The Off Button

There are joys to having a big pipe.  Media pipe we mean, as in a broadband network connection into this remarkable Internet-tube thing.  Conceptually, we have access to almost all the World’s Wisdom, more or less at our fingertips, a short search away.  This access isn’t only at our cumbersome desktops and laptops, our portable phones have been in on the game for years, gobbling up bandwidth, pulling down more of our collective wisdom to be used for the Good of Humankind.

With all these apps at our fingertips, literally, have we managed to do anything good with it?  Not particularly.  The Information Economy, whereby we would be freed from the tyranny of the assembly line. to pursue the best and the brightest uses of our minds, has become an ironic trope, trotted out by politicians every four or five years, funded for a week, then quietly outsourced somewhere less expensive, which means more profitable for someone else.  Emphatically not profitable for the guy who used to assemble instrument panel clusters at a factory, or his family.

Yes, we’ve gained speed.  Amber Alerts can tell us, within seconds, if a child is missing.  It hasn’t solved the problem of why the child was snatched in the first place, but at least we know about it in a big hurry.  You can download entire seasons of “Gilligan’s Island” and relive the zany antics of the Professor and Gilligan attempting to bring hot water to the Howell’s hut with bamboo pipes.  Conversely, in travelling to Wikipedia, you can see that the Periodic Table of Elements now has 118 entries, up from the usual 101.

Have we become more connected as a species, knowing the hopes and aspirations of our distant neighbours, are the same hopes and aspirations as ourselves?  Based on the vicious polarization we see daily, we’ll vote for a quiet No:  That didn’t quite work out as well as it was shown in the PowerPoint.  Nor do we have our own personal helicopters to fly to work every day.  The computer controlled highways that would whisk us from city to city have been placed on the back burner, much to the chagrin of the late Norman Bel Geddes. 

We do have incessant media, clamouring for our attention, driven to new heights of hysteria by the demanding monetary maw of marketers, determined to not only pick our pockets, but to hold us at gunpoint in front of the ATM, forcing us to open a line of credit from here to Saturn to feed the Beast.  You mean you don’t have more than four thousand friends actively following your every burp and blink on Twitter?  That is sooo 2007 that you must not actually exist as a viable life form.  That phone must be at least six months old, how can you actually stay in touch?  Were there ever apps for that dinosaur?

Taken as a whole, this massive aggregation of knowledge, opinion and discourse has produced exactly what?  We’re more isolated from each other with every mindless tweet, ill-considered status update, insular voice mail, misguided link and moronic text.  Learned folks, with more sociological skills than I, have looked at social networking, this hours’ meme and declared it madness.  But they have missed the core question:  What to do about it?

There are as best we can see, several things that can be done about our exponentially increasing isolation.  The first is to find the Off button.  Even this ancient Compaq iPAQ PocketPC on my desk has an Off button that kills it stone dead.  So does the smartphone, the computer, the TV, the media player and all the rest of these great gadgets:  There is some kind of button that disrupt its’ operation.

The follow on question becomes what to do if you deliberately, with malice of forethought, turn off the technology?  Will the economic engine grind to a sudden choking halt because you are not jacked into it in a state of perpetual hysteria? 

In a few minutes, after I post this, I intend to make a nice fire in the fireplace and look out the window for an hour or two.  It’s cold here, around –23 C (-9.4 F for the American readers, or effin’ cold) but the sun is shining brightly.  Smoke from the houses are rising in gentle plumes, waggling their white fingers at the sky while well-bundled neighbours crunch through squeaky stale snow to walk the dog in the nearby park.  I might even decided to read a book.

Let me know if the economy keeps going OK?  I’ll check back in a couple of hours.  Or, maybe not until Monday.