The Tao of iPod, part four (final)

(the final installment in my sermon; see parts one, two, and three below)

When you think about it, the alleged evils of “new contraptions”—or at least, our fears of their dubious evils—began plaguing us long ago. Talkies were supposed to spell the end of live theatre—but got their comeuppance, since today, the movie industry regularly bemoans its own exaggerated demise in the face of home DVD players. Radio, that heralded pastime of yor, ushered in the modern era of propaganda as a political tool. Cameras killed portraiture—and today are major players in museums and the creation of fine art.

Further back: Actors once thrived as traveling “journalists,” going from village to village to deliver the news orally; when printed pages containing the news, the precursors to tabloid newspapers—themselves now in danger of extinction—came into being, they put a whole slew of actors out of business. Anybody notice a shortage of thespians today?

And further: Gutenburg’s press, besides putting all those monks out of business, also made obsolete the concept of mneumonic devices, which might have weakened our ability as a species to memorize. Probably more significantly, the Gutenburg press, because it made possible mass printing, diluted the power of the Church by spreading literacy beyond its high, narrow, isolated walls.

You can go even earlier if you want to. According to some historians, many Greeks absolutely detested the construction of “that new mall”—also known as the Acropolis. And the invention that has really gotten us into trouble over the years was that of fire.

David Tierney even suggests, in his article, that the human brain itself was perhaps our earliest “new gadget”: “The original Information Revolution,” he says, “occurred during the Pleistocene, a decentralized era if there ever was one, when hunter-gatherers on the African savanna developed a powerful new computer: the human brain. [It] evolved to its large size because its information-processing capacity enabled humans to band together and increase their chances of survival.”

We tend to think of computer-like gadgets as the purvey of the young. There’s that joke that centers around the idea of the computer so easy to use that a 10-year-old could manage it, but the elder is stymied because he doesn’t have a 10-year-old in the house. But in my life—and I’m guessing I’m not alone here—my parents discovered and embraced many gadgets long before I did. CT scanners, for instance. MRI machines. Chemotherapy IV monitors. Cunningly designed needles that inject anticoagulants so easily that even a 53-year-old can do it.

For those of use circling ever closer to that generally shared human goal of getting old, I offer a purely pragmatic reason to try to embrace the kids’ new gadgets: They’re here, and they aren’t going anywhere soon. And the kids, at least some of them, seem to understand how they can be used in positive ways. I was in an e-newsletter class recently, and a (younger) classmate there challenged my tired old definition of a “nerd”—that cliched, pasty-skinned adolescent boy chained to his computer monitor, capable of speaking only through a screen or ear device, going days without human contact, much less having any real social skills.

Apparently, as she patiently informed me, there actually are human chat groups, where friends who’ve met online get together in person. They don’t talk about devices or their favorite websites. They talk about life, love, Saturday’s plans—the stuff of eternity. And they never would have met if they hadn’t shared some esoteric hyphenated abbreviated acronymated passion like FaceBook or MySpace or Podcasts or Twitter.

What gadgets like iPods have to offer us, in the end, is—like so much else in the world we inhabit—an entirely subjective matter, based not on what they are, but on who we are.

Whether jogging, running a family, experiencing the companionship and loss of loved ones, or seeking your own spiritual path through life, the gadgets we create along the way are neither evil destroyers nor enlightened saviors. In the final analysis, what matters isn’t the tools you use, but how you as a person choose to embrace, ignore, interpret, or flourish using them.