This post by mememe on Zoklet clicked with me, and I wrote a response, but then I thought I could spin it out a bit further and make a blogpost out of it.
You know its funny you say that, i've been a total net addict for way over 7/8 years now. In that time i couldn't go anywhere for more than a day without thinking how i'll get online. But lately I find the internet so shit and boring i don't really give a fuck. I'm planning on heading down the coast in a month or so and i wasn't even gonna take my laptop with me. I don't even think i'll bother using it while i'm there to be honest, not much anyway. I'm gonna be camping and i'm not even fucked about how i'll charge it up or whether there'll be any signal or anything.
I'm much the same way. I've been addicted to it for so long, and it can be so interesting. But then you look around after a while and realise that you haven't got any friends or life left, you're fat from sitting on your ass all day long staring at a screen, and actually you didn't learn that much.
Dan Simmons said it pretty well in a recent article of his, we are the first generation of people raised almost entirely by glass teats. We never need to be without the internet if we want, we never have to have down time where we're out of our minds bored with nothing to do because we have no money and network tv sucks. Those times are needed because that's when creativity happens, like writing or learning to play an instrument, or exploring some woods or whatever the fuck. You can't do that if you can constantly replace human and physical interaction in the world with fake substitutes on the internet.
I feel like I could do something or create something decent if only I could stop checking forums or twitter or youtube or playing online games for five minutes. But I can't.
You know those people who do things like leave the tv on "for company" or can't get to sleep without it on in the background? I used to think they were sad cases, but actually I realised it's happened to me. I can't really go more than about a day or so without checking out what's happening on the internet, and I find it hard as fuck to sleep once the stimulation of the computer or music or tv is turned off. And when I go round to see my family, once the obvious avenues of conversation have been exhausted, I have pretty much nothing to say to them. After a while we inevitably turn on the tv, and have some food at 6 or so, and then I go home a couple of hours later. It's like, I met them, I spent time with them didn't I? But I always feel dissatisfied as fuck, and I realise I didn't actually spend time with them. We were just watching tv in the same room.
I mean in my childhood I didn't have the internet, we got it when I was about 12, in 1998, and then it was still dial-up. Didn't get broadband at home till 2006, when I was about 19. And thinking back, the time before I had constant ability to access the net seems like such a better time in my life. Is that coincidence? I don't know.
I have pretty much the same relationship to the internet as an alcoholic does to alcohol. One drink/checking of the internet and i'm gone down the hole for the night. I'm glad i'm not a drunk or a drug addict, those things never held much appeal to me. But honestly, I wonder if my internet addiction might be worse, because how the fuck do you avoid the internet in this day and age? It's everywhere, we use it for everything. For communication, both private and professional, for job hunting or finding a cinema, for shopping, for entertainment, for news, for reading; everything! At least if you're an alcoholic you can avoid bars and tell people about your addiction when they offer you a drink. How the fuck do you avoid the internet in 2012? Or 2020? Aside from going to live in a shack in the woods, which holds no appeal for me, and I would be terrible at, being the least practical person ever.
The answer is to get a job, right? Or find something that takes up my time and gets me off the computer for a few hours a day. Well like I said, the days of handing out paper CVs to random shops in the hope they will call you back are over. And with the amount of time i've spent on the computer the last five or six years, it's the only thing i'm good at. It's the only thing I know how to do.
And I have seriously almost nothing to do without my computer. I don't really have any friends, I don't have anywhere to go beyond walking for about an hour or so round the local part of my city. I can read or listen to music for a bit, but that gets old so fast.
I don't know how i'm supposed to do it. I want to sell or throw away my computer and see what happens. I've tried unplugging it, and that doesn't work. I've tried telling myself not to use it, and that doesn't work. I've tried watching films on DVD instead of downloading them for free off torrents, and that is expensive and I can't afford to do that, plus I order my goddamn DVDs from Amazon! I've tried setting up a process that automatically shuts down the computer at midnight, but I disabled it the second night afterwards because I wanted to stay up watching a movie. And like I said, I will need it to apply for jobs online.
And I need it to write my infrequent blogs that nobody reads, because scribbling shit down in my A4 notepad has even less use than this. But honestly, something has to change.
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For Christmas – just a little more than a month ago as I write this – my family gave me a brand new, cutting edge i-Pad 2. The thing is still in its shrink-wrapped box. I mean, what’s the use of opening it? Right after Christmas, word came out that a much-more-advanced i-Pad3 was in the works, but anyone buying that cutting-edge version will be just as disappointed as I am now because – a surely as the sun rises in the east – a few months or weeks later, the i-Pad4 with SG9X or whatever will be driving the Apple-devotees over their purchase cliffs like so many white-ear-budded lemmings.
My overly mentioned-above pal Harlan Ellison had an alleged TV-criticism column in the Los Angeles Free Press from 1968 into the early 1970’s. I say “alleged TV-criticism column” because – as has been everything Harlan has ever written – the column was actually a cry of outrage at cultural trends and pretensions of the day. He gathered his early columns of TV/cultural criticism into a non-fiction book which he titled The Glass Teat. His second collection of such columns was titled – of course – The Other Glass Teat.
