All this talk about how corporations are hooking kids
on gadgets and gimmicks
is familiar.
By William Wetherall
I had similar thoughts when my son began spending most of his time with a home video game he had to have because all his friends had one. My dad felt this way about my generation, which seemed to be watching too much TV and reading too many comics for its own good, to say nothing of rock'n'roll.
It all began with the ancestors of the shamans, medicine men, and priests. Vocationally specialized fish-hook, blow-dart, and arrow-head makers also share the blame. Then came itinerant snake-oil vendors and local shoe salesmen (where I got my introduction in the art of selling people something they don't need and may not really want) and redundant engineers peddling the latest Star Wars weapons systems.
Today the masters of "friendly persuasion" are simply a few degrees removed from the neighborhood and town. Their pitches have become "sophisticated" by behavioral psychology applied to the design, manufacture, and distribution of addictive consumer goods. The theory, knowhow, and tools needed to market the "stuff" that globally courses the veins of human vanity are so elaborate that only a handful of people understand how they really work. The rest of us, as passive participants in the slow but gradual industrial slogging and social blogging of the earth, are the meek who shall inherit its ruins.
A lot of writers in the late 1800s and early 1900s forecast the Brave New World doom of humankind with the coming of telegraphy, telephony, radio, and television. Rooms full of vacuum tubes and gear trains shrunk to pinhead nanosecond microprocessors in the span of half a century. In the meantime, Vance Packard (The Hidden Persuaders), Norbert Weiner (God and Golem), Arthur Koestler (The Ghost in the Machine), and a host of other such writers saw where it was going after it had become impossible to deny that it had begun. Today the ideological drive is toward the globalization of everything from machine-readable passport standards to local ballots.
Still, the advances in electronics, and in the materials science that has made today's virtually unbreakable wireless technology possible -- not to mention the programming that instantly gratifies HAL's appetite for more complex code and content control -- have been startling.
Just the other day a friend called my conventional cordless phone from his conventional cordless phone on the other side of the planet. Or at least I took the mere stream of electrons exciting the wafer of plastic replicating his speech in the air outside my ear for his living voice.
He reiterated his chronic fears about the quality of life in this age of cells, telecommuting, and virtual pets, fast food and junk politics. And immediately after he ended this thread of critique, just before he rang off -- or did he hang up or press off? -- he, a music lover, complained he had lost his terabyte iPod on which he carried every cacophonic symphony ever composed.
23 March 2009
