Op-Ed
Bringing The Noise (Down)
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Cosmology on the Rocks
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Boom. Kah. Boom. Kah. Boom. Kah. Boom-boom Kah. Hey. Man. I. Can. Hear. The beat. From your cool new ear-bud headphones that mold into the inside of your ears.
We’re in the library, and it’s very quiet here on this side of the headphones, except for … it.
What is it? One can’t call it music, exactly. No, all I’m getting is leftovers of music, sort of dried up and spoiled. That static, drums-only overflow of sound that comes out of the iPods gone wrong, turned too loud. iOverflow, for lack of a more marketable term. Matter out of place. It is supposed to stay in that hermetically sealed paradise of individual entertainment. But hard as modern technology, modernist regimes, and modernist philosophies have tried to hermetically seal things, they don’t always succeed. Or at least they really torture the unlucky ones on the wrong side: those thought to be pre-modern. In this case, that refers to anyone on the wrong side of the headphones.
Now, if you listen to your iPod all the time, you might not know what I’m talking about. Let’s consider, for a moment, that you are a very nice person who is listening to music. There you are, sitting in the library, having a personal little party DJ’d by your Nano as you do your problem set. And you stop for a moment, and say, “Hey, I hope this digital get-down is not bothering anyone else.”
So you take off an ear-bud, and things sound pretty quiet out there, and headphones are meant to channel the sound directly into your ears after all … so everything is, as my roommate likes to say, “gravy.” This is “the good life,” Mr. West, Mr. T-Pain, because you are in control. Except it really is too loud. You just didn’t realize, because it was still blasting in your other ear. (Wake up, Mr. West!)
You see, I’m not sure we control our iPods, our cellphones, our iPhones, or our cellPods (coming soon from Motorola, I figure) as much as we think. We believe they give us more control over our lives. But perhaps it’s our very enchantment at this prospect of control that makes it all spin out of control — and all of the sudden you’re struggling to find that buzzing phone as the whole class glares at you. You’re racing against time, as it were. That is, time culturally conceived such that it is racing too, with its progress through technology, and time is beating you real bad here. If technology is an end in itself, we ourselves lose at some point.
A few weeks ago, someone in the Kinkeldey Room, which was once the best kept secret in Uris Library (until it was mentioned in a Sun column by this kid Jeremy Siegman, who ruined it for everybody), was just rocking out. I mean, you could hear this guy’s music loud and clear. Like, speakers-loud. iOverflow this loud is what sociologists of iOverflow might call post-iOverflow. It gets a “post-” prefix. That’s how ridiculous it is.
Now, in this story, I happened to know the guilty party — let’s call him A.H. Robertson. And I know A.H. is a very nice guy, who probably saw the several people in the room who were dancing in their seats to mock him (and to release their frustration library style: with a silent but wild dance routine). So, discreetly enough, A.H. did the Nice-Guy. It’s that hot new dance move where you take out one headphone, just the tip, just for a minute, just to see if you’re completely bothering everyone around you. He realized what was up, was pretty embarrassed and turned it down.
So, who’s in charge: Charles, or his iPod?
It’s probably both. Prof. Ronald Kline, science and technology studies, wrote a book on this subject called Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (2000), in which he argued that “farm people wove the telephone, automobile, radio, and electric light and power into an expanded rural way of life from 1900 to 1960, instead of being ‘urbanized’ by these technologies as their promoter wanted and predicted. In other words, they resisted, adapted, reinterpreted, selectively purchased, and even modified these technologies.” That’s not so much a story about consumers, but about cultural beings who, unlike Derek Zoolander, think for themselves.
So the question is what we really think, deep down, about our iPods and our cellphones, because they have largely come to define that hazy concept called “the West.” I’m not sure I have ever felt such a visceral sense of urgency than when my phone rang in class. And we aren’t assholes. We just don’t have our shit together. So you might love your gadgets, but since they are all mass-produced to be exactly the same, you can’t actually mold your Volkswagen to fit your life, as some commercials suggest. You can’t train it like a little pet ferret.
They always play the Beatles’ “Getting Better” in car commercials. Wherein “It’s getting better all the time,” not “since you’ve been mine,” but because this car will change your life, baby! That’s the ideology of progress. It’s sort of bullshit.
Of course, technology itself is not new (think of the astrolabe), and neither are the problems it poses for social interaction.
“I don’t think there’s anything that new about it,” says Professor Trevor Pinch, science and technology studies. “The shock of a new technology happens all the time. The necessary legal norms and rules for dealing with such technology are often in flux.” So maybe we’re a little shocked by our new gadgets.
Perhaps what would really make things “get better” is if we pulled a Farmer (think about what that would look like as a dance move) and integrated our iPods and phones into life through new social habits. The phone will not put itself on silent and no, they aren’t laughing with you because your ring-tone is “Boots with the furrr,” they are laughing at you. So you have to go the extra mile, and put it on silent. Which is such an utterly human thing to do that it alone defies technology as a final solution to war or poverty or that most vexing problem of boredom. That’s an ideology of humanism.
I’m thinking most especially of one humanistic resistance we haven’t quite mastered yet. It still feels awkward. But it’s helping a brother out, and we should get used to it: “Excuse me, friend. Do you mind turning it down?”
Jeremy Siegman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at jsiegman@cornellsun.com. Cosmology on the Rocks appears alternate Fridays.