On Saturday, Eric Patton and I were talking about the advance of technology. Eric expressed a very reasonable concern: media are evolving faster than we are, much faster. We have no idea of the long-term consequences of such immediate access to so much information.

If I were truly clever, I’d have said to Eric, “Yes! We’re already so far evolved that we’re aware, in advance, that adverse long-term consequences are a possibility, if not a likelihood!” But I wasn’t; I just listened.

Doubtless it’s nothing but my abominably conceited determination to be different, but I still think that the technological advances that were in place by 1960 changed human life far more radically than any that have  been implemented since then. The Internet is really just a fancy improvement on the telephone and the television. The convenience is amazing, but the action-at-a-distance thing was settled long before Sir Tim Berners-Lee worked out the protocols for browsing. You could even argue that HTML represents no technological advance whatsoever, that it’s only a more comprehensive use of existing technology. For a long time, remember, the Internet ran on phone lines, and on phone lines only. 

And I’m not sure that a sharp increase in the convenience of communication constitutes a disturbance of deep-seated human expectations. It’s just that, all of a sudden, everyone is on call all the time. This can be exciting, and like most exciting things it can also be stressful and tedious if overdone. Our ability to sustain excitement has not evolved, at least in any physical, genetic sense. So it’s really no different from the cultural/metabolic problem that cocaine posed to stockbrokers in the 1980s. Dreadful, but, ultimately, a test of reflection and self-control.

Finally, I’m old enough to know — to know — that much of the ADHD whatnot was in place long before Bill Gates’s Quick and Dirty Operating System was contracted out to IBM. Young ‘uns will be amazed to hear it, but complaints about “long-form reading” were rife in the 1960s. I’m still shocked to recall the exaltation with which a particularly brilliant member of my graduating class from college (1970) announced that he would never read another book in his entire life — he was done with that. One might well ask if the Internet’s true midwife wasn’t Marshall McLuhan, the pen-wielding critic who published Understanding Media in 1964.

I don’t mean any of this as a reply to Eric. Every time someone takes a call in the middle of a conversation with me (or, worse, a meal), I’m dumbfounded by the want of judgment. Can anyone who would think of answering a telephone, on a what’s-this? basis,  in the middle of an interesting conversation, be regarded as truly thoughtful? I’d say not.

Eric certainly didn’t. Although a close friend was in ordeal mode, at long distance, for much of the afternoon, Eric confined his phone calls to moments of pause and transition. Not once did he allow his iPhone to interrupt his bill of particulars against the pervasiveness of gadgetry — or my pontificating responses.

Which didn’t surprise me at all. If I were truly clever, I’d have reminded Eric that he gave up Facebook for Lent. How grounded in our unevolved humanity is that?

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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