In her latest piece for Boundless, Lauren Winner goes after, of all things, the cellphone.
I think it quite worrying that we have become a nation — and in my microcosm, a campus — full of cell phone users. If I were queen for day, I would ban the things, and I encourage you to think about shoving yours in a drawer, to be brought out only for emergency use during a hypothetical car breakdown on a cross-country drive.
What’s next, the iPod? Well, yes.
In what could be considered a companion piece to Winner’s, a Godspy piece by Christine Rosen, The Age of Egocasting, expresses similiar concerns about a nation of people wearing “white headphone[s]” nodding “at each other in solidarity, like members of a tribe or a secret society.”
Winner and Rosen are both troubled at how cell phones and iPods foster what Rosen calls “absent presence”: “paying little or no attention to the world immediately around them.” Winner writes about how all this emphasis on “connectivity” can yank “us out of the small corner of the world we happen to inhabit today.”
Winner and Rosen’s pieces reminded me of a satirical piece I wrote a few years ago. The piece, set in 2073, described a 250,000-member megachurch, the “National Capital Assembly and Happiness Center,” which had outgrown its Dodger Stadium-sized “worship space.” Instead of building bigger facilities, members were “assigned one Sunday each month in which they will be able to attend services in person.” On the other three Sundays, “the combination of the UltraNet and Extremely High Definition Video will allow members to be present in every sense but the physical.”
The joke wound up being on me: Japanese engineers have already tested a system with sixteen times the resolution today’s HDTV. At the demonstration of the technology
the visual effect of the footage travelling down a road was so realistic, some viewers even experienced nausea as a side effect of seeing ultra realistic motion, but not physically feeling the motion.
This was in 2003. “Present in every sense but the physical” will soon, along with Rosen’s “absent presence,” form the two sides of a coin that Winner might (rightly) call “gnostcism.” Living as if “our minds, our attention and our conversations should be focused on a person in another city, instead of on the person right next to us,” and regarding our physical surroundings as superfluous or irrelevant, is gnostic to the core. Instead of seeing ourselves as embodied creatures and living as if matter matters, we regard people as the sum of their thoughts and intentions. Forgive me one last technological reference: who we are is regarded as software and where we are, starting with our bodies, are merely hardware. The latter can be discarded or, increasingly, “upgraded” with no moral and spiritual repercusions because it’s ultimately irrelevant to who we are.
To put it succintly: Christianity begs to differ. For Christians, matter matters. Our physical surroundings, not to mention our bodies, figure prominently in the story of our redemption. Thus, anything that tempts us to disregard on denigrate them must be viewed with, at a minimum, healthy suspicion, especially if that temptation comes in all sorts of fun colors.
I’d like to hear more about why you come to the conclusion that a Christian perspective requires an emphasis on the physical as opposed to an emphasis on the intellectual?
Perhaps I didn’t quite get your point. I don’t follow how the iPod weaves in. This device is not a digital alternative to physical interaction, but rather a way to ignore human interaction in any form, to escape.
Comment by Josiah Ritchie — February 2, 2006 @ 3:03 pm |
Until Roberto weighs in, let me try to answer that. I don’t think it’s an emphasis on the physical at the expense of the intellectual, so much as a right balance and integration of both. To favor one over the other is to ignore that “the word was made flesh.” The unity is upset.
I’m not sure what the difference is between a “digital alternative and “a way to ignore human interaction . . .to escape.” Both are means of avoiding interaction with the world around you. Both shut out others when they see you with your ear connected to other signals. And now, with the video iPod, your eyes as well. In the world but not connected to the world.
Comment by Alex — February 2, 2006 @ 10:20 pm |
I also have a severe distaste for the rude use of cell phones. There are certainly times when physical presence should be acknowledged and there is a volume level that is invasive. Just look for the nearest Nextel Chirp and you’ll understand.
However; having mulled over this last evening, I submit that the biblical issue is about the personal relationship, not the technology. Technology doesn’t change the basics of relationships, only shifts the platform upon which they exist.
Cell phones have allowed people to build a small town inside a metropolis. They can run into a friend anywhere and shoot the breeze even though the chance that their physical paths will cross is slim. I think this is what has really spawned the burst of cell phone growth. Everybody loves to live in a small-town community, just some get bored with the lack of activities. Now they have both.
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