The Tao of iPod, part three

(my sermon continues - parts one and two are below)

Certainly, there are lessons to be taken from the past about the damning potential of gadgets. In a NY Times article, Charles Morris wrote: “The 1870s saw possibly the fastest sustained growth in American history … with the rapid spread of the railroads and the telegraph, new department stores and mail-order catalogs pressured local producers with mass-produced goods, a precursor to the Wal-Mart era. … The productivity shock was comparable to that from the Internet in our own day.”

David Tierney notes about the same era, in another Times article: “As people abandoned farms and small towns, they lost communal bonds; as personal incomes rose, public air and water got dirtier…. Indoor plumbing and washing machines freed women of onerous work, but there was less socializing at wells.”

A technology reporter for a medical Web site noted an array of health hazards littering the short distance between you and your electronic toys. Working at night in front of a lit monitor can screw up your internal clock; other potential hazards are repetitive stress injuries, obesity, permanent hearing loss, accidents from use of gadgets while driving, and even asthma, which might be triggered by some models of laser printers shooting out invisible particles that can lodge deep in the lungs.

And, as very well demonstrated online at storyofstuff.com by Annie Leonard (everybody should watch this disturbing, funny performance), the effect on our planet of the American cycle of consumerism—a broader topic than what I address today—has been and continues to be devastating.

But most of the negatives about technology and new inventions don’t live in isolation. As Tierney notes, “Although new technology is often described as a Faustian bargain, historically it has involved a trade-off not between materialism and spirituality but between individual freedom and social virtue.” He says,

“Technology’s victims have become familiar images in the media: on-line addicts who don’t know their next-door neighbors; workers displaced by machines…; frazzled parents, especially working mothers, too busy to spend time with their children. We contrast these pathetic figures with images of a happier past, … when people still had time to read, contemplate the meaning of life, visit with their relatives and neighbors.

“But when exactly,” he continues “were those halcyon days?… Before the Industrial Revolution, the average person … was short-lived, [and] illiterate…. Women’s lives were consumed with domestic chores and continual pregnancies… … [even] after the Industrial Revolution, … people still didn’t have much time to sit around discussing the classics or communing with nature. In the middle of the 19th century, the typical man in Britain worked more than 60 hours a week, with no annual vacation, from age 10 until he died at about 50.

…“Contrary to popular stereotypes,” he continues, “ … the workweek has been shortening, … [and] parents are spending as much time with their children as they did in the 1960s. These children … are less likely to live with two parents, which may be partly a consequence of technology that has made divorce and single parenthood less of an economic burden: men and women …[today often]… can both support themselves, relying on machines to make clothes, clean house, and do most food preparation. But new technology is hardly the only cause of the traditional family’s decline, and in any case, it’s hard to get too nostalgic for the days when women had no choice but to stay in the kitchen.”

Technology’s potentials reach beyond domestic aid, significant as this is. In his book, The Audacity of Hope, our president—whose status as president exists at least in part because of the electronic devices of this century—describes a tour in its nascent days of the Google offices.

“… a three-dimensional image of the earth rotated on a large flat-panel monitor. ...‘These lights represent all the searches … going on right now,’ an engineer said. ‘Each color is a different language. ... you can see traffic patterns of the entire Internet system.’ The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all … boundaries …—nationality, race, religion, wealth—were rendered invisible and irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo, the student in a remote Indian village, and the manager of a Mexico City department store were drawn into a single, constant, thrumming conversation, time and space giving way to a world spun entirely out of light.”

Obama’s account is a striking illustration, I think, of the hopeful possibilities of a world sewn together in communication and industry, one example of the positive potential of modern electronic gadgets. But he continues: “Then I noticed the broad swaths of darkness as the globe spun on its axis—most of Africa, chunks of South Asia, even some portions of the United States, where the thick cords of light dissolved into a few discrete strands.”

Technological devices might offer all people a means to lift themselves up, but more importantly, I think, devices can show us—more graphically than even good oratory can—where our hard work remains in achieving true parity.