Born in 1934, Harlan wasn't raised on any Glass Teat – his daemons of choice were imagination-stimulating radio and motion pictures – but my generation (Wabash, ’70), while not born with the Glass Teat of television already in our mouths and brains, connected to it soon enough. By the time most of us were 7 or 8, on those Friday evenings when Dad was traveling on business, Mom would let us eat dinner on TV trays in front of Cheyenne and Rin Tin Tin.
Most of my generation was never weaned from the Glass Teat of TV, but in later years – even during college where Martindale Dorm had one lousy b&w TV in the basement, and it hauling in only 2 ½ channels – the demands of growing up, earning a living, graduate school, earning a living, marriage, earning a living, parenting, and earning a living, all combined to keep us away from our favorite and only Glass Teat of choice for days, months, or even years at a time.
Today, no one need ever to leave his or her Glass Teat behind for so much as a single moment of waking hours.
We commute to work chatting and texting on our cell phones with their increasingly busy screens that can stream TV so that our connection to this all-essential Ur-Glass-Teat not be interrupted, move to our desktop computer at work to check our Facebook page where we have hundreds of friends whom we’ve never met, haul our multiple laptops and now even more portable tablets when we need to be mobile (but still connected), and now we’ve begun getting our “books” almost solely via cheap little e-readers that have far more basic disadvantages – needing electricity, most aren’t readable in the dark, making marginal comments is difficult, older marginal comments by the book’s previous owners aren’t there – and very few of the advantages of even a modest paperback book.
Social critic Neil Postman died in 2003, but his predictions from even decades earlier of a truly technopolized society are no longer predictions; they’re our daily reality (sic). Excuse me while I leap to Wikipedia –ah, here’s the information I wanted, elapsed search time 1.9 seconds – and I quote from the least-reliable quotable source on the planet (next to the Huffington Post):
In his 1992 book Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology, Postman defines “Technopoly” as a society which believes “the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency, that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment ... and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.”
Sound familiar in any way?
Postman was one of the few educational theorists or social critics who realized how profoundly undemocratic runaway technology combined with unrestricted capitalism can be. Who was it, exactly, who voted to make all our LP vinyl record collections obsolete --- not to mention the expensive turntables and “sound systems” we’d invested in to play those records? When was the democratic referendum held in which the majority of us voted to begin our lifelong music acquisition efforts from scratch again, first for CDs, then for burnable singles from i-Tunes (or someplace where we pay nothing because the artist’s work is stolen), now to stream to and through and from all our Glass Teats?
Postman understood the need for the “creative destruction” element of capitalism, augmented as it is through dizzying technological change, but he wasn’t ashamed to call himself a Luddite. That group fought to preserve their culture and the value of their (non-industrialized) work. And yes, it’s true that the etymology of sabotage leads back to the French word sabot (wooden shoe), but the story that it was skilled textile workers in France and the Low Countries throwing their wooden shoes to gum up the works of the automated looms that had replaced them which gave us “sabotage” just doesn’t hold up under etymological scrutiny. I wish it did. Rather, it goes back to sabot as in “walking loudly” or clumsily which leads to the real source for sabotage – saboter (to bungle something, to screw it up through clumsiness).
Postman’s identification with Lord Byron as a supporter of the doomed skilled textile-worker Luddites – the followers of a mythical, Robinhood-like Ned Ludd, who did sabotage their new automated, early- industrial-age looms – is an acknowledgment that each new technology, however ill-conceived or temporary, may bring a greater reality of damage to a culture than the technology might be worth. Neil Postman realized that the headlong rush to more and faster and shinier and more omnipresent Glass Teats in our lives would have dark consequences.
“Give us the name,” thousands of American parents might shout, “of the man or woman who put texting capabilities on a cell phone and then sold these machines to our sons and daughters who’ve just received their drivers’ licenses!”
If you invent and sell a non-osmotic semi-permeable crunch-enhancer for cereal (ala Chevy Chase in “Christmas Vacation”) and it poisons and kills thousands or tens of thousands of people, largely those under 21, someone or some corporation is going to be held responsible. There’s going to be hell to pay and that payment will begin in the tens of billions of dollars to the parents of the dead kids.
But cell phones alone used by drivers of cars – much less cell phones with texting capabilities – have already killed thousands of young people (and those of all ages whom they plow into on the highways) and will, despite draconian laws and punishments being proposed in all states, kill hundreds of thousands more. Couldn’t someone designing cell phones (especially with text capabilities ) have foreseen this highway carnage as young people and stupid people, already suffering from the human race’s worst Age of Constant Attention Deficits, lose what little driving attention they were able to muster in the first place? Oh, give us a name –we’ll take the whole design committee if you give us their names –and give us a gibbet!
Postman understood that Glass Teats – all Glass Teats – are not only the drug of choice for shallow people, but they are deadly treacherous as well. Like the 1207 “friends” I’ve accepted after being on Facebook for less than two months – about 7 of whom I’d recognize in person – context-free information flowing like botulized milk from all these Glass Teats creates a “comprehension field” that’s twenty-five thousand miles wide and one-millimeter deep.
Mostly, the gorilla-glass myriad of Glass Teats in 2012 will do what the Mother of All Glass Teats did in 1955; mostly, it will distract us from more important and more human thoughts and interactions.
