Revolution

When I was a kid we had one in our house. One television and one telephone. The television was a black and white model made by RCA. It had rabbit ears attached to the top that my Dad would adjust this way and that depending on the weather conditions and which of the four channels we happened to be watching. At the top of each antenna we had fashioned crumpled aluminum foil, back then known as Reynold’s Wrap, for additional reception. Our one telephone sat on the edge of the china cabinet in the dining room. It was a pitch black rotary phone whose one enhancement came the day my Dad sprang for a long cord that allowed us kids to have our brief conversations in the relative privacy of the stairway heading upstairs.

Almost everyone I knew had this same phone. You could always tell who the rich kids were when you would go over to their house and discover that phones came in colors other than black. The first time I saw that one of my friends actually had something called a Slimline phone in his bedroom, I discovered that wealth was indeed unevenly distributed!

I’ve been thinking about that old rotary phone a lot lately. In my lifetime we have come from the days of this ugly, heavy, corded beast to the age of the smart phone without the destruction and warfare that usually accompany such revolutions. While in my teenage years I might have averaged five minutes a day using the telephone, now the screen time usage on my Apple smart phone is an embarrassment to me. Ironically, I still only spend maybe five minutes a day actually talking on the phone. The other hours are spent inundating myself with endless streams of information, or scrolling through semi-literate ramblings of people I don’t even know, not to mention hours upon hours of hilarious puppy videos. Phone calls have been replaced with texting. The emails I am bombarded with have managed to almost render the hand written note or letter obsolete. If information is power, then I have more access to more of it than my ancestors could ever have imagined. 

So, why do humans seem dumber than ever? More accurately, why do I feel dumber?

Part of it is that ancient bugaboo that has stymied social planners for centuries—human nature. When humans are confronted with an enlightening article explaining how to create an organic flower garden, or one entitled Ten of Kim Kardashian’s most embarrassing red carpet moments,, the garden will just have to wait. When a man is given the choice between parenting hacks or free porn, well…the numbers don’t lie. 

The internet is usually dominated by the loudest, most provocative voices, not because they are more interesting or informative but rather because we have elevated them to their place of dominance because human beings are attracted by loud and provocative, not understated and calm. In the old days when newspapers were dominant in the information culture, those old editors understood that if they wanted the guy on the street to read about some unifying, uplifting story that might make life better they first had to get him to buy a paper—and that was done by the vitriolic screaming headline. However, with the internet and the smart phone, its not just a matter of good vs. bad content, its the addition of video, especially the live variety. Nothing can compete with the addictive live feeds on our smart phones. The entire world is one big train wreck and none of us knows how to look away. I wonder sometime if when Al Gore was inventing this thing he ever considered the fact that maybe the human brain was not created to hold and process all the information that his internet brings to our doorstep. Maybe its all just too much.

From where I sit in November of 2023 I see no viable way to lessen the universal dumbing down of human beings brought on by this astoundingly convenient and prosperous technology. Sure, we could all just stop using the internet. We could all throw away our cell phones and go back to the land line. We could give up the GPS for that old road map that nobody knew how to fold. We could give up our instant expert YouTube status in exchange for dusting off our old library cards. 

Who am I kidding? There’s no way that this genie is going back in the bottle. Each of us instead will have to decide how much we are willing to allow this new Information Age to define us.