Discuss: Pulling the Plug

Amen to that!

How bitter sweet that these musings are posted on-line. Indeed technolust has most of us firmly in its grips. Long ago My Love and I have chosen to abandon television as inapropriate technology fostering zomby style consumerism but so far the internet has not lost its appeal.

We live in a time when we are able to learn more about more than at any time in human history. This week I learned about the apprenticeship of bees, the making of hydrogen from microbes, and the 64 million year cycle of our solar systems exposure to cosmic rays as it rises above the shockwave of our galaxy, to name just a few.

The internet has provided the only medium that was bold enough to expose the truth about the 911 scam to make money from war and it may well be the tool that helps us come to grips with the terminal illness of our species.

Having defended the medium, I would concur with condemming the message. Whenever we replace our real community of friends and neighbors with a virtual community we loose the connection that reminds us of our interdependence.

But then it wasn’t the internet that caused that disconnect. Rather it was the automobile that allowed us to construct our virtual community by carefully selecting distant individuals to be part of it while ignoring those that live all around us.

May I respectfully suggest that while you are pulling plugs you might want to disconnect from that most pervasive and distructive appendage of all, the family car.

On A beam of Light
when not riding my bicycle)
Thomas

What can one say on an internet chat site about dumping the whole mess?  I, like Mr Pyle, have moved away from the boob tube.  However, I still watch movies, communicate by e-mail more than snail mail, get news over the computer, watch some You-Tube clips and “mock-u-mercials” and even read, write and research on the computer.  This is no substitute for personal interaction but I do consider it one degree removed from tv so, with my lack of knowledge of soaps, sitcoms, and unreality shows, I consider myself an ill-vid-erate (i.e.: non-conversent about tv programs).  I could watch tv (the set still works) and have had addictive behavior about watching it, but now that I’m 5 or 6 years removed from any serious tv watching, it has lost its seductive hold.  So life after tv looks rather nice.  And though you won’t have to pry my “cold dead fingers” from my keyboard,I’ll keep my e-mail for now, if you please, and I’ll continue to admire my Amish neighbors, and perhaps Mr. Pyle.

I moved to a small town in Washington State in 1986. I had no family nearby and only two or three acquaintances within a few miles so the television was my main companion. Except that I would fall asleep, sometimes after watching a program for the second time that hadn’t been worth watching the first time and my immediate response when the white noise woke me up was to be angry that I had so little going on in my life that I was giving my hours, ones that I would never have again, to boredom.
  I had contracted to have the creek bed on my property widened and it happened that as the backhoe came into my front yard, I was leaving for the weekend. The backhoe operator and I exchanged a few words, I waved so-long and as my car moved slowly backwards, the backhoe moving past the front of the house, hit the TV guide wires. I sat frozen in the driver’s seat as the TV antennae collapsed before my eyes. The pain that shot through my body was unexpected and shocking. Every thought of lonliness, empty nights, and other miseries, danced before my blinking eyes.
  The machine operator leaped from the backhoe, raced to my car and apologized.
“I’m so sorry…I didn’t realize the hoe was that extended. I’ll finish the work and get a couple of guys and we’ll put the antennae up as good as new.”
  I stared at him not saying a word while my heart pounded but in that moment I knew what had to be done.
“No, don’t do that. I think you’ve just done what I didn’t have the courage to do myself. Drag the antennae around behind the barn. I’m going to do without it for 30 days. If I can’t stand it will you put it back up for me?”
“You can count on…and I am truly sorry about this.”
“Don’t be. I didn’t understand why I’ve been so disappointed in the way I’ve been spending my evenings but only an addiction could hurt this much. I need to go through withdrawal.”
Like the author, I too have a televison set…no cable, no dish…just for DVDs of my own chosing. And I too sit on the bed in a hotel and watch anything that comes on the screen, but I know that it’s only for one evening.

Tari

Robert,

I still recall the fun I had discussing mutual interests we had in mt. beavers and other natural history topics by email some years back. I originally met you at a SCB conference in BC but was able to keep in touch for a bit online. I found it very enjoyable and worthwhile. Other methods could have worked to stay in touch too, but seem less likely to have been used. I also find it a necessary tool in my government life, essential it seems.  A necessary evil that has overloaded us all.

I hear you in terms of time better spent outdoors and of course these days you can take the online world with you most every where you go. I know it followed me to Brazil this summer. I don’t recommend that but the chat I had with my doctor online was very helpful when I went down ill in the middle of the Pantanal. Amazing too.

I think for now I’ll just crank the spam filter a little higher or maybe dump an email account or two and strive to better manage my online time. Lord knows it is addictive! Meanwhile I can feed another netflix dvd into my 15 year old tv.

Maybe you can drop me an email sometime, to let me know how it’s working (kidding).

Good luck!

Dale
p.s. I would likely have missed this if not for the email notice Orion sent me tonight…

I long ago gave up TV, with the exception of Bill Moyers, and devoted my watching to old comedies which I had taped years before, and then to Britcoms which I bought.

Some Britcoms; they aren’t all that great.

Long before my own worries about e-mail began, I had come to rely on them for information, since I had begun putting together a regular newsletter with which to provide important news that somehow never found its way either onto TV or into my morning paper.

There are certain things happening around the world and at home that the industry Czars (i.e.: our rulers) don’t want us to know, and I thought it was a public srvice to get that information out into the daylight.

I can only do that because I am retired; otherwise I wouldn’t have the time. So I am locked into the computing machine much as the baby is locked onto its mother’s breast.

The only thing I have to look forward to, the way things seem today, is my own death. The drawback to that is that as a non-believer, I don’t expect to be there to be happy about it.

Hello,

Please think about the paper, gasoline and human resources involved in snail mail.  Which one is enriching our lives e-mail or snail mail?  What will help our great-grandchildren?  What did we learn from our great-grandparents?  Conserve resources and share them equitably!
Peace.

Response to Jane:

You are quite right. However it is not a black-and-white issue. I have now encouraged my subscribers to accept my paper in pdf format, which is sent as an e-mail attachment. I have offered to suspend their subscription fees, which never did cover my out-of-pocket expenses anyway.

I moved my place of residence recently and it took 19 days to get my on-line hook-up. This interim allowed me to experience a contrast:

My first time back on-line conversing via e-mail, I was confronted with brash feelings of sensory shallowness and empathic emptiness.

This feeling continued for the next 5 to 6 times I went on-line, and then wore off.

I am appalled that this on-line, 2-dimensional activity is almost the first thing I do almost every morning. And sadden to realize that I become so easily adapted to a lesser aliveness, lesser organic communication and quality of being in the moment.