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 I have a question for you. How jacked in are you? How many devices begin as an extension of your body and end in an electrical outlet or USB cord? How many hours a day do you spend connected to the power grid, sucking down electricity as if your life depended on it? These are things that we never think about until something breaks down and you are left with a void where that gadget used to be.
You see, my cherished MP3 player finally gave up the ghost today, and it started me thinking about this stuff. It was a Creative Zen Vision: M, black with 30 gigabytes of holy listening pleasure. I know it wasn’t as fancy as some of the behemoths that kids carry around today, but it was cool for me. That machine was my boo.
The problem, though, is becoming my reaction to losing contact with that machine. It freaked me out that the familiar loading screen doesn’t pop up when I press the button. I know that I still have access to my music on my computer, and I have the capacity to play compact disks in the car and I can buy batteries for my old battered Discman. But it’s like my old buddy no longer accepts my calls. It has the capacity to mess up my week.
Some of you feel the same way about your cell phones. Personally, I can go for days at a time without using the things, but there are some people in this great wide world that can’t exist for a minute and a half without clicking out a text message or jabbering to the invisible man who lives in their Bluetooth headset.
The cell phone conversation has become the primary means of interpersonal connection in many areas of the world, and that can sometimes seem a scary thing. What if my cell phone died? What if yours died? What if the whole damned network died? A few years ago, something like that happening might have had a small impact on our lives, but things would have been ok eventually. Today I fear that if we had a worldwide cell phone outage that society might fall to its’ knees.
And that’s not even counting the internet. Imagine what the world would do if it had to spend one day without internet connectivity. Sure, many individuals don’t use the Web, and entire countries wouldn’t know a computer if it bit them on the nose, but I would dare say that what we ironically call the “civilized” world might just crack into a thousand pieces without that safety net of instant communication and information.
We’re all connected to the Great Technological Teat, and we will forevermore jones for that sweet, sweet milk. There’s no going back. I don’t mean to imply that losing my poor, poor MP3 player is turning me into some wretched Luddite, but it’s a lot like having a great puppy for a few years, and then losing it. Sure, you can learn to live without it, but you will always have a puppy-shaped hole in your life. If only that puppy could hold 5,000 songs.
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