Unplugging from Tech Gadgetry

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In the course of a day recently, I did the following:

• While driving to work, listened to music stored on my phone and played by some miracle on my vehicle’s stereo through Bluetooth technology.
• Bought tickets to an upcoming Red Sox – Rangers game and stored the tickets on my phone. When we get to the ballpark, all I have to do is let the person at the turnstile scan my phone screen. (I’m bringing printed tickets as a backup. With my luck my phone will die just as we walk up).
• Watched video on my laptop of B.B. King playing “The Thrill is Gone” in a tribute after his death.
• Checked email and the latest Red Sox scores on the laptop while covering a board meeting.
• Came home and watched an episode of “Grace and Frankie,” a new series on Netflix, which is streamed to the television wirelessly.
• Practiced playing guitar by fumbling through songs saved on my five-year-old iPad in an app called OnSong. I won the iPad at a press association meeting in 2010. It is approaching obsolescence, but I don’t plan to replace it — unless I win a newer version.
• Continued reading a book on the sinking of the Lusitania cruise ship, which spurred the United States to finally enter World War I.

No, I did not read the book on a Kindle or another electronic device. I held a hardback copy in my hands and flipped actual pages. It was a refreshing change after an entire day spent peering at one type of electronic screen or another, no sound except for the ceiling fan whirring and Rosie the Wonder Dog softly snoring on the sofa.

I appreciate and enjoy electronic stuff. Growing up, I built crystal radios and eventually worked up to an actual radio, soldering transistors and capacitors per the instructions. I bought my first computer in 1983, and upgraded the next year with the very first model of an Apple Macintosh. It had a nine-inch screen, no hard drive and sold for $2,500. I have lost count of how many Macs I have owned since then, but the 27-inch iMac sitting in my study costs a few hundred bucks less than that original model did — with thousands times more computing power.

In, the 1980s, I also bought a Radio Shack TRS-80, forever known in newsrooms as Trash-80s. It was a laptop with a single-line display and not a lot of memory. But it served me well as I did research in libraries to finish writing a long-delayed master’s thesis. Then I discovered CompuServe, the first commercial online news service and eagerly subscribed.

This has the potential to change the media landscape, I thought at the time. Some folks will enjoy getting their news 24/7 and not having to wait for the paper to land in the driveway — or be held captive to the nightly network news. I had no idea the revolution would change modern culture so completely. There is now an entire generation of folks under the age of 25 or so who cannot imagine a world without an Internet or cell phones.

When I taught mass communications at Kilgore College last year, one day the class of 30 young people looked at me as if I had just landed from Mars. I told them that not long before they were born, if you wanted to find out what year, for example, the Lusitania was sunk, you either had to look it up in an encyclopedia (if your parents had invested in a set, paid with the installment plan), or go to the library and look it up in a reference book. Or, if you had gotten chummy with a reference librarian — and all savvy journalists knew to do so — then you could call and get the librarian to look up the information. (The Lusitania sank May 7, 1915, if you’re wondering, torpedoed by a German U-boat.)

The information explosion made possible by the Internet, the World Wide Web, Google and its competitors represents the greatest advancement since the invention of the Gutenberg press. The printing press made it possible to reproduce books and other material in mass quantities, which led to the widespread dissemination of knowledge. Now, a universe of knowledge is at our fingertips.

Sometimes though, it sure is nice to shut down all those screens, put the phone on vibrate and curl up with a well-researched and written book of history. I don’t plan to ever give up that habit.

 

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