My phone is dying. I've just bought phones for everyone else in my family, so I'm trying to hold out for my own upgrade. The battery in my phone has about enough life left in it to get me from home to work most days, but I have to plug it in once I get there. If I use it at all during the day, I have to make sure I charge it before it I leave. I have a daily reminder to this effect to avoid those days when I'm ready to commute home and discover I have 12% battery left. Some days, for whatever reason, I don't see the reminder. I am on the train, reading emails or my book with music playing and then suddenly... nothing. When this happens I find myself staring at the blackness of the screen in a state of conditioned expectancy for a bit longer than I should be. I may forget or not bother to take the earbuds out of my ears. Eventually, I look up and am faced with having to deal with the reality immediately in front of me. If I weren't sitting on my ass within the confines of a train leaving this segment of my day in the hands of the transportation authority, I don't know what I'd do, but commuting is challenging enough.
When I look up, I realize that nearly everyone else has their eyes down in the direction of their laps. Their batteries live. It's comforting to think that in that moment I'm invisible, alone in a realm so removed from connectedness. This unconnected realm-- there needs to be a word for it. Meanwhile my fellow commuters are out there in connected reality, lost in their books, or their music or wandering the web. It gives one pause to contemplate it. What are they all doing? What fascinates them? Some of them are using the down time to edify themselves, or "crossing stuff off the list" and "gettin' 'er done." Most are no doubt frittering their time on a diversion. Some are engaging with family, friends, colleagues on social media. Some are trying to improve their lives, or fix the country, or save the planet.
Some-- you can imagine based on what could be interpreted as furtive glances about them between laser focused gazes back on their screens-- are getting into trouble. Looking for satisfaction, looking for love, looking for fights. Some are using the downtime to poke around the edges and dark spots, stimulating themselves with forbidden sensations. This used to be impossible to do by yourself on a train underground.
The other day, my phone died in the middle of a search. Believe it or not I was looking for a slur for British people to use in a joke I was writing in an email to my brother in the context of discussing the third bad middle brow British movie I'd seen in a month. I had found a dictionary of pejoratives by ethnicity among the hits of my search, and on clicking on it, had just gotten a warning about the danger of the site I was going to when the screen suddenly went dark and turned my phone into an inert black mirror reflecting my quizzical face back at me. My first thought was that I had breached some forbidden line and been busted and my rights to the web had been rescinded. Served me right when I thought about what I was trying to do. And then when I came back to my senses, I thought what if I had a heart attack at that moment and died, and the next person to access my phone were my wife or daughter. What would they make of the fact that the last thing I was doing when I died was searching for ethnic slurs? And why do I not already know a good bad word for British people?
I don’t know if it’s any consolation or if it mitigates things, but everyone using computers these days -- including me-- is a human, i.e., basically an ape. The internet is horrible in terms of what it does do but it’s also amazing in terms of what it can do, so putting this powerful instrument in the hands of apes is going to result in weird search histories for everyone. It’s frickin' bizarre when you get down to it. Every ape is almost guaranteed to have shit on them in their search histories that other apes could take out of context and misconstrue right along with and next to the stuff that they could nail perfectly and perfectly construe. It’s not just a case of “Nobody’s perfect ^_^” It’s more like “Everybody is frickin' fucked up! < 8 0 “ Yes modern society contributes to that but I also think it’s part of the ape condition. Not that anyone’s going to excuse anyone else on that basis—nor should they necessarily-- but I like to remember it from time to time.
No comments:
Post a Comment