The Devil's in the Digital

(Via The Chronicle) Cellphones, headsets, and hand-held computers may connect us to everyone and everything elsewhere, but they distance us from our immediate surroundings, writes Michael Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University. In the essay, he describes various incidents ranging from very personal observations about how hard it is to get someone's attention when they're "plugged in" (for instance to ask for directions on a college campus) to the more serious phenomenon of "celebratory riots", such as those following sports events, where participants summon their friends to the scene using cellphones.

The cellphone has changed society more than the home computer, which it has assimilated. Cellphones sound during worship, wakes, births, graduations, hearings, trials, and accreditation meetings -- interrupting life-changing spiritual or secular proceedings, with most people present showing only mild annoyance, if any. Cellphones remind us that we dwell in more than one place at most times, splitting consciousness in parks, cars, schools, restaurants, and malls. We are connected to everyone elsewhere and not necessarily to anyone in our immediate environs. Our surroundings metamorphose into elevator music -- they are our space but not our place.

We pay a price for that, not only in access fees but in feelings. The medium is not just the message any longer, but the moral too, and virtual morality is born out of mechanism rather than humanism. When parents on cellphones push toddlers in strollers, their children are introduced to the community without a focused tour guide. By the time they attend college, they will come to view technology as companionship. The Internet may promise companionship, too, but people who use cellphones in a public place generally ignore others, as if they weren't there. That indicates one's priorities and hence social values.

Posted by Tom on July 28, 2004