Saturday, April 24, 2004
TechnodreadLet’s get down to one source of my anxieties these days: an email inbox full of guilt and recrimination—unanswered emails that tumble with so much need that I have to take pause and ask myself: if technology is supposed to make things easier for us (better communication, faster speed, convenience, and ease…), is dread for such ease its ultimate paradox? Convenience making way to becoming one massive traffic jam of distress? I suppose it is. I can only quote the avant-garde fictionist and über-scholar
Rolando Tolentino when he replied to one of our correspondences some time ago: “
Ako rin, madalas ay may anxiety na magbukas ng email
dahil foregrounding of more work.
Ganito na talaga ang reality
ng uneven techno-world we claim to be part of.”
And yet we also know we cannot live without the Internet, or any of the technological marvels we currently call our real life. But let me qualify that a bit: we perceive such things as something integral to how we live, that even if we know deep within that we can live without them, we can only imagine the headaches with which we have to contend with in a life made much too easy by such conveniences.
Cellphones, for instance—but that goes without saying. I may have been one of quiet a few in the Philippines who owned a cellphone in 1997. I got my DoCoMo handset—smaller than your Nokia 8250—in Tokyo when I was studying there, but which I promptly gave away once I arrived back in the country, to a friend who had marveled at its small size. Cellphones in the Philippines then had yet to take root in the culture—and the initial sets that were available were clunky devices with antennas. Remember Nokia 5110? Or Bosch? (I can only imagine the shivers you are getting with that flash of memory.) For the next four years, I was cellphone-free. Even when all everybody could talk about was this model or that, this latest version of Snakes (
Snakes!) or that, this wallpaper or that backlight… But nobody could convince me that it was an important thing. Not to have a cellphone became a mark, somehow, of the true rebel—something I always fancied myself to be.
Those were simple times.Eventually, of course, my brother, straight from Switzerland, placed a Nokia 3210 in my hands and told me it was necessary that I keep in touch with him, and the family. Suddenly, I was finding out this was a tool for expedience indeed. The high point of my so-called flirtations with cellphone culture was when I had forgotten this poetry reading I was supposed to organize. The event was set for a Friday night at 8 o’clock—and I was walking home for school that late afternoon when the owner of the bar we were supposed to hold the event in, hailed me and said, “See you tonight for your poetry reading!” That froze me. Armed only with SMS invitations, a scanner, and a printer—I was able to organize a poetry reading within three hours flat. And it was surprisingly a success. Thanks to the cellphone.
From then on, I was never one to doubt the life made so much easier with a cellphone, like a trusty gun in its holster. It is a weapon in an age where information is the ammunition. But my rebellious streak still shines through: I have never exchanged my Nokia 3210 for other, sleeker models—and my cellphone is still in its original gray casing. This is the case, even if a Motorola V60g is in my room, waiting for me to change my mind. Even if the temptations are constant to jump ship and get that new phone with a camera. But I won’t. I refuse to be part of the commodified crowd. Easily whipped to buying the latest models for the sake of owning the latest. I tell myself: I am practical. The truth may be that I am merely cheap.
The Internet is completely another story. One of my writer-friends
Gabriela Dans Lee recently sent me five questions to answer while she makes head-and-toes about the Internet lifestyles we all lead.
She asks, “Can you live without an Internet connection right now? Why or why not?” My answer: my life is the Internet. I spend more hours in a day clicking and surfing than I do watching TV, reading, eating, or sleeping. There is a compulsion to log-in at least twice a day. I buy my Nitro or my Warpspeed pre-paid cards like I drink water. And when these pre-paid credits run dry in the middle of the night, I have my standby of a Globelines dial-up account to whisk me through the quickly dawning sense of starvation.
Am I addicted? In a sense, maybe. Or it may also be that modern life revolves more around the digital these days. More than we like it to be, perhaps, but it is already out there. The Internet is a savvy lover. It connects you with people you care for, or work with, hundreds or thousands of miles away. It gets you the latest information on anything, even read the thousands of magazines or newspapers or books you do not get to have in your local newsstand. The New York Times, for example. Or Amazon, from which I have grown a small library of hard-to-find volumes. I aced many of my tests in college by logging on first and getting substantial extra information regarding my exam topics a full two hours before the teacher sat us down for the grind. I’ve also built a network of colleagues by maintaining a website dedicated to my profession. It is heady, the possibilities one gets just by being online.
The first time I logged in was when the Internet was still in its baby stages in the Philippines. I was immediately hooked. Going to an Internet café cost P60 then, for every hour. I remember spending as much as P300 just for one session (this was way back in 1995) -- and never even considered that a waste of money. Now, that obsession with keeping abreast Net-wise has morphed into various pre-occupations. Consider the following, beside the everyday task of logging on to email or to surf: Blogger. Friendster. Geocities. Face-pic. Yahoo! Messenger. mIRC. MSN Messenger. OzWorld. Google.
That is, for the uninitiated: A journal or a diary, or a links machine set-up to simulate a kind of personal magazine. A network of friends and flirtations. An online profile readily on-hand for the prying eyes we all seek to unleash our exhibitionist tendencies. Three real-time chat fora, often complete with video, to act out our personal theaters. An avatar game that is seductive as a world all your own. And a library of all things possible and retrievable in the universe.
Sometimes it strikes me: do I live a life in order to blog about what happens to me? Does my online self define who I really am? The boundaries between the two often blur, which make me disoriented at times. I would get cranky, and I’d bid farewell to my online self “in order to get on with an offline life”—but sooner or later, I would come back to the Internet like I could not really let go. I have been through five blogs already! I have two Friendster accounts! I maintain seven webpages! I chat at least once a week! I Google like crazy!
Imagine that. The Internet practically tracks my evolution as a human being. Am I pathetic? Not really. I think I like the fact that my private life edges on the public, a reverse voyeurism of sorts—but it’s a life, of sorts.
Gabby again: “How important is the Internet to you in meeting new people or communicating with people over long distances?” As important as knowing that you cannot even remember the last time you sent, or received snail mail. And Friendster? By God. The many long lost friends I’ve found again in Friendster! The whole idea is amazing—making the theoretical six-degrees of separation become more a reality, and in increasingly lesser degrees as well.
“Has the Internet changed your concept of relationships, whether platonic or romantic? If so, how?” Not radically. But love can be found in the Internet. My best friend Kristyn once made a joke for herself, and filled-out a form for a matchmaking site. An Australian chap named Justin answered. Soon they were emailing. Then they were cam-chatting. Now, they’re living happily as husband and wife in Sydney—a case of twains meeting where once it was impossible. The Internet has become a doorway for intimate things. There are good results—and bad ones. But that is only natural.
“What were your initial purposes in creating your various web accounts? What are the pros and cons of maintaining these accounts?” Because they are simply there. We mainly email and surf the Web for the various information we need; the rest—chatting or maintaining a Friendster account—become welcome diversions. The candy in the bunch.
And lastly: “Ultimately, is being aware of the opportunities for communicating over the Internet a help or a hindrance?” Both. It is a help, as I have variously intimated above. But also a hindrance by the way it has replaced a real face for a white monitor. That is its catch: to communicate online is really like maintaining a love affair via a fax machine.
And the convenience may also hurt. The ease points the way to a clogging. Chat friends demanding to be entertained in Yahoo! Messenger. Email inboxes threatening to overwhelm your miniscule Hotmail size limit. Friendsters demanding testimonials. Google flooding you with too many returns you may not, at all, be “feeling lucky.”
This is the dread I speak of. But I guess it is a dread I can learn to live with.
But one must also make an effort, I guess, to live an offline life. We are not, after all, robots.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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