t even hot in NYC today!”, “Well there’s one way to get out of
your patriotic duty”, “It's not even that hot!!!! If she can't handle that how
is she going to handle other public events as president?!”, “That's one way to
handle the heat and pressure. Bail on the American people. Nice example for a
presidential candidate”, and finally, “Bullcrap, and I've got some swampland
for sale real cheap....”.
And then there were a few others that weren't quite as nice. Ya know....questioning one’s leaders or would-be leaders
is healthy. Rejoicing in pure hate at every opportunity is
poisonous. It’s not sticking it to The Man--or The Woman, it’s just being a cretin.
But it’s the new normal. It’s throwing sand in the sandbox for adults. It’s
worse with politics, but it applies to everything. You can read the comments of
YouTube videos and see everyone calling each other a “dumbass”, or a “retard”
because they have differing perspectives on the artistic merits of AC/DC’s Big
Balls or Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off or Apple vs. Android. And I don’t think
they are all 13 year old boys.
Insulting everyone and everything as a knee jerk reaction is becoming as normal
as breathing. It’s an angry online mob. And with more people spending more of
their lives online, how much does this influence our thinking and attitudes
even when we’re actually offline (that 4 percent of the day). Is the Internet
and “social” media making us more anti-social? It is making us meaner?
That is meaner
porn addicts? Let’s say we decide porn is bad. Like, at minimum, not as good of
a way to pass the time compared with reading War and Peace or volunteering at a
soup kitchen. Did the Internet invent it? Of course not. But did it cause a
skyrocketing in porn consumption (and production?). I think that goes without
saying. I saw that recently Playboy gave up and said they will no longer feature nude centerfolds. But Playboy didn't have a chance operating under the old model. In the Dark Ages, if you wanted to buy the latest
edition of Playboy, Penthouse, or Hustler, you needed to WALK UP TO THE DESK
AND PLACE IT ON THE COUNTER. And there was a reasonably good chance the checkout
person was a 16 year old girl or a 76 year old grandmother. This was a
non-starter for most. I’ll stick with Rolling Stone and Sports Illustrated,
thanks. Or what about video stores? (Remember those?). Up front they had the
regular titles—say, Uncle Buck or Chariots of Fire—and in the back there
was a curtain. Behind this curtain……..the adult selection. I think most people
thought, “What kind of a loser goes behind that curtain? Without hand sanitizer?!”. Creepshow! Now your front door is
your checkout desk and curtain. No one even knows. (Unless they have
hacked into your computer of course). Four of the top 100 visited websites on planet earth are porn sites. They are….drumroll please…..XVideos, Pornhub, XHamster, and of
course everyone’s favorite BongaCams. (I’m afraid to even look). Two
of these spring from the US, one from Canada, and one from Cyprus. It’s a
global phenomenon.
Oh and
all those mean tweets and NSFW videos can be deadly. There was a recent story about
a guy who walked off the edge of a cliff and died in San Diego a few months ago
because he was glued to his smartphone instead of watching where he was going. He lived in beautiful
San Diego but he preferred the view from his screen! I just found an article
which noted that in Ontario recently distracted driving had caused 38 deaths compared
with 19 caused by DUI’s. For all of the deaths caused by drunk driving, the
evidence shows smartphones are twice as deadly. Walking and driving is now a life
risking showdown with fate.
Or
let’s talk about money. Everyone but the top 10 percent in America is poorer
than they were 30 years ago. One reason is incomes haven’t risen relative to
inflation. The other reason is costs for things like college tuition,
healthcare, and housing have skyrocketed. But what a money drain the Internet
is! 30 years ago we didn’t have a monthly Internet bill. Now many of us have
two: our home Internet and our smartphone data bill. Some might have three. Plus
there’s the cost of shiny new computer,
phone, iPad, etc. You’re not even really buying the device; you’re buying the
Internet. 24/7 access to it. Faster, better, access to it on a stunning “Retina
HD” or “Super Amoled” display with better battery life so you never have to
worry about rationing your use! An Internetless computer was a glorified
typewriter. A phone without the Internet is a $50 flip phone. It’s access
to this magical parallel universe that we pay so much of our hard earned money
for. And even if we suspect that maybe it does us more harm than good, we pay
of it anyway for fear of missing out.
And
ambivalence about the Internet doesn’t seem to be as rare as we might think.
