Pre-TV humanity

William Gibson's novel Neuromancer has stirred some of my first-year level university students to protest that they just don't know how to deal with something like this. I think they refer to the genre issues--science fiction and cyberpunk. Not to the real book, printed page medium, but as I get older, that too becomes a possibility. Today in a senior course, I watched a student read his class presentation from the screen of his iPhone.

Gibson and I are both early baby-boomers. He is all of four months and a day my senior, which means we do have a few formative experiences in common.  In an article called "Rocket Radio,' first published in Rolling Stone in June 1989, but recently republished in Distrust That Particular Flavor, Gibson writes of one of those experiences:

 "I belong to a generation of Americans who dimly recall the world prior to television.Many of us, I suspect, feel vaguely ashamed about this, as though the world before television was not quite, well, the world. The world before television equates with the world before the Net--the mass culture and the mechanisms of Information. And we are of the Net; to recall another mode of being is to admit to having once been something other than human."

I hate to disagree with my elders--I was taught to respect them, mainly by my elders. But I don't feel that way at all. Either of those ways: ashamed, or once having been other than human.

Oh, I have a smartphone, complete with a data package, so I carry my e-mail, Google maps, and the Internet with me everywhere I go these days. I don't use Twitter yet--but I suspect it's coming. Who wouldn't?

Some of my colleagues at work, apparently.

Last week I was at a meeting of just before middle-aged to middle to somewhere past middle-aged academics (I saw a motto tile once that said that the most difficult decision a person makes is when middle age ends and old age begins. I admit to late middle-aged. I'm not on Old Age pension yet--but the government recently sent me the application forms, completely unasked for. I haven't yet filled them in.). One was telling us how he uses various forms of newer technology to help him handle his large-enrollment classes. He lets the shy ones Twitter him their questions, rather than force them to raise their hands and speak in front of a large audience. But others, while not exactly admitting to electro-Ludditism, declared their ignorance of and disaffection towards such things as Twitter, Facebook, and a host of other options. Some don't even like using the classroom computer equipment, in case it reduces eye contact with their students. I asked how much eye contact I have when I have my back to the class filling the board with notes, compared to looking over the top of the monitor?

One didn't even carry a cell phone yet, let alone a smartphone. Maybe that's why he finds the technology so easy to dismiss. Even if he had one, just a straight cell phone is just not that useful or intriguing, anyway. I didn't begin to get value for my monthly bill until I got a smartphone.

All I know is that I would have been so fascinated by the equipment when I was a kid, and why if then, would I  not be so fascinated with it now? Found it useful then, why not now?

I'm not too old to be able to learn or use or appreciate this stuff. It's the kind of thing I would have nagged my parents mercilessly for when I was a kid. Like I sort of did for them to get a television, even if I could always go to my friend Elliott's to watch Walt Disney on Wednesday evening, right after supper. (You might recall Elliott from "Dressing for Church," some postings above. Or below.)

Always with my younger brother Bob in tow (though Elliott wasn't even his friend except on Wednesday evenings), I'd show up at 6:29, knock on the door and ask if Elliott wanted to come out to play. Elliott was always just getting ready to watch Walt Disney. Did we want to come in to watch with him? We always agreed: "Okay." We kept right on agreeing until some time about 1956 or so, when a huge, ungainly tv antenna sprouted on our roof, to join the aluminum forest above the family quarters at the RCAF base in Claresholm. Bigger antenna above, to pick up Calgary: smaller antenna below, to pick up Lethbridge. Until a Chinook wind took the top part off one night, and we became Lethbridge (CJLH) viewers only. But that was enough. We were not dependent on Elliott anymore. We had our fake fumed oak cabinet, GE 21-inch, black-and-white window on . . . something.

In one respect, though, variety, radio was and stayed better, at least until cable and satellite. We could pull in stations from all over North America on a good night in winter. Two respects: our radio had a record player built in. 


But I'm never going to experience, or admit to, any feelings that the me who listened to Saturday and Sunday morning story hours on the radio, who played kids' 78 rpm records to scratchy ruin, was any less human than I would claim to be or feel now.  That's got to be Gibson over-reaching for rhetorical effect. Or I hope it is.

Life pre-television and pre-Net was every bit as human as life with it.

In 1926, Tesla predicted: "When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance."


True enough. But being able to communicate across larger distances more quickly does not make us more human. Wanting to communicate across a larger representative portion of the human race, to tell our stories to a bigger audience and to hear the stories from a larger community--that is definitively  human in the first place, and has nothing to do with the technology we have--more to do with the reasons we develop new technologies, new means. Greater flexibility of means is not the same as changing ends, of redefined traits. The technology just makes it possible to achieve our eternal human ends on a larger scale.
Some of a more nostalgic outlook might even  insist that life pre-TV and pre-Net was more human, but that is a whole other argument. Better? Worse? Or just different? I'm with the last option, except on evenings now when there just is nothing worth watching (that's definitely disappointing), and I don't feel like getting behind this keyboard and reaching out (that's making some space and time just to be me in isolation. Or its laziness). At those times, I sometimes read a book. Like Distrust That Particular Flavor.