by Arthur Black
So, nine hours for digestion, say, eight hours for sleep, and enough other hours every day to build fires, avoid predators, find shelter, forage for food . . .
That doesn’t leave much time to invent the wheel.
Fortunately, we stumbled upon the concept of cooking. That bought us time—time to invent language and art and science and . . . and . . .
Have you met the Segway? It was invented in our lifetime—only unveiled in 2001, as a matter of fact. The experts promised it would revolutionize transportation around the world.
It’s a two-wheeled scooter built along the lines of a push lawn mower. You stand on it, tilt the handle in the direction you want to travel and off you go, at a stately ten miles per hour. The Segway is compact, environmentally friendly, very safe (George W. Bush fell off his, but . . .) and cheap.
Well, pretty cheap. I saw one on eBay for six grand.
Yep, the Segway is a transportation dream come true—except hardly anyone likes them. Because when you stand on a Segway you look like a dork.
I know I’m going to get emails from the eleven Segway owners in Canada saying that I’ve maligned the vehicle and it’s really a sexy ride.
I respect your position. All I’m saying is Socrates would have thought you looked ridiculous.
Rule Britannica! Not
If there was any skepticism about the digital information tsunami we’re currently dog-paddling through, surely it was swept away by the terse announcement that recently appeared in newspapers, magazines—and inevitably on iPads and laptop screens around the world. I’m referring to the one telling us that after 244 years of publishing, Encyclopedia Britannica would no longer be putting out a print edition.
No more Encyclopedia Britannica? No more of those glossy-paged, gold-embossed, hernia-inducing, faux-leather volumes that have anchored libraries, private and public, since . . . since Oliver Goldsmith scribbled, William Hogarth doodled and Catherine the Great diddled?
Well, pardon the hysteria. This is a death notice that was not exactly unexpected. Truth is, Britannica’s been on the endangered list since at least 1990 when the company declared bankruptcy, only to be temporarily rescued by a Swiss businessman. Even before that, Encyclopedia Britannica was coasting on the fumes of an inflated reputation. The information its volumes contained was often outdated before they were printed. The latest (and last) print edition, published in 2010, was twenty-five years in the making.
But it wasn’t just the information lag that doomed the print version of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Consider: if you were one of the eight thousand customers who purchased the latest edition, you would have thirty-two volumes that would take up a wall of your house, weigh 130 pounds and set you back nearly $1,400.
Or, for seventy bucks a year, you could subscribe to the web edition and enjoy instant access in your bedroom, a bus terminal or an Internet café.
But that’s today. Back in the days when we weren’t in a perpetual rush and portability wasn’t a concern, Encyclopedia Britannica ruled.
Ruled the middle class, anyway. And it never really was about information; it was about social status. Families that boasted a set of EBs in their parlour ascended automatically to the mandarin class. And it didn’t matter whether anyone actually opened a volume. The books just had to be there, where visitors could see them. When people purchased Britannicas they weren’t just buying information; they were buying a dream.
I know. I used to sell that dream.
I was once a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. On my first evening, clad in an ill-fitting sports jacket and tie, I tagged along behind a seasoned salesman who would show me the ropes. By “seasoned” I mean sleazy. This guy was a weasel in a suit. We knocked on every door in a large downtown high-rise. I lugged a satchel full of sales gimmickry. Weasel did the talking.
Virtually all of the doors we knocked on were either unanswered or curtly slammed in our faces. But finally, some poor, kind soul whose mother taught her not to be rude to strangers invited us in.
Big mistake.
The weasel had a polished line of patter that bordered on hypnotic. He dazzled the little old dear like a cobra bewitching a sparrow. Before an hour was gone she had signed up not only for an overpriced set of Britannicas but also for a bookcase, a reading lamp and a subscription for an annual update volume.
