If you take a walk along the decks of the USS Eckert and Mauchly, you may notice water seeping up through the chinking of our giant ship of undelivered promises and general all around purposeless entertainment formerly known as the computer industry, at least in the pre-Web 2.0 days.
It is 6:38 AM: I am sipping coffee and offering up electronic dialogue from my perch high atop the clock tower at Rearden Industries here in Philadelphia. My text musings will engage not only my brain, but will also engage the hardware of my computer, monitor and Wi-Fi connection here, and will proceed to engage servers, gateways routers, firewalls, switches and any other technical paraphernalia imaginable downstream along the message routing pathway. Even being armed with knowledge of the full complexity of sending my message across the ether I perceive my message to consume very little energy and, therefore, my hands are clean in this whole environmental versus energy debate.
Were my words of critical importance to the well being of the world, I would find justification for all the wanton, rampant severing of hydrogen atoms from carbon atoms that I am bringing to bear but, I fear that my words probably fall into that wide category of the mostly forgettable in the larger scope of reality.
Our nation spends an incredible amount of it’s financial and energy resource capital on what can only be described as electronic distraction and personal entertainment. Cell phones, Blackberry devices, PDA’s, iPods, laptops, desktops- all contributing to an exponential increase in consumer demand for electricity over the past twenty-five years.
It would be interesting to compare the proportion of consumer spending for telephone/electronic entertainment/connectivity services to gross income for the years 1969 and 2007, I think that we would be stunned by the dollars spent on such transient, volatile pastimes.
In 1969, we were probably more concerned with paying our mortgages, buying hard goods of lasting value and saving money than we are today but, in 1969 we were more engaged with one another in a realistic fashion which seems to have been gone away over time. Although we enjoy a certain degree of independence from each other, we still find it difficult to sit in quiet idleness at airport concourses without searching for a wi-fi signal or a wall plug to recharge our laptop; we can stand but a quaint few moments in our cars before we scroll though our cell phone address book looking for someone, anyone, to call during our journey. We are so afraid to be alone with our thoughts.
The greatest minds of our common era were able to plumb the profundity of intellectual creativity without email, text messages, YouTube or a MySpace account and brought forth wonderful inventions- this computer included.
Is all of the connective ’soothing’ really worth the environmental price to be paid? I personally do not think so. I’ll just repair to the park with my Moleskine and draw carefully on the paper all of my thoughts. I just can’t survive happily in this Hand Staring Age of Distraction.
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