Recently I read an article in the CBC about a family who decided to live for a year as if it was 1986. The father and his two sons donned mullets and the mother got an 80s style perm. They listened to cassettes, they watched VHS, they even dressed up in the fashion of the time.
By living in 1986, additionally they couldn't have cell phones, nor computers, nor tablets and of course, no popular video games.
CBC interviewed the father on the last day of his year and asked him what he would miss. The hair was one thing but also the sense of togetherness he experienced with his family. Instead of each family separated by their gadgets, they lived a year without the digital distractions. "I think it would just be sad going back to everything" he told CBC, "because we had a
lot of positive experiences. But obviously the way the world is in 2014,
it's impossible to live your life like that because eventually you
won't have any friends left because you're such a nuisance communicating
with everybody else."
By 'nuisance communicating' he meant not using texting or email or Facebook to contact people.
I felt close to this article and after reading it, an emotion of sadness and sympathy for this family. I only just now heard of their experiment and wished I could have participated in it. Though in 1986, my father bought Beta instead of VHS. And I didn't have a mullet but I remember the jeans and the shoes and the sweaters.
Born in the late 1970s, the 80s is only half-a-blur for me and yet I still remember the two phones we had in our house, one with a long blue cord that barely reached the floor and a tanned phone in the rec room, there on a wooden shelf beneath the breaker box.
My mother was on the phone more than the three of us only because she had relatives and friends further away. All my dad's family congregated at their parents on Sundays so communication was easy and more communal amongst relatives.
But the idea of being a 'nuisance'. I shake my head. Memories rise up in me. When I was living in North Vancouver in British Columbia, I took a German class at the Goethe Centre at Simon Fraser's University Harbour Centre campus. There I met a girl from San Francisco taking the course to compliment her semester of language studies at SFU. It seemed the only time we could actually talk was online and I wasn't the only one. Sometimes there was long pauses in our discussions or 'chats' (the technological age has made me despise the word now) and when I asked her what she was doing in the time I waited for her responses, she merely said she was talking to another friend.
When we did share each other's company it was in a movie theatre and no heavy make-out or anything like that. No. We sat side by side and stared at the screen. When the film was over, she went her way and I went mine. We saw each other at Harbour Centre for class but again, the majority of our discussions took place MSN-style. The screen was always there.
For the longest time I have put off buying a cell phone. When I was living in both Victoria and North Vancovuer, I had a land line. Old fashioned and naive, I figured anyone of worth would call me. I also didn't like the idea that people could track me. I also didn't like being that asshole on the bus whose one-sided conversation imposed itself on others.
I also didn't like the idea of being a cliche. I've noticed this twenty-first century trend of holding a coffee cup in one hand and a cell phone in the other while walking. In the restaurant industry, people used to go out back for a smoke with co-workers. They still do but now you see that ubiquitous device.
Perhaps I am truly a luddite. I did eventually buy a cell phone only because it didn't make sense having a landline when I moved back to Ontario. I lived with a brother a year and then found my own place. The cell phone seemed to be a natural solution but I had to have my number changed because the girl who had it before was fairly popular and a lot of guys were texting her to come over. I got tired of deleting their pathetic messages.
The word 'text' itself has become a verb in our culture. Before, in universities, English and literature professors referred to the novel or story you read as the 'text' the same way a doctor might discuss a patient with his colleagues. 'Text' actually comes from the Latin texere - weave. I would say that is fairly appropriate considering the way 'texting' has created the new social 'mesh' of our modern, progressive lives. Instead of speaking, people using their thumbs and busy themselves like spiders, web after web of words on the screen.
But they aren't words really. Certainly, on the surface they are words - texts are often short, often grammatically incorrect sentences made up entirely of words. But it's not the same somehow. For me, when I think of words, I think of things that have weight and meaning. Words make up conversations, animated ones, serious ones, quiet one, light ones, etc.. Words are in debates, they move arguments back and forth. Words belong in novels and poems and in foreign languages, they are part of librettos in operas and when we're watching a French film, the subtitles are made up of words.
When you break up with someone, they said it is better to do it person. To see the person, to hear their voice, to get the bad news, all those words belong to that moment.
And the word 'word', etymologically goes back to the Indo-European root wer- - 'speak, say'. Word and verb are also related in this sense. Words and speaking are intertwined. The act of speaking itself is a verb.
'My word is my bond'. 'You have my word'. 'Words fell right out of mouth'. 'Word on the street'. 'Can I have a word with you?' All these expressions point to another time, one that is appearing faint in the rear view mirror of our indifferent and apathetic society.
Now the 'text' is everything. And the text exists in a nowhere, a digitized space. Social media is our coveted oxymoron and the cell phone connects us without actually creating a place of intimacy. Words losing their meaning, a means to an end and for most people, a way of alleviating boredom and loneliness.
Text is vacuous at best. Of course some might argue I am being overdramatic but when was the last time many of us had a conversation with someone where the other person or you didn't look at your phone. The phone is there and people correspond to it with anticipation. A text coming through gives most people the same thrill as having many people hit the 'Like' button on something they said or a link they posted on their Facebook page. These little social-security orgasms... But always, they are being take out of the moment, existing in a world where the currency is at best pathetic and worth as much as Monopoly money. But then if you don't play the game of 'texting' you miss out on the fun.
But to get back to the cellular-interuptis...
Back in the 80s, even the 90s, when the phone rang at dinner, no one was allowed to get up and answer. Even before answering machines, if it was important, the person would call back and even if it wasn't important, they'd still probably try later. But then again, most kids I knew, their parents had a no-phone rule for dinner time so it was likely the person calling was a salesperson or telemarketer.
And yet the few times I've gone out for dinner or lunch I see people with other people and always looking at their phones.
Words are present, the text isn't.
