Returning to the 1980s House
Returning to the 1980s House
By Daniel J. Fisher from A La Carte Scholar
By
fromIn my earliest years my family owned a typewriter, not a computer. We had a tiny black-and-white television and a slightly larger color television. Both received their signal through an antenna, and neither came with a remote. Our telephone was connected to the wall by a long spiral cord. Music came from the radio, cassette tapes, and, eventually, CDs. When I was about seven we did buy a computer. It didn’t have an internet connection, but we could type documents and play solitaire and a grainy-looking Oregon Trail on it. But, for all its wonders, that computer was not the pinnacle of technological development. I once overheard someone say that a new invention called “the internet” or “the information superhighway” or something like that was going to change everything.
For a while, I was too busy playing outside and reading to compare us with others. But then came a technological revolution that made the world of the early 1990s more like the world of 1950 than the world of just a few years later. A friend got a computer with the power to access that new internet and play games a lot more sophisticated than anything I had – like SimCity. Another friend got Nintendo 64. A lot of sporting events I wanted to watch began to be reserved for cable. Why couldn’t we have these things? I started jostling my parents to get with the times.
Eventually, even I got to enjoy owning these shiny new things. My family bought a more powerful computer with the internet and the capacity to run complex games. We bought a big television with a remote control. I bought myself a Playstation. When I went to college, I received a cell phone and a laptop and, for the first time, enjoyed high-speed internet. My parents bought me an iPod. My dorm and my early apartments had cable. A few years after I moved out of the house, even my parents bought it.
During this decade between late childhood and my early twenties, I was changing, and access to these things enabled the change. I began devoting more time to television and video games and less to reading and playing outside. I needed noise and distraction all the time. I would listen to podcasts even while writing a paper or mix video games and television. I popped in my earbuds to go for a run or walk to class. I never drove without the radio on. Facebook appeared months before I started college. I was soon coaxed into setting up a profile and took to looking up acquaintances to find out what they disclosed about themselves, from political views to favorite television shows. I cast away my dignity and made hysterical political posts.
Participating in a culture gorging itself on the latest technology started to give me indigestion. An early flare-up came at age twelve. My parents usually reined in my video game playing, but shortly after my birthday they let me spend a sunny summer afternoon indoors playing a new game. My feeling at the end of the day surprised me: depression, not exhilaration. Techno-sickness continued to appear. I realized that when I attempted feats of multitasking like watching the game and grading papers all at once I crashed my efficiency, forcing me to sort-of work all the time and rarely fully rest. I began to be ashamed of blabbing all my views online and wished I would spare my words like a Clint Eastwood character. Chatting with people who could talk of nothing but what they watched on TV bored me. Nothing chagrined me more than the way people used the most potent of all the new technologies introduced at the turn of the millennium, the smartphone. For most people, it became a new body part and ever-present companion. In one college town I noticed that at street crossings the sidewalks bore signs reading, “Phones down, eyes up.”
Not all at once or always by choice, I started to change my ways. Just before my senior year of high school I put aside video games so I could read more books. In my mid-twenties, I found that the home where I had rented a room had no cable. I got accustomed to not having television at home. I took the earbuds out when I went running, substituting prayer or letting my mind go fallow. In 2020, hoping to cut my exposure to an aggravating culture, I turned off the radio in the car and almost entirely cut out watching sports.
Most significant for the way I began to live after my late teen years, I abstained from turning to the smartphone. When it was introduced, I didn’t buy one because it was costly, owned only by a tech-savvy few. By the time smartphones were ubiquitous, I hated them for the hold they had over their owners, like a twenty-first-century Ring of Power. I held onto my slide-phone as long as I could, and when my phone company discontinued service to dumbphones two years ago I bought a Lightphone. It makes calls and barely makes texts. Perfect.
Rolling back the dominance of technology in my own life and feeling disgust at the addiction I saw all around me changed my values. I began to see the time of my life as scarce and wanted to have something more enduring to show for it than familiarity with what was on television. I started caring more about “enjoyment” and less about “pleasure,” to use author Sherry Ning’s terms. “Pleasure,” she has written, “is passive and consumed.” By contrast, “Enjoyment demands you to participate and invest in the process of something.” I simplified what I really cared about to a few things: devoting undistracted attention to God, family, and friends; working diligently; being an active neighbor and churchman; learning from books; and encountering the physical world through gardening and outdoor exercise. I became suspicious of pursuing powers humans had never possessed before now offered by the new machines, such as instantaneous knowledge of whatever happened to distant so-and-so.
But I am humbled to recognize how far in the distance real virtue remains. I think it is right to regard as hideous the sight of every adult in the waiting room or every child at the bus stop glued to a phone, but my response is adulterated with buckets of self-righteousness.
My turned-up nose is not only obnoxious but also hypocritical, for I am not the untainted Luddite I fancy myself to be. Technology slithers into my life like a creeping vine, and I struggle to tame it.
Imposing rules on my tech use help to keep it under control, but I wonder if they are strict enough. We don’t have a television, but we stream shows and movies on Friday and Saturday nights. While I keep a handwritten daily planner and diary, I work on my computer by using it for writing and taking notes. I print most of the articles I read and do my pleasure reading in print books, but I often use e-books for work-related research. I try to find information from our home library before I resort to Google and place limits on my computer use, such as checking my work and personal email only once per day. But I still take all sorts of miscellaneous looks at my computer. Even a limited number of looks at weather or news makes for a lot of screen time. I’m as far from a social media “influencer” as one could possibly be, but I do have a Facebook account. Each day, I make one post and read the top post in my feed then get out of there, making for at most five minutes of use. The main reason I still hold that shred of social media is that getting rid of it would cut my last link with dozens of people with whom I once had a face-to-face relationship who now live far away. Still, this may be a concession to vice. I listen to jazz or classical music while I do thoughtful work and podcasts while I do routine chores. This use of my computer allows me to enjoy music, stay informed, and encounter new ideas, but it also means I tote a laptop all over the house and have less silence than maybe I should.
And then there are the times I fail to follow my own rules and principles. I have sat there slack-jawed, letting an Internet session go longer than I meant it to or searching for something at a time when I meant the Internet to be out of bounds. The tide of technological addiction has receded from where it once was, but it has not left me unchanged. I long more than I once did for the timelessly valuable things that the 1980s house of my early childhood left space for, but I am also incapable of doing without the benefits brought by the technological revolution of the last thirty years, and I imperfectly seek a balance between the two.
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