Rhinocrisy

I realized yesterday that I had never made my iPod rant here, and what else is a blog for, after all? So here it is.

Sometime back I came to the bus stop and had an epiphany forced upon me. Everyone had something attached to their ear - some had cell phones, but most had those familiar thin white wires, myelinated axon fibers running directly from their ears to their vital nerve centers: the small white boxes in their pockets. Each one of them was being fed their own private stream of sound, covering them in an invisible shell, hermetically sealing them off from the world around them, from the very people they were brushing shoulders with. At that moment I got down on my knees, laid my axe on the ground in front of me and raised my arms to the heavens, swearing by the name of Dyaus Pitr that I would never, ever join that cult.

I am, of course, not the first to note the ill effects of isolation caused by iPods. Andrew Sullivan has a very nice column on the subject in the Times Online, and a private school in Sydney went so far as to ban them. Quoth the principal: “It’s important for kids to be talking to one another at school, socialising and being part of a community. That’s why they come to school, to be connected.”

iPods are an exemplary phenomenon, a poster-gadget for the alienation our society seems to encourage; as a single manifestation they’re probably not, in and of themselves, worthy of close attention or ire. But I’ve always tended to latch onto particular archetypal examples as actual demons - the GAP as the embodiment of monotonous, sweatshop-produced trendwear, or SUVs as destroyers of the environment. This instantly makes my statements weaker, since the implied action (stop wearing GAP clothing, driving an SUV, and listening to an iPod) is not going to stop the problem. It is only indicative of it. Social isolation would continue exist even were everyone to take the buds out of their ears; everyone isn’t going to magically start talking to their neighbors or the guy standing next to them on the bus. But iPods do make things incrementally worse, and it’s really the death of a thousand cuts that we should fear. Catastrophe rarely emerges directly in front of us, roaring and tearing things apart like Godzilla. Usually it sneaks up upon us from behind, so quietly and gradually that we barely notice that the buildings have crumbled, the flood waters have risen, and we’re standing ankle-deep in flotsam and rubble.

There’s a whole host of choices available to us these days that allow us to defect to the hermetic world. Blogs, for example - you can read what you want and ignore what you dislike. Even the opinion you dislike usually comes through the baleen curtain of some ideologically aligned blog - you only have to listen to the echoes, never to the actual source sound. These kind of choices are always easy to make - why would I, indeed, choose the unpleasant, the difficult world that stings me and causes me discomfort? Better to gather the warmest bits of the world around myself and build a nice, soft cocoon, of the sounds I like, of the people I like, of the opinions that are like my own, of the world that is the way that I want to see it, and not as it actually is.

So this is the way we’re going to go: each to our own quiet depths, alone and dead to each other. Bye. Nice knowing you. I’ll see you in your YouTube video clip.

Noah, over at Max Udargo’s blog, has been chronicling his ordeals building that damn ark. Check it out in case you haven’t, yet. Parts one, two, and three, so far.