We live in an age where one can engage in frivolous pursuits that, while immediately gratifying, offer little fuel for the imagination or the soul. What I am talking about is our society's increasing dependence on things which are not genuine. A person can pass an entire day without doing anything real. I could wake up and eat some sort of low fat cereal bar - composed of chemicals (it would of course be low fat and high in omega 3 acids and every time I bought one an international conglomerate would give 35 cents to educating inner city youth in Bangladesh....so they could read the instructions on the sewing machine when they got a job at the local Nike factory making a pittance so we can buy new shoes). I could then log on to my computer and interact superficially in any number of ways with any number of people... I could poke my long-lost sandbox playmate on Facebook... I could instantly message my brother... I could chat with strangers from around the world... I could email/text/blog/post/download/post from sun up to sun down and not even leave my desk... not even go for a walk. I would not have to experience new things or compromise who I was because I would not be interacting in a real way with any living thing.
And for what? Would any of that communication be real? What would I learn from it?
What would I gain? The other day, I decided to turn off my computer and read a book.
And it seemed like an unusual thing to do... I decided to turn off my cell phone for an afternoon last week and everyone wondered where I had gone. I decided NOT to check my email for a day, and it seemed as though I was completely disconnected from the larger world. But was I? I went for walks. I went out for coffee with my friends... I learned music and made dinner and laughed.
Indeed, I vow to have an interesting life that is not connected to some technological device. I intend to have meaningful communication with people I care about, rather than surface chatter with a thinly spun web of "friends". Starting now. If that makes me unpopular, I don't care. If people don't understand, I don't care. I have left the building. I am not reachable right now. I am not online. I am not live. I am not hosting. I am not "at home". I am a human being with a right to a private life.
I was listening to the radio the other day and someone said that every email we write - every picture we post is saved on the central memory of the internet. This means that everything we do online is recorded for posterity, whether we like it or not. What does this mean?
The Nazis recorded everything they did for posterity with alarming detail, even though they did not have computers. They never thought that they would lose... they thought that their documents - their actions - would never see the light of day. But things did not turn out as expected, and their documents were seized, and now we know what happened. And yet, there are still those who deny.
What happens when our collective actions see the light of day? What happens when this mammoth collective online memory falls into different hands? What will we have to show for it? What happens if the power goes out and we actually have to rely on each other... actually have to interact - to compromise, to fight, and to grow?
Will we be able to handle it?
The other day I was reading a book written by a woman who survived the bombardment of Berlin. She was a journalist, and recorded her thoughts anonymously. This is what she had to say:
" We have been spoiled by technology. We can't accept doing without loud speakers and rotary presses. Handwritten placards and whispered proclamations just don't carry the same weight. Technology has devalued the impact of our own speech and writing. In the old days one man's call to arms was enough to set off an uprising -- a few hand-printed leaflets, ninety-five theses nailed to a church door in Wittenberg. But today we need more, we need bigger and better, wider repercussions, mass produced by machines and multiplied exponentially."
These thoughts were written over half a century ago.
I wonder: What is the power of our words now?
I am logging off.
