Pop 89: Hold hands not devices
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
Last night I dreamt I was lost in Grasslands National Park. And I didn’t have cell reception! Big deal, I said upon waking. I lived forty-six years of my life without a cell phone and did just fine. Eventually, my radio producer made me carry a phone to do “live hits” from the road. But by then, I’d known a life devoid of a pocket computer and had no compulsion to text, search, or take snapshots every five minutes.
Pocket computer sounds like a handy, friendly, helpful device, doesn’t it? Think again. In “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” Shoshana Zuboff outlines how cell phones were invented as consumer tracking devices that could harvest every piece of information about our private lives then bundle and sell it to corporations who would shower us with advice, coupons, directions, offers. They even curate our news, gearing it toward our search history and according to what’s happening in the world.
The cell phone/tech industry is in the business of “reality” matching. Whatever world you live in, the tech world will bolster it. The cell phone is the computer of the 21st century, and its power rests in its ubiquitousness. As Zuboff says, quoting tech gurus, “the most profound technologies are those that disappear.” Right into your pocket.
So, ok, you love your phone and can’t understand why people like me are being so mean to it; it’s helping make your life easier, after all. Yes, your phone knows where you go, what you buy, who you talk to, what you eat, what recipes, news events and video clips you prefer to access so that it can serve you before you even ask. I mean, really, name a person with that much loyalty and servitude? Remember how we were told the microwave oven would free us up to have more time to spend with our loved ones? Most technology is sold to us with this promise. But if you have a hard time connecting with your loved ones to begin with, technology will not make intimacy any easier.
Maybe phones do bug you - but not your phone, just other people’s phones. What irritates you is bad phone etiquette. Like when you’re out to dinner, and your dining partner’s phone rings, and they actually answer it and carry on a conversation. Since when did an absent person take precedence over the one right in front of you? Or how about that family at the table next to you - cut off from each other, each buried in their separate cell phone world? Or what about your brother’s kids; how come he lets them text their friends at the supper table? I thought phones were supposed to bring us together, free us up to spend more time with those we love. Seems we spend less and less time with real people and more and more time isolated, hunched over our preferred “reality.”
Our cell phones are a form of surveillance designed by tech companies Zuboff refers to as “Big Other.” “Big Other” uses an intimate, I-really-care-about-you-getting-the-help-you-need Alexa voice as it manages to exploit the need it created. It reduces human experience into measurable chunks. It then “poaches our behaviour for surplus and leaves behind all meaning lodged in our bodies, our brains, and our beating hearts, not unlike the monstrous slaughter of elephants for ivory.” We aren’t the product; the product is the surplus, the information “that’s been ripped from our phones and our lives.” We are just “the abandoned carcass.”
Last night I was out walking. I rarely walk with my phone, but I admit I was listening to a podcast that evening. Don Brown rolled up alongside me in his truck, and I unplugged my earbuds. “I wish you’d write something about people always on their own cell phones,” he said. I’ve been meaning to ever since I saw a man standing in a field looking down at his hand, and I just assumed he was looking at his phone. But he was checking the state of his crop, looking at a grain in his palm. He was looking into his hand, not his hand-held device. My mistake deeply disturbed me. When the posture of a person looking into his hand becomes iconography for cell phone use, then Big Other has won.
And then, I remembered a dream I had and wrote about in an essay called “Hearth Day,” that got me first prize in Prairie Fire’s nonfiction contest. Here’s part of it:
“I dreamt I was back in the city. It was rush hour, and everyone was headed home. The subway doors opened, and humanity tumbled out, their faces bent over their hands, staring into their devices. Or so I assumed. Until merging with them, I could see what had them in its grip. They were staring, alright. Intent and transfixed. But they held nothing; they were staring at their own hands.
What is this wonder, this glorious tool? Their faces said this map that holds the memory of everything I ever reached for and all I ever lost, the stigmata of the past, the future’s spontaneous grasp. For the first time, they understood their own powers. Oh, the things I will build, they wept.
With this hand, I will plant and harvest and peel. I will chop and cook and serve a meal.
I will make a musical instrument, and then I will play it. I’ll scale mountains, juggle oranges, drop droplets, pick up sticks. I’ll shuffle cards. I’ll practice card tricks. Thread needles, attach a button, open a latch. Close a window, stitch a wound, sew a patch.”
Five years ago, we sold a t-shirt at the local museum that read: “There is no wifi in Grasslands, but I promise you’ll find a better connection.” Once those are sold out, we won’t be ordering any more of those, I thought. Sure enough, we had wifi by the end of the year.