“Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.” Stephen Hawking
A couple of nights ago, I got home from work and did what I have always done, in terms of my rhyming routine. I can spare you the details of how I end up sitting at my desk, computer flipped open, phone plugged in and Alexa, waiting for its everyday music command.
I waited for the screen to load with what it always loads when I get the motor running. Instead of photographs and teasing text, I got the dreaded message of not being connected to the internet. How could this be? I did what I always do. Thank God, there was a human voice, available at my gentle command. I asked “ Alexa” to “Shuffle my Pandora stations,” an order coldly delivered, whenever I feel like being serenaded by the music that settles my heart and mind.
When IT told me that there was a problem with my internet connection and I needed to disconnect the router for ten seconds and then plug it back in, I got concerned instantly. This meant, until the technological disaster was corrected, I’d be living in total, electronic darkness, the ultimate void.
For those of you on the edge of your seats, I am obviously completely healed from this devastating dilemma, or I wouldn’t be writing this, nor would I be exhibiting a calm that elicits these thoughts to share.
On that evening, worthy of a Hitchcockian, emotional collapse, surrounded by the vultures of the void, I knew this had to become a story to share. It’s funny, life’s highs and lows make for good storytelling, but the vast real estate, unattractively squatting in the middle is of no particular interest at all.
Sitting there, in the midst of electronic nothingness, my mind flipped around, looking right at me and wondering what the hell we were going to do? How did I get here?
I started thinking about all the inventions of communication I have been introduced to over my life. Sometimes, I forget all I do is tell stories. I am not an information resource, accuracy is inconsequential for my purposes. So, I don’t care exactly when shit happened, because that is not the story.
This first invention that took root in my childhood is television. My father used to sit around on Sunday afternoons, in an overstuffed chair and listen to the Metropolitan Opera on national radio. I believe it was sponsored by an oil company, when they were the future for us all. Radio was the first electronic drug that captivated society. Morse code and the telegraph were before me, or I’d be writing from the other side. It was Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show that exploded my world.
In the Seventies and Eighties, I worked in the broadcast advertising world and the three TV networks owned our eyeballs back then. People scheduled their lives around the airing of shows like Bonanza and Johnny Carson. It was unthinkable not to have a television in your home. During this time, the phone was still connected by a weaved wire to a little, black box, with its alphabet, rotary dial.
Now, here’s where we fall into the quicksand of precision memory. I know, when I drove from NYC to Santa Fe, NM in ’87, I was listening to cassettes on a ghetto blaster and had neither wireless phone or computer. At least, I am certain of that. Music spun around the 78 rpm and then the 45 rpm, with a much bigger hole in the center. Finally, it was the 33 1/3 rpm, with its psychedelic covers that gave flight to our youthful empowerment, visions of flowers and smoke dreams. The bulky eight track was next up, following closely by the cassettes I was listening to on my voyage west. The CD slipped in and the nascent computers made sure to accommodate them.
Honest to God, I am not sure when I got my first computer, but it certainly wasn’t until I located to the high desert country of NM. I got a purple, plastic MacIntosh around 2000. I was working for a very eccentric guy, who developed a breast shaped, silicone baby bottle, I swear. I don’t remember if I had one before then. I realized the purpose of this story is not about the precise chronology, rather the personal experience of the technological revolution and how it took me over, while I wasn’t paying attention.
The timing of my first cellphone is also a mystery. I was not one of those guys, who needed to be first. I never thought of having a shoe-sized phone I could awkwardly place on my ear, to speak with three other people that had one of those contraptions. I do know I got a flip phone and kept it far longer than I should have. While people were emailing each other messages, I was still thrilled to have this really cool, secret agent phone.
The computer and the phone both started out as contraptions for communication, without any thought given to the limitless entertainment and informational possibilities each one would ultimately possess. It is how we “talk” to each other, even if we’re in the same damn room!
My experiential baggage is more than most of you, which provides me with a much fuller palette of personal perspective. I can’t put my finger on the moment when i became a slave to technology, but I did. Certainly, one milestone was getting rid of my television, relying on my computer for my entertainment. Remember, I grew up with three networks and worked in that industry for years. Somehow, all of that became unimportant to me, because there was this incredible alternative, a freakin’ miracle!
I was slower than many of you to embrace the lightening evolution of technological communication. My God, I had a ton of historical baggage and it all seemed so big. Now, this new world was all about shrinking its size and increasing its significance in all our lives. Keep in mind, this is only the beginning! It is redefining reality, creating its very own.
Honestly, I can’t pinpoint that moment in my life when the combination of the cellphone and the laptop kidnapped my total attention. Their temporary absence, for whatever reason, could easily wreck any semblance of equanimity for me, until they were restored and life got back to its new normal.
I’ve known I’ve had a problem for years now. Addiction is dangerously stealth, things becoming far too important, not realizing it until their abrupt disappearance, even for a few minutes. What am I supposed to do now?
My name is Larry and I am an aging techno junkie.