I want you to go back in time with me for a few minutes to those wonderful days known as the 70’s. You know the decade—disco, smiley faces, flower power, sunshine, love, and some of the best music ever. Not to mention the best commercial ever—everyone sing along . . . “I’d like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love, grow apple trees and honey bees, and snow white turtle doves. I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.” Wow! Someone was smoking something when they penned that little ditty! The sad thing is that I really love that song and that commercial. As I remember, they always seemed to run it on Sunday nights right before Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom (another 70’s classic along with Hee-Haw, M*A*S*H, The Carol Burnett Show, All in the Family, and, that Saturday morning staple, Land of the Lost). Land of the Lost was from two guys named Sid and Marty Kroft. They were also responsible for that Saturday morning Psychedelic acid trip of show about the guy playing the magic flute.
Anyway, the other night around the dinner table, I was waxing nostalgic on the virtues of the 70’s. At this my oldest son disagreed referencing things like inflation, Vietnam, the energy crisis. Oh yeah, I forgot about those little things. It’s funny how we tend to remember the things we want to remember.
We have to be careful not to make an idol out of those much loved days of yesteryear. Things are never as great as we remember them in our “misty, watercolor memories.” And, yet, I often reflect on life in the seventies with wistfulness. To be sure, I was just a kid and didn’t have the pressures and stresses of adulthood. I am sure that my parents’ recollection of those days would be very different than mine. But think with me for a moment about life before the age of personal computing. A time long ago before the world was ruled by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Again, remember that I am a gadget geek (see previous posts). I love me some shiny, lithium powered, computer chip driven stuff. Love it! And for all of my cautionary comments in this blog I think that technology can be a wonderful thing and a great tool. Plus, it’s just neat. But even the best tools, if misused or misappropriated, can have some dire results. That’s all that I am saying. Let’s rethink the role and pervasiveness in our lives of technology.
Back to the 70’s. Do you remember life before the constant pressure of maintaining and keeping current a variety of computers, cell phones, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and something called flikr (is that how you spell it? It doesn’t matter because with computers we don’t have to spell anything correctly anymore)?
What about life before having to keep track of login info for our digital universes? Do you remember a day without the considerable cost of cell phone bills, internet bills, newer and faster equipment, HD TVs, Blu Ray players, video games (or to put it simply, pretty much anything we get at Best Buy)? Do you remember not being utterly overwhelmed by literally unlimited entertainment choices. In the early 90’s a guy named Neil Postman wrote a great book called “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” That was 20 years ago and things have only gotten worse. We are an entertainment, leisure driven society and technology has fed the beast.
We have hundreds of TV channels between cable and satellite not to mention the infinite number of internet diversions. There is streaming video from Netflix, Hulu, YouTube as well as unlimited sources of music. The job of the advertising industry is to create a need so that we will spend money filling it. And they have done this flawlessly regarding our insatiable desire to be infotained. And let’s be honest, 95% of it is absolute junk.
All of this is to say that I am increasingly becoming convinced that, as neat and helpful as all of this often is, more important things are suffering and our souls are withering. Do you remember when there were maybe three or four TV channels and only two choices at the movie theatre. And so families had to actually talk with each other and agree on what to watch. And, together, they would watch a show and during commercials they would talk or get something to eat (unless it was the Coke commerical which everyone would stay to watch). Except for the occasional phone call (which didn’t last long because of being tethered to a cord) there were no distracting beeps, rings, alerts.
People weren’t in their individual cyber bubbles like the boy in that great 70’s TV movie “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.” In this classic, John Travolta took a break from being Vinny Barbarino to play a boy whom people could see but not touch. Sometimes I think that is us when we enter into our virtual cac oons to be entertained or connected with virtual people while we grunt at the real people sitting next to us.
During my Facebook phase I had a great time reconnecting with old friends. But that soon ran its course and I began to wonder why I care that a person I barely talked to when our lockers were next to each other for six years had a great time in Hawaii. I became increasingly annoyed at the narcissistic status updates of people trying to get attention. Or with the passive aggressive pot shots of folks with an ax to grind who, rather than dealing with the issue in a constructive way, are content to vent for all the world (or at least their 29 friends) to see. If you are on Facebook and enjoy it and find it a good way to enrich your relationships and friendships, I am not criticizing you. I just think that we all need to think long and hard about the message we send when we immerse ourselves in constant connectivity with everyone except those we are physically with.
I love that Jesus was always fully present wherever He happened to be. There were always people tugging at him to go somewhere else, minister to another person, tend to a more urgent situation. But He didn’t do it. There was a calm and a peace and a focus to His life. He was fully engaged with whomever he was with. I want to be like that.
You may be asking (and you have every right to), “Okay, Chris, you say you love gadgets and technology, so how are you applying your own words to your life?” Well, I will talk more about that next time, but I will say that I haven’t fully figured out all the changes I need to make. But I have made some. And, more importantly, I am asking the questions. And that’s where we all need to start.
Chris Higgins 