Deep in the heart of Evanston emerges a howl that deafens and enlightens all who hear it. From Dempster to Central, the streets buzz alive with new energy, and indeed the world beyond reverberates with an echo that demands to be heard. Tom Hayden has just tweeted, and it is the most important thing he could be doing with his time.
Well, of course not, but that’s what it feels like. I’ve never been one to embrace technology. It frightens and confuses me, and most of the time I wonder what is the point of it all. Before I bought a smart phone, I was perplexed by the popularity of Twitter. Who cares what I’m thinking at any moment of the day? Why should I care about what everyone else is thinking about? The answers are: no one, and I don’t. But now, since I have access to the Twitter service at all times, I understand the appeal. The process is easy and allows us to fulfill our need to self-indulge quickly and quietly. People begin to follow you, which gives you the illusion that someone’s listening. And then, you talk at them. Your tweets increase with frequency and become more absurd as time goes on. You launch inanities into cyberspace for whoever is bored enough to read them. Twitter is like having a visual record of all your rambling, incoherent thoughts. Kind of like this column, but restricted to 140 characters at a time.
A sea of information about everyone I know is available at all times in the palm of my hand, however worthless that information is. On Twitter, we ignore nearly all of it. On Facebook, though, our connections are more tangible and we pay attention, inexplicably, to the day-to-day dealings of people we don’t know. I usually enjoy it when I see someone for the first time in months in real life, so why not on Facebook? Well, because Facebook also includes minutiae about people I haven’t seen in years and don’t particularly want to see. In the years after graduating high school, I watched my locker buddy become a mother, and then slowly become a single mother. I had to block my estranged uncle’s endlessly depressing status updates (“kicked out of the house,” “jobless again,” “wife took the kids,” etc.). A friend who burned his arm off with gasoline started working at a gas station, which is kind of funny now that I think about it. In years past I could have gone through life without knowing most of this, and now it’s all burned into my memory.
This past weekend I performed what must have been the most 21st-century action in my life. I saw someone I haven’t seen in a while at a bar and, standing next to each other in real life, we used our phones to post some crap on each other’s Facebook walls. I’m baffled by how normal the ordeal was. We were using these little devices to send magic waves into the universe or however it works (I’m no engineer) to accomplish the task of saying “hello” while maybe three or four feet away from each other. I remember using rotary phones, where you had to spin a dial and wait a few seconds for it to spin back before you could start the next number. Now you can shout some directions at your phone from across the room, and it will order you a pizza.
This is where technological advancement has left us. You can navigate somewhere with a voice command and launch birds at pigs, but we’ve become more divided as a result. We are exposed to and ignore so much and pay attention to the unimportant. When friendship requires a single click, you tend to amass a collection of weirdos you don’t really know, and then you’re stuck listening to them chatter around you endlessly. You become so numbed by the deluge of information that you think communicating through Facebook while there is flesh and blood directly in front of you is normal.
Tom Hayden is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at [email protected]. Illustration by Alice Liu.
