The Death of
Conversation … Thoreau, Where are Ye?
Published in Marietta Daily Journal July 10, 2016
Which do you suppose supplies more
knowledge and understanding of your work place, your desk computer or the water
cooler? Which produces a stronger
family, a modern mom in a modern kitchen talking over the intercom to her daughter
upstairs, or the mom and daughter together, talking across the kitchen table?
You get my drift, but one more
scenario. A small family, after a week
of school and work, is sitting in a restaurant on Friday evening. Which is better, all of them reaching for
their smart phones or talking to each other?
Conversation is in a bad way. We are absolutely running from it. We’d rather text than talk. Emotional distance is the order of the day.
One
of the bedrock truths of our existence is that everything is somewhere. But is this truth really bedrock after
all? When it comes to our relationship
with technology, it seems to me we’re always elsewhere. The claim that technology is connecting us is
laughable. Technology is distancing us,
pulling us further and further apart with each passing upgrade.
I’m not speaking of technology in
general. What ill could come from being
able to measure your living room for new carpet by casting a laser beam across
the floor? What harm is there in a GPS
that talks to you in the voice of your choice, whether a true blue Southerner,
an Englishman, or Bugs Bunny? How could
I not appreciate the medical technology that surrounded me during some serious
heart surgery?
No,
I’m talking about the technology of social media and education, two areas in
which human touch is gasping for breath.
Currently neither parents nor schools are one bit concerned about the
neurological or cognitive effects of children staring daily at flashing
screens. We love babysitters, whatever
the cost.
Americans
have come to expect from their technology a continuous flow of infotainment,
failing to recognize that 24-hour-a-day news is not news, but news rehash, and
that constant entertainment doesn’t actually entertain. It numbs.
We know how children and youth view
and respond to the online world. They
view it as a way of life. They respond
to it as if – no, because – it is
their master. We haven’t mastered
technology. Technology has mastered us.
There are two extremes for
everything. Total embrace is one; total
rejection is the other. When essayist
Henry David Thoreau grew tired of the busy life of Concord, MA in 1845 (that’s
right, 1845), he took to the woods for two years. His action was extreme, but from it came the
following wondrous words.
“I went to the woods because I
wished to live deliberately … and not, when I came to die, discover that I had
not lived. I wanted to drive life into a
corner and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
Could Thoreau make a living today
practicing that kind of escape? Perhaps
not, but he still stands as an example of a courageous man who refused to let a
changing world change him. Thoreau also
wrote, “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friends, and
one for society.”
Technology is fast, but speed
doesn’t always give us time to think. It
is exciting but it also offers children illusions of joyfulness (wizards,
spells, seductive mermaids), and offers adults substitutes for intimacy (Skype
meetings are not meetings).
Technology is like money. Those who knock it have never been without
it, or have never had heart surgery.
Even so, we are unthinking if we disregard technology’s curse. Its curse is that it is putting the wrecking
ball to Thoreau’s three chairs.
Solitude
is not stillness. It’s merely an
occasion, even in a fast moving airplane, to be alone with your thoughts. Family is not family if there is little or no
family conversation. And a society is not
very social when its schools and work places rely almost entirely on screens,
forgetting that eyeball to eyeball and heart to heart can seal a deal or hoist
a relationship when gizmos can’t.
Eyeball to eyeball we’re somewhere. Gizmo to gizmo, we’re elsewhere.
Aristotle
addressed our problem over two millennia ago.
Calling it the Golden Mean, he argued that between extremes there is the
promising safe path of reason. Golden
Mean sounds nice and literary, but we could simply call it common sense.
Eyeballs?
Yes. Gizmos? Yes.
But Thoreau and Aristotle would urge us to think about where the
technological Golden Mean lies. Right
now, we don’t seem to care.
Roger
Hines
7/6/16
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