We were operating inside the law, but just barely. And morally what we were doing sucked large granite boulders. I was just a kid then, and not nearly brave enough to stand up and shout, “Close your chequebook, lady—it’s a scam!” But I often wish I had. My encyclopedia sales career began and ended that same night. The experience soured me on what I had considered to be a noble institution. After all, how noble could Encyclopedia Britannica be if it employed two-bit hustlers like us?
I don’t believe I’ve cracked the spine on a volume of Encyclopedia Britannica since.
But then, neither have lots of people who bought the whole set.
Whatever Happened to Email?
It’s safe to assume that no one alive has ever seen a quagga. The last specimen died in an Amsterdam zoo in 1883. Quaggas, a kind of half-zebra, half-horse combo, used to roam southern Africa in huge, dense herds but they’re extinct now, just like T. Rex, the dodo and email.
Beg pardon? Email? Extinct? Well, almost, according to Atos, Europe’s largest information technology firm. The company claims that 90 percent of email messages sent among its employees are a waste of time and money. Accordingly, Atos employees—all seventy-four thousand of them—have been ordered to ditch the email and go back to the telephone. Email was supposed to boost office productivity; in fact, it’s behaved like cholesterol, clogging the arteries of the business machine. Think of all the crap emails you get. Think of the millions of people who, like you, take time out to at least glance at their crap emails. Studies show useless emails can cost a company of one thousand employees as much as ten million dollars a year.
Ah, well. We’re getting used to extinctions these days. Tyrannosaurus Rex terrorized the river valleys of Western Canada for a couple of million years during the Upper Cretaceous period before flaming out, whereas, say, the Polaroid Land Camera barely lasted sixty years (1948–2007) before being flung into the Landfill of History.
And remember the pager? Back in the 1980s it was hard to find a doctor or a salesman who didn’t have one clipped on his or her belt. One or two rappers even went briefly pager-crazy in their performances. Then along came the mobile phone to gobble it up. RIP, noble pager.
And who doesn’t have a Sony Walkman gathering dust at the back of a drawer? When they first appeared in the early ’80s Walkmans drove a stake through the heart (or the centre hole) of phonograph LPs. Then, just a few years ago, along came a mutation called the iPod, and the Sony Walkman went straight to the Museum of Quaint Artifacts.
It had lots of company. The PalmPilot, born in 1997, was a wonder of its time. Imagine having all your contacts, an accurate calendar and personal notes in one handy gizmo! With a touch screen and a personal stylus to boot! What could possibly improve on that?
A company named Apple for one. Hello iPhone; adios PalmPilot.
Then there’s the Atari 2600. Customers snapped up more than thirty million of those to play video games like Pong, Pitfall and Combat. For all its fame Atari lived for only seven years: 1977–84.
All these techno dinosaurs share two characteristics. Number one: they were each once on the very knife-edge of surging technology, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Number two: their collapse was utter and lightning-swift in evolutionary terms. Thirty years for the Sony Walkman. A decade for the PalmPilot. Seven years for Atari.
And now we’re watching the titanic struggles (which look increasingly like death throes) of Canada’s own BlackBerry. Just a couple of years ago it was the world leader in smart phones, commanding over 50 percent of the American market
alone. That share is now down to 10 percent and circling the drain.
But evolution’s like a baseball game: it’s not over until the last at-bat. Back in the mid-1990s, a company named Apple was on the ropes too. They appointed a guy named Steve Jobs as CEO.
They did all right.
As for email, the prognosis isn’t bright. “The younger generation has all but given up on it,” says a feature story in the London Daily Mail—in favour of social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Why? Instant messaging feels more “immediate.” Messages don’t languish unread in somebody’s inbox. In fact with Twitter, it can feel almost like you’re having an actual, one-on-one conversation with somebody.
A face-to-face conversation. You can remember what that was like, can’t you?
Riding on Spaceship Earth
Ever try to make a map? It’s a tough assignment that ought to give us that much more respect for pioneers like Marco Polo, Magellan and our own Samuel de Champlain—all dedicated map-makers who took pains to leave a record of where they travelled and what they saw.