Those “kill your television” folks might seem a little self-important and
annoying, but when someone flashes a flip phone instead of the iPhone 6 Plus or
Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, it’s not uncommon to almost feel a bit of awe and
admiration for them rather than pity and scorn. Like, “How do you like do that”? Even in the heart of the
enemy’s territory (the Facebook news feed) you see memes like “I’m glad I grew up in
a time before technology took over”. I’ve also seen a pic posted more than once
of a sign outside a bar that says something like, “No Wifi. Talk to each other.
Act like it’s 1993”. This is guaranteed lots of likes: from people who are clearly living like it’s
2016 because they’re on Facebook . Liking a status which extolls the simple,
offline quiet beauty of life in 1993!
So
let’s say because people tend to spend as much time staring at their screens
instead of talking to each other, it’s made us more disconnected from each
other while making us more connected to the Internet--and that the two are in fact mutually exclusive. The irony is that this is
driven by our desire for human connection. There’s a famous science fiction
writer named William Gibson. I read his most famous book Neuromancer which
portrays a dystopian future society dominated by virtual reality. (Also just
around the corner if the good folks in Silicon Valley have their way!). He
basically predicted the Internet in 1983—although many others did too—and it
did technically already exist. (Oh and like so many others, he failed to
predict the cell phone. Like no one
saw that coming). After reading the book I found an article he wrote about the
Internet for the New York Times in the 1990’s about his first experiences using
the Internet. He said the first thought you have is, “Are they here?”. “They”
being your old school classmates, the kids you grew up with but lost touch
with. Did the star athlete end up a millionaire or in AA? What about that girl
you had a crush on? Where is she? So he also predicted social media too. In
hindsight, it’s surprising the Internet was around so long before social media
came to dominate things. That drive to figure out what your old friends and
acquaintances are doing was probably always there. In 1974 Bob Dylan said, “All the people we used to
know they’re an illusion to me now. Some are mathematicians, some are
carpenter’s wives. I don’t know how it all got started. I don’t know what
they’re doing with their lives”. In 2016, this is as outdated as all those old
song lyrics about “waiting at home by the phone” because now we pretty much
know what they’re all doing with their lives. Friend them on Facebook and you
can at least get an idea. In fact depending on their privacy settings, you may not even need to freind them! Isnt' technology amazing?
I can recall having the exact same thought as Gibson.
I’m embarrassed to say that years ago I even joined this site Classmates.com
(which I think charged you to join!) just to see if I could find my old
classmates I had lost touch with. They still even send me occasional e-mails
begging me to come back. They are like horse and buggy salesmen after the Model
T was invented. I feel a little bad for them—but not enough to come back. After
Classmates.com came Friendster, then Myspace, then Facebook. Then Google +.
Just kidding.
So do we
have a world which has brought us closer to our acquaintances but less close to
our friends? Who has time to call when you can text? Who has time to chat with
your friends at Happy Hour when you can read status updates about dentist checkups for
the kids of someone you haven’t seen in the offline world in 21 years?
A
defender of the phone might say, “They’re addictive because they’re awesome.
Broccoli is not very addictive. Pizza is addictive. That’s because broccoli sucks and
pizza is great. But this pizza won’t
even get you fat so why don’t you STFU and enjoy the awesomeness?”. So I’m only
one guy…but here’s a general summary of my smartphone addiction: take phone out
of pocket and check the time. I was once so carefree that I didn’t even own a
watch let alone a phone! Check Facebook (posts about dogs, kids, inspirational quotes,
politics…). Check e-mail. WHY would anyone check their e-mail? They’re all spam now.
But I feel compelled to check anyway. All the damn time. I might click the Stocks app and read some of
the tech articles. But I hate Wall Street! I click on the weather app and study
any changes in the forecast since I last checked 38 minutes earlier. But I hate
the weather! Unless you’re about to go to the beach, go fishing, or go to a
baseball game, preoccupation with the weather is an unhealthy obsession. A) You
can’t control it, B) the forecast is often wrong and/or prone to changing five
times, and C) If you live in this part of the world, the weather sucks more
days out of the year than not. The only way to cope? Don’t think about it. The
Weather Channel didn’t succeed in getting me to care about the weather but my iPhone
did. I seem to hate winters more than ever and I think it’s because I keep frequenting
the weather apps on my phone and looking
at that gloomy cloud icon sometimes accompanied by the rain or snow icon just to add to the despair. I’m not sure if I even hate the weather
or the icon! I f#%%%g hate you Steve Jobs! I mean rest in peace of course…..
