2020. Am I the only one who shudders more violently at that number than I did at “2000?”
What a f**kin’ joke everything has turned out to be so far in this century. I’ll pick just one that’s in my craw – again – lately: communication. We’ve been back in the age of the telegraph for a while now… sorry, “teletype” (sans paper), or maybe a hybrid of the two, with emojis instead of telegraph’s morse code.
All on a telephone, a phone whose voice-transmission ability is about 10th down the line of used functions. Maybe.
I remember when cell phones became common; I got one. It was amazing to call someone from wherever I was. I had an elderly, beloved aunt in a Kansas ghost town who I would call from a ferry, or the Space Needle… she would live vicariously through me. “Aunt Deanie, I’m sitting on a dock with my feet in the ocean!” She had never seen the Pacific.
I digress. Remember that for decades, a 2-way “video screen” was the envy and hope for the future? That technology has been commercially sold for over 20 years now, but I’ve never seen it in action, firsthand. iPhones can do it, even; you don’t need a home computer. I know people who use it once in a while, but again, I’ve never seen it work. Hardly the standard means of communication today. Too personal.
Speaking of the home computer, for various reasons they’ve been trying to phase that out, haven’t they? In favor of SmartFones. I post music and videos here on FB, forgetting that most people will see a tiny image on a tiny screen, and not listen to the music as I do – with an awesome, 25-year-old computer sound system with subwoofer. Oops. It’s not the money – you can get my 12-year-old Mac Mini and said sound system for peanuts. It’s the convenience. Convenience has trumped quality, and a quality experience, once again. People carrying around a teletype machine, an old RCA TV and a purple Radio Shack transistor AM radio (remember those?) in their pockets. It’s as if FM and big column speakers in the living room never existed.
The problem with SmartFones, they’ve discovered, is that they can sell less on tiny screens. But there’s an app for that.
I digress. Whether we’re aware of it or not (and daily denial of so many things until Friday happy hour is becoming more and more essential), real interaction between people has become a joke on us. Bit us in the ass, and it’s not all technology’s fault. It just wound up hitting the right buttons, as we hit the buttons we thought were right.
No one talks on the phone anymore, much less in person. Year after year for the last… dozen years (jeez, isn’t that about the dawn of FB)? Fewer and fewer people take my calls. On important things, even emergencies… and they’d really prefer an hour’s exchange of texts on inane subjects, rather than a 90-second call to sort it out.
Sure, we say to each other electronically, “Hey, it’s been too long – let’s get together, eh?” But that rarely or never happens, because among other things we’re too busy with technology. Some people spend a half hour exchanging bulls**t with a dozen “friends” that they’ve never met, and then wonders where the time went – and a ten-minute phone call to someone they actually know will be put off until tomorrow. Maybe. And to be fair, there are people who spend time exchanging bulls**t with people they’ve never met – because it’s better than their unfortunate 21st century alternative: not communicating with anyone, by any means.
We’re being silenced, and not by what used to be the future – by the past. Social interaction is being eroded by social media… by going back in time, past the interaction-eroding dawn of television to the age of the telegraph. We even have our own codes and our own fists. Everyone’s an operator, but there are less and less of those who can compose messages with meaning.
All of this really f**king bothers me on a daily basis – and has for years – even while I indulge in some of the wastefulness. Is this post (what used to be an essay, or in my old line of work, a paid newspaper column) a waste of time? Probably.
The only one I know who wholeheartedly agrees with me is my father-in-law. He’s 75. Roger and I both have the sunglasses from “They Live” in viewing many subjects. People think he’s eccentric; they think I’m crazy. We both think that pod people actually exist; we can see them and they’re not all Trumpers. And we’ve both seen “Network.”
But I digress. If someone you care about is found dead tomorrow, what would you savor most — a dozen tweets between you from today, or the half-hour of laughing or crying with them this week over coffee that those tweets replaced?
Sure, there’s the factors of time and distance, you say. Absolutely. But don’t tell me there’s not a lot of wasted time involved in technology addictions, overall. And don’t tell me that technology hasn’t reduced some face time with nearby friends and family.
Sure, you can save the tweets and texts and sexts on your phone for infinity and beyond… but the sound of a loved one’s voice – if not the feel of their hand in yours – with any luck, that remains forever in your .