Especially given what they had to work with, which wasn’t much. Can you imagine trying to draw an accurate representation of the east coast of Canada or the proportions of the Great Lakes, using nothing but seventeenth-century technology? Champlain did it.
Maps have fascinated mankind since . . . pretty well forever, really. The oldest man-made map we know was not of this earth at all. On the wall of a cave in Lascaux, France, there is a series of dots that astronomers confirm unmistakably charts three bright stars, Vega, Deneb and Altair, as well as the star cluster we call the Pleiades. Archaeologists say the uncannily accurate map was drawn by cave dwellers nearly nineteen thousand years ago. Just think: our ancestors were mapping the night skies nearly ten thousand years before the New Stone Age began.
Nowadays we’re all map-makers—or map facilitators, at least. Anybody with a GPS on their dashboard or a smart phone in their pocket can instantly conjure up the coordinates for a ski chalet in the Rockies or a good sushi restaurant in downtown Tokyo.
It’s a far cry from the bulky Mercator projection maps that hung off the blackboard when I was a kid. Those things gave most of us our first look at the wide world around us.
Too bad it wasn’t an accurate one. School maps altered our perceptions of the planet we call home and they left us with some peculiar ideas. Empires were assigned colours—the British Empire, I recall, was pink. I still think of the long-vanished renegade state of Rhodesia as rose coloured. Other misconceptions abound. The maps depicted Norway and Iceland as almost the size of continents, and Canada, with all those provincial borders slicing north to south, looked like a colossal pink salami.
A clumsily carved pink salami at that. Oh, BC and the Prairie provinces looked neat enough, but then came Ontario with that chunk of gristle hanging off its chin. And the Maritimes? Forget about the Maritimes. Their borders made them look like some preliminary sketch scribbled by Picasso.
The most astounding map I’ve seen is technically not a map at all. It’s a photo taken on December 7, 1972, from the window of the Apollo 17 spacecraft as it whirled through space forty-five thousand kilometres from earth. You’ve seen the photo. They call it the Blue Marble because that’s what the earth looks like—a wispy blue marble hanging against the inky black backdrop of interstellar space.
It’s an amazing photograph—perhaps the most amazing photograph ever taken. It changed the way we see ourselves. There are no borderlines on the Blue Marble. Russia is China is the Pacific is Canada is Earth. Everything we’ve ever known is in that photo. Everyone we know, everyone we hate, and the millions upon millions we will never know. Everyone who ever was and everyone who ever will be. Kings and carnival barkers; cardinals and courtesans. Everything mankind has ever built; everything we’ve ever sung, painted or written. All of us together, on a glowing blue marble. Our lifeboat in the sea of space.
I hope we’ve got somebody aboard who knows how to patch leaks.
Weapons of Mass Distraction
You are sitting at a table—sweating, distracted and more than a little edgy—in a slightly skungy downtown San Francisco lounge called Jones. You are with a gaggle of people you’ve never met before. You are not here for the cocktails or the floorshow or to listen to stand-up comedian hopefuls. You are here for the same reason the others are and none of you is laughing or bantering or looking very happy. In fact you’re probably wringing your hands and looking at your shoes right now. You are there because of one simple, ugly truth: you are an addict, a junkie and you are finally ready to acknowledge that you need help. And when your turn comes to speak you hope you will have the courage to stand up and say in a clear, loud voice:
“Hi, everybody. My name is Art and I am a . . . a . . .
“A nomophobic.”
Relax, buddy. Everybody at the club tonight is wallowing in exactly the same leaky boat. They are here because, like you, they are addicted—wired, actually—and they’re finally ready to admit that their addiction is wrecking their lives.
That’s what this get-together is all about. It’s billed as a Device-Free Drinks event. The idea is to teach people how to survive without a WMD in their pocket or purse.
