The Tyranny of the Online Life or Welcome to Pavlov's Circus

The online world as we now know it has come to have a profound impact on how we lead our lives. Marshall McLuhan certainly was presient when he proclaimed the " medium as the message" not necessarily the content. What McLuhan was getting at was that the medium would become more important than the content when it comes to influencing how we may think and act. So with its ease of use and conveniences the computer and all its digital off spring supposed slaves to our wanton lust for more information, and connectivity has us twitching and salivating like Pavlov's dogs at the mere muffled personalized ring tone inside our jacket pocket. Grasping wildly at our clothes we must obey its command and retrieve that server of a digital feast that has now become the master of our domain. Our dependence on this medium has had its defenders as well as it detractors. In his book "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains" Nicolas Carr raises a number of questions as to the impact this technology is having on culture. Mostly a critique of the consequences associated with online use his book presents an informative starting point for a debate on the future of reading and of books themselves. Carr's description of his experience with computers certainly resonated with my own history of computer usage. I used my first desk top in 1985 when the organization that I worked for at the time purchased a Sanyo MBC 555-2. It had two floppy drives and Wordstar 3.30 as its word processing program. I used it primarily for letters, developing agendas for meeting etc.. Oh yes I became infatuated with a text based game called Zork. Of course I only played it after hours and during lunch breaks. When I left the organization to pursue graduate studies I bought the system from the organization since they'd become enmeshed in the upgrading frenzy and it was no longer fast enough or have enough memory but I knew that it would come in handy for my academic work. It took me a few years to become fully immersed into the wily ways of the computer. I would write out most of my assignments in long hand-that's using a pen or pencil and writing on paper for those of you who have forgotten or never have used long hand- and my wife would transcribe my scribblings into nice readable text for professors to mark up with unreadable long hand comments usually in red pencil(that's a wooden stick hollowed out to contain a thin rod of lead with a nib at the end that makes marks when pressed down on paper some of the leads come in different colours. At the end lived a small piece rubber like material we called an eraser we used that to delete unwanted lead marks). I owe my successful completion of my Master Thesis to that Sanyo MBC 555-2 and more importantly to my wife who had to endure untold hours of deciphering my awful hand written notes and essays. So it was with some trepidation and an ultimatum from my dear wife that I plunged into the world of computer literacy. From then on it has been a whirlwind of technological improvements and costly upgrades while I fell increasingly under the spell of the online digerati. Like Carr I too sense that something has changed in my behaviour in the last few years. While it was easy for me to sit down and read a book for hours on end now I find that my concentration is of short duration. I become easily distracted often drifting off in mid conversation onto other topics before finishing the first or checking messages on my cell phone or iPad. What seems even more disturbing is that others around me are doing the same thing.  Clipped sentences with your coffee mates punctuated by text messages to your cyber space friends while downloading some songs from iTunes. Has this lead to less civility in our society is a question we need to deal with or is this just a new set of social interactions created by new technologies from which we humans continue to evolve? Have we become slaves of our own making? Perhaps a couple of re-worked quotes by Karl Marx are needed at this point. With my apologies to Marx. The web "is the opium of the masses". Users "of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your" digital chains.
 Isn't it interesting to note that drug addicts and internet surfers are both called users. So let me finish off by referencing part of the introduction to an MC5 concert in 1969 " you have to decide whether you are going to be the problem or whether you are going to be the solution".  Perhaps we need a 12 step program for those addicted to the digital world. " Hi my name's Bob and I'm a webaholic". Well, I better go check my e-mail now.

A Quick Update

This past month has been a busy one for our wandering tomes. A few made it to Peru and climbed the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. Some are on their way to South East Asia and as usual a number of them decided to stay close to home here in Calgary. Keep your eyes open and check the "Where are they now" page for their whereabouts. Let me know if you adopt one of our nomadic books as the weather is turning colder and they will need a warm place to stay for the winter.