So maybe we’re often addicted to things that aren’t necessarily awesome after all. These targets of our addiction may just reduce us to OCD
suffering bunny rabbits more than anything else without really making us happier or better off, but sometimes we slavishly succumb to them anyway. I once watched an episode of Behind
The Music on VH1 and The Who’s tour manager was discussing Keith Moon—their drummer
who died young as a casualty to the rock and roll lifestyle. He said he would wander into bars day after day and “Keith was looking to find something that
wasn’t there”. I loved that description. I think it summarizes many types of addictions—possibly
including smartphone addictions. What’s really there on your phone
that you look at 200 times per day? 99 percent of the time….not much. But we
look the 201st time just to make sure.
And
how did we cope before? What did we do in all those spare moments of the day
(or semi-spare moments) that we now occupy with our phones? We talked to each
other probably a little more. And we definitely talked to ourselves more. Not
out loud, of course—not usually anyway--but our thoughts are a form of talking
to ourselves. You think of what you’re going to do later. You relive a funny
moment from earlier in the day. Maybe you even plan out what you want to do
with the rest of your life. Who knows? But maybe it’s those thoughts, that
little running interior monologue we have with ourselves that keeps us sane, keeps us
human. And can letting our digital devices take over that job potentially
reduce us to something less? Like a battery operated toy that used to run on
its own energy?
Does
smart technology make us smarter or dumber? If you listen to Apple and everyone
in high tech, they will always say it’s going to make us so much smarter, cooler, hipper, thinner, sexier, and richer. Are
we to believe that as smart as Aristotle, Shakespeare, or Einstein might have
been, they would have been that much
smarter if they had an iPhone in their pocket? with full Wikipedia access? Or how much better could Edwin Moses have been at Track and Field if he had a FitBit? It wouldn’t surprise me if
Einstein thought of the Theory of Relativity while walking home one day. Maybe
getting the paper. Maybe waiting in line for stamps. Maybe he never comes up
with it today because in that once in a lifetime moment where inspiration otherwise would have struck--that quiet moment of otherwise blank space and silence-- he would be checking out a
picture of a healthy but delicious kale salad that a girl who turned him down in
high school for being too geeky just posted on Pinterest.
If
technology makes us dumber, it’s because it distracts us and starts doing a
little too much work for us. It didn’t just start a few years ago, though.
Before radio and TV were invented, how did people entertain themselves? They
read books. Books are more likely to make you smarter than watching Wet Hot
American Summer on Netflix. (Speaking as someone who watched Wet Hot
American Summer on Netflix). Before the Billboard charts measured songs and
albums by records sold, they measured them by sheet music sold. Technology was
once so dumb, the average person wasn’t able to play back music at home on a
turntable, let alone download it from their pocket everywhere they go 24/7. So if
you liked music you had only one choice at home….learn an instrument and get
the sheet music to that great song you heard in concert. Playing music takes
more brainpower than listening to it, obviously. Smart people, dumb technology!
Plain old newspaper articles used to feature references to Greek philosophers
and literary giants, now most headline writers struggle to get “your” and “you’re”
right. And let’s not even tak about “a” vs. “an”.
Maybe a part of me actually misses the days before the Internet even though it wasn’t like there
were no problems. But maybe a world in which we were required by technological limitations
to entertain each other and entertain ourselves more….maybe that was actually a
better world. And has it made work more efficient? A couple different times
this summer, airlines had a massive debacle which messed up travelers's flights because
their computer systems went down. You know what was great about the typewriter? If one typewriter broke it didn’t cause 5,000 other
typewriters to break. If you spilled coffee on a notepad, it had no bearing whatsoever on
all the other notepads around. Not so computers. At my job I showed up
just as we were fully converting to electronic cases and moving away from a
kind of hybrid system that used both the computer and paper case files. The
average caseloads then were…..about the same. The quality stats were……about the
same.
Modern
technology. It’s a miracle.
And the growing income disparity.....are we sure that's not the Internet too? The Internet makes it easier to outsource to China and Mexico and run procurement and monitor parts production from a computer screen--and there goes American manufacturing. It makes it easier to sell everything from an online warehouse rather than employ people in actual stores--hello Amazon, goodbye retail jobs. Middle class/working class jobs gone in the Rust Belt gone, high paying jobs in Silicon Valley gained....
Technology sucks.
Now if
you will excuse me, I will go back to fighting the urge to pre-order the iPhone
7 Plus. A dual lense camera! A “cinema quality” display! Even better battery life? No freaking way! No
headphone jack but $159 wireless
AirPods. That's what we call progress! YES.
I have
to calm down.