That acronym doesn’t stand for Weapon of Mass Destruction; it stands for Wireless Mobile Device. These people are going to attempt to spend the next few hours separated from their iPhones, iPads, iTouches, BlackBerrys, Android devices, smart phones or other digital leg iron of choice.
Sounds absurd but it’s real enough. An estimated thirteen million Brits suffer from nomophobia—the fear of being separated from their mobile phone. It’s even worse on this side of the Atlantic. The average American mobile user is online 122 more hours per year than the average Brit. (That’s the best part of a week wasted staring at a little box in your hands.)
A bad habit for sure—but an addiction? Absolutely, according to the experts. A report in a recent issue of Newsweek magazine claims that overindulgence in cellphone use, not to mention texting, tweeting and web surfing, can quite literally rewire human brain circuits. Brain scans of adults deemed nomophobic—which is to say people who use their devices more than thirty-eight hours a week—display symptoms that are eerily similar to those found in the brains of cocaine addicts and hard-core alcoholics. Those symptoms range from serious anxiety to clinical depression—even rage or acute psychosis.
This particular Device-Free Drinks get-together at the lounge has attracted about 250 digital junkies and they are offered a variety of diversionary pastimes to help wean them from their toys. There’s a glass jar labelled “Digital Detalks” that’s full of strips of paper, each one bearing a slightly-off-the-wall conversational opener, such as: “What’s the best sound effect you can make?” and “What does your grandmother smell like?”
The idea is to derail your digital brain and rewire it to think outside the WMD box. To help in the weaning process there are a half-dozen twentieth-century digital devices available.
Typewriters by Smith-Corona. The manual kind.
Does it work? One participant says if you can make it through the first twenty minutes without running back to reclaim your checked-in cellphone or iPod, then you’ve got a chance of reclaiming your life.
But really, it’s too early to tell.
Will there be more Digital Detox gatherings like this one in the lounge? You can count on it. Might even be one near you.
If and when it happens, you know how you’re going to find out about it, right?
Somebody’s bound to post it on Facebook.
Your Call Is Important—Har-Har
As I write, there are an estimated 1.3 million Canadian adults out of work.
I can fix that.
Put them to work, I say. Put them to work at the other end of my telephone line.
There is a galaxy-sized vacuum at the other end of my phone line a
nd it is crying out for human beings to fill it. At the moment it is occupied by a cringe-making mechanical Robovoice. Every time I call my bank, an airline, a government office, the CBC or a large business concern, Robovoice intercepts my call with what has to be the most insincere statement uttered since Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook.”
“Your call,” purrs Robovoice, “is important to us.”
No. No, it’s not. If my call was important it would be answered by one of the living, breathing 1.3 million unemployed Canadians out there who could use a warm, comfortable desk job answering phones.
What “Your call is important to us” really means is the exact, 180-degree opposite. It really means, “We’ve found a way to make even more money by firing our receptionists and replacing them with a recording. Incoming calls are so cosmically unimportant to us we’re willing to risk offending the crap out of our customers by forcing them to converse with a vending machine.”
What’s more, the messages from Robovoice (“This call may be monitored to ensure voice quality”—gimme a break) are so blatantly false they wouldn’t bamboozle the most gullible and compliant customer this side of Elmer the Safety Elephant.
We don’t all surrender meekly. Many of us instinctively punch “0” the instant we hear Robovoice warming up, and often that will put us in touch with a human operative. As for the more devious and sophisticated “Interactive Voice Response Systems,” there is a growing guerrilla network of websites that offers tips on how to sabotage the CCBs (cheap corporate bastards). One website counsels that we should abandon the frustrating practice of mashing button after button (“For help with overbilling, press 368”) and just holler “OPERATOR!” at the receiver until a Homo sapiens comes on the line. Another website advises us to swear like a paratrooper—apparently X-rated diatribes can trigger emotion-detection technology that brings a live operator on the run.
