You asked for it, pal! What comes from recognition is attention. There’s a bit of biting the hand that feeds you to this bit of poetical complaining, but it’s not so severe or unforgivable. If the phone starts ringing off the hook, that’s an annoyance. It’s annoying; doesn’t matter why it’s coming. Fair enough. Isolation costs money, but it’s a comfort. “However, I shudder & the world shrugs in”, abetted by tape recorders, cameras, telephones. Trust me, you have no conception, from 1960-whatever, of what’s in store in another 50 years.
Last Monday: The doctor’s office,
people in the waiting room. Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Revelation,”
mainly takes place in a doctor’s office. It’s summer in the Deep South, 1950s,
there is no air conditioning of course, it’s stifling and hot in Georgia, people
sweat together, complain about the heat, and talk to strangers because when you
find yourself in the same place at the same time, suffering the same annoyances
and torments, that’s what the culture has you do. You share stories, talk about
yourself and what ailment brought you to the doctor, you share and reinforce
each other’s prejudices and culture-wide racist assumptions one conversation at
a time. I’m not being nostalgic or saying it’s ideal. O’Connor lays out a furious
and contemptuous condemnation of the widespread, shallow ignorance she saw in
her world in the South, and when she titles a story “Revelation” she means something
spiritual and revolutionary. She does this with all of her stories. But the spread
of shared ignorance she witnessed was person-to-person, and talking was the medium through which it translated.
Communities, with both their mutual support networks and reinforcing of
ignorance, are built this way, locally. People talk.
So there were ten people in the
waiting room on Monday. Thank God there was no infernal, maddening television
droning away like in too many waiting rooms these days. There was no piped-in
music. Total silence. Every person, except for me and my wife, had their heads
down, thumbing away into their cell phones. Some texting, some watching
whatever, some playing games. Dead
silence, except for some light beeping and other subdued digital noises.
The texters may have been engaged in community-building or gathering news of
life and the world, for good or bad, but it was spread tissue-thin, continent
wide or global. The gamers were building virtual experiences filled with the
complex details of astonishing virtual constructs: Virtual: Not real. But the
local community, born of language-generated interpersonal contact, was utterly
dead from everything I could see at that moment. Learning who we are, what we
love and what we condescend to, from little 3 x 5 screens. Flannery O’Connor
would have had absolutely nothing to work with.
I couldn’t help it. The weird,
flat silence put me in mind of a silent movie from the 20s. What would Buster
Keaton have done with this material? I laced my fingers together in front of my
face and starting dancing my thumbs. Eyebrows raised, big contented smile. Ah
yes, this works. “Stop that,” my wife hissed. Exaggerated surprise on my face.
Point with a momentarily free hand to the other still in front of my face,
thumb still moving, mouth the phrase, “I’m
texting.” An elbow to the ribs. Hey! I’m part of the crowd here. Can’t you
see my phone? Look how fascinating it
is! My wife rolls her eyes at me and turns away, embarrassed, checking to see
if we’re being watched (we’re not—no one has noticed), knowing that she’ll wind
up truly mortified if this escalates any further. I thumb away on my imaginary
phone, affecting a Charlie Chaplinesque, mime-like, mindless bliss. She starts
giggling, and now I can stop.
We’re so surrounded with something
that it feels normal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not extravagantly bizarre.
Henry feels assaulted by the technology of his day, which shoulders in to
record what he says so it can be fed to the waiting world’s appetite. Henry:
You have no idea what’s coming. God help you now if you’re say, Kristen
Stewart, the beautiful young actress in her 20s who slept with some guy not her
recognized and publicly condoned boyfriend. Perhaps not an upright choice, but
who cares? And utterly common and normal—and most to the point: Hers. Private. The
global techno-appetite that made her a star expects to know everything about her
in return, including the most intimate details of her sex life, so that she
felt the need to hold a press conference and apologize to the world for her
affair. I felt she was violated terribly. Some creep hacker got hold of
Jennifer Lawrence’s private nude photos stored
in her cell phone, and posted them to the Web. A merciless techno-violation.
If you’re not famous, not the target of the techno-appetite, you still simulate
the attention. You Facebook post your dinner, brag about your European
vacation, spread the news to the world of Doritos and root beer on the patio.
Thoreau saw the appetite for senseless minutia coming in the 1840s. He wrote in
Walden:
We are in great
haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and
Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate…. As if the main object
were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the
Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance
the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear
will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
Here is prescient, clear-eyed
sarcasm of the highest order.
Much of tremendous value
communicates through our exploding new global techno-nervous system, and there
will never be a going back. But it’s sometimes better to talk sensibly rather
than talk fast, and it does matter that we continue talking at all. And when we’re
face-to-face, talking, if all goes well, we also can monitor through
interpersonal etiquette the cues that ask us to back off—as much a part of
community-building as communication.
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