Hooked Into Machine

I'm not terrifically fond of popular music, but I do rather like Regina Spektor, the irreverant young songwriter/singer/pianist whose latest album, Far, has helped me get to work lately. Her stuff is witty and melodic, with odd jazzy/bluesy vocal riffs, and some amusing social commentary.

One of the songs gives this post its title, and my riff is on the currently popular propensity to stay constantly plugged in to one machine or another--and sometimes many. In many ways this phenomenon is connected to some of my remarks in The Multitasking Myth from some weeks back. It's undoubtedly also connected to the huge (and growing) number of ADHD diagnoses being thrown around, but that's for another day, and another rant.

In "Eet," Spektor touches another of my nerves with the lines,

you spent half of your life
trying to fall behind
your ears in your headphones, to drown out your mind

--yet she's far more sanguine than I, as she notes at the end of "Machine":

and you live in the future
and the future
it's here, it's bright, it's now

Of course, I live in the future of which I was terribly afraid as a child. I am, after all, part of that post-war generation that practiced "duck and cover" and (because I lived in Japan in the early fifties) air raid drills. When we lived on base we kept a packed suitcase under each bed, and when the sirens went off, we grabbed them and headed down to the basement of the concrete GI housing complex ("Green Park" it was called, rather ironically).

This probably accounts for my chronic suspicion in regard to technology in general, even though I haven't always been quite so reluctant to adopt new gadgets. My aunt bought me a little turquoise transistor radio for $5.99 in 1964, and I still have it. It was my lifeline to California during my first Texas exile; occasionally, late at night, I could get KRLA if the bounce was right; if not, KOMA, from Oklahoma City played much the same kind of music. I wasn't nearly as much of a music snob then as I am now, and the surfer rock played continuously, ever reminding me that I was really far from any ocean. I did not, however, own a set of headphones.

We also didn't watch much TV when I was growing up, even when there was one in the house. And my daughter was a year old before I bought my first color television set, all 13 inches of it, in 1980, so I could watch Cosmos and she could watch Sesame Street in color. I'm pretty sure we had a computer (a Commodore 64 first, and then an IBM clone, called a Clone) before we ever got a bigger TV. I was only peripherally aware of the possibilities offered by computers, but my first gig as a teaching assistant was in the microcomputer center at UTD, tending to early PCs and Mac SEs. Even my first teaching job at the Art Institute was using Apple 2Es to teach computer literacy.

What being around my children taught me, however, was to be selective about my technologies, because I saw how fast kids latch on to things, without questioning their real necessity or even utility. Children are little information siphons, and anything new that feeds them data (no matter what kind) is on that year's birthday or Christmas wish list. I am to this moment grateful beyond measure for the fact that cellular phones were not widely available in this country while my children were growing up.

These days I have to practically beg my students to disconnect for an hour and a half. Despite the fact that electronic devices of any sort are prohibited in the classroom, I constantly catch them sneaking peeks at their phones or even texting under the desk, oblivious to the fact that their very body language gives them away. Occasionally I'll make fun of them for trying to pull one over on me, but usually I just let it go. The real problem isn't just the lack of social graces and courtesy these little acts of rebellion demonstrate; it's the sense of quiet desperation reflected in the fact that they just can't turn the damned things off for even a few minutes.

It really is almost as though they're afraid to listen to themselves think.

Plugged relentlessly into headphones attached to their iPods or iPhones, they don't seem to be able to live without a soundtrack. Silence seems to scare the crap out of them. And why shouldn't it? They probably grew up with TVs on all the time, or tape players and radios and CDs in the car, computer games going night and day, Muzak in every store. I wonder how many members of generation X or Y have actually ever heard silence.

Even now, sitting at my desk on a Sunday afternoon in a quiet house, the furnace is going, the cars drive by, the ridiculous recorded church bells from nearly a mile away are tolling. The one truly pleasant sound is the occasional snore from one of the dogs.

This morning I was reading a book I bought yesterday, Land Arts of the American West by Chris Taylor and Bill Gilbert. It's a compendium of images and text resulting from a project involving the College of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. It's designed, according to the Introduction, to "explore the large array of human responses to a specific landscape over an extended period of time." Some of what it features are works by people I've lectured on in the past--Robert Smithson, James Turrell, Nancy Holt, Michael Heizer, Lucy Lewis's daughters--as well as landscapes of which I am particularly fond--Chaco Canyon, Wupatki, Sunset Crater, and a big chunk of Western desert. The book is stunning and inspiring, and as I was writing this essay I remembered one of the things I love best about these spaces: their silence.

Except for wind and birdsong, there is little in the way of noise out in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes it's so quiet, one can hear the sound of a bug walking across sand, or a lizard skittering across a rock. Sand itself seems, despite the hard surfaces of the grains, to absorb sound into its interstices, muffling the world around it. A thumping great wind can blow up out of nowhere and change all that, but in the end everything goes back to silence.

Yesterday I thought the battery in my iPhone was shot, and I played around with the idea of upgrading to a 3GS (mine is a first-generation 2G). I even mooned around on the Apple website lusting after a MacBook Pro (one of my students let me play with his the other night and I was smitten). In the end, though, the problem turned out to be my car charger, and the battery is working just fine now. So I get to put off the decision a bit longer--like I did with getting the phone in the first place. I've only had it for two years, and I only got it because nobody could reach me when my daughter had to have an emergency appendectomy. So I ended up with a phone not for myself, but to put my family at ease.

Now, of course, I depend on the bloody thing far too much; but it helps me keep in touch, even though I don't really use it all that frequently. I read the New York Times on it more often than I phone anyone; I've never listened to music on it; I'm not even sure how to use some of the basic apps. So no, I won't be getting an iPad any time soon.

I am, however, still daydreaming about the MacBook Pro.

Image credit: Ghengiskanhg, "Artificial Fiction Brain" via Wikimedia Commons.