The Overload of Modern Times

Thoreau

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived….I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”  Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1849)

Walden Pond

During junior year in high school I recall the passionate introduction by our wonderful English teacher, Mrs. Bea Johnson, to Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden. It was 1963, and the digital age was yet only a glimmer of what it is in 2016, but the message was immediately a profound one for me, a gangly teenager with rather low self-esteem, and with social skills that made Silas Marner look gregarious. It wasn’t that Thoreau was a hermit. He was in his Walden years less than two miles from the City of Concord, Massachusetts, and his ten by fifteen-foot cabin occasionally accommodated as many as thirty guests at once. His solitude was by choice and more about attaining some sort of perspective and balance in an ever busier and noisier world that, by then, had trains and the telegraph.

telegraph

Walden Pond was a place where Thoreau was better able to connect with nature and his own thoughts without what at that time seemed to him a bombardment of noise and busyness of less than profound importance to his own psyche. I wonder what he would think of the constant infringements today upon humanity via cellphones, endless texting, neon signs, the barrage of media messages every few moments urging us to purchase cars, medications, and electronic devices with equal zeal, not to mention the never-ending coverage of natural disasters, human stories about crime, war, massacres and mudslinging in politics around the globe. In this deluge of information (requested or not) and entertainment of the modern age, we have developed numbing devices in our brains that separate quickly the TV images of toilet paper commercials from the news features about beheadings of American journalists by Isis. It’s how we survive the mountains of messages thrown at us without ceasing.

media overload

At least subliminally, we have evolved a kind of off-switch without which our minds would almost certainly go into overdrive. This unconscious but perhaps necessary mode of protective desensitizing has come about by our seeing televised images almost daily (sometimes hourly) of everything from graphic ravages of war to hundreds of people being swept away by tsunamis, images with which the sensitive mind cannot hope to deal, especially in such frequency.

media overload 2

Thoreau, if he were somehow transported to our time, could easily go mad, which makes me think further about how much more technology will intrude upon and perhaps stifle our humanity over the next century. Is there a limit to the illusions about technology’s solving all our problems and that we are more in control through electronics, when technology is controlling us instead? The word “upgrade” has become a term of almost religious reverence in our time, and many of us leap without question at every new device or “improvement” that insists it will be leaving us behind if we don’t install it right away. Everything seems to be about being further “connected” in a world where many teenagers are becoming almost android in their devotion and attachment to devices like cellphones and actions like texting, reducing our language to its lowest terms, so that at last we seem to be more disconnected than we can imagine. The delusion of being constantly “tuned in” and forever in contact is already, I believe, having negative effects upon personal growth, social skills, and contemplative thought. We all need to be asking the cost, not in dollars but in terms of what being connected really means, and if there are limits to human beings becoming automatons themselves through a seemingly eternal flood of external stimuli that can often inform but also smother the creativity that is such a vital part of being human.

Overload

The “marrow of life” to which Thoreau referred is not necessarily to be found through technology alone. Other writers after Thoreau, like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein have shown other imagined future scenarios through their fiction, based upon trends current to their times and upon human nature itself, which is at last something that cannot be “plugged in” or use batteries. A balance must be found between the benefits of technology and the most profound and timeless meanings of what it is to be human in the first place.    John Bolinger    4/20/16

overload 3

About John

About John John Bolinger was born and raised in Northwest Indiana, where he attended Ball State University and Purdue University, receiving his BS and MA from those schools. Then he taught English and French for thirty-five years at Morton High School in Hammond, Indiana before moving to Colorado, where he resided for ten years before moving to Florida. Besides COME SEPTEMBER, Journey of a High School Teacher, John's other books are ALL MY LAZY RIVERS, an Indiana Childhood, and COME ON, FLUFFY, THIS AIN'T NO BALLET, a Novel on Coming of Age, all available on Amazon.com as paperbacks and Kindle books. Alternately funny and touching, COME SEPTEMBER, conveys the story of every high school teacher’s struggle to enlighten both himself and his pupils, encountering along the way, battles with colleagues, administrators, and parents through a parade of characters that include a freshman boy for whom the faculty code name is “Spawn of Satan,” to a senior girl whose water breaks during a pop-quiz over THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Through social change and the relentless march of technology, the human element remains constant in the book’s personal, entertaining, and sympathetic portraits of faculty, students, parents, and others. The audience for this book will certainly include school teachers everywhere, teenagers, parents of teens, as well as anyone who appreciates that blend of humor and pathos with which the world of public education is drenched. The drive of the story is the narrator's struggle to become the best teacher he can be. The book is filled with advice for young teachers based upon experience of the writer, advice that will never be found in college methods classes. Another of John's recent books is Mum's the Word: Secrets of a Family. It is the story of his alcoholic father and the family's efforts to deal with or hide the fact. Though a serious treatment of the horrors of alcoholism, the book also entertains in its descriptions of the father during his best times and the humor of the family's attempts to create a façade for the outside world. All John's books are available as paperbacks and Kindle readers on Amazon, and also as paperbacks at Barnes & Noble. John's sixth book is, Growing Old in America: Notes from a Codger was released on June 15, 2014. John’s most recent book is a novel titled Resisting Gravity, A Ghost Story, published the summer of 2018 View all posts by John →
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One Response to The Overload of Modern Times

  1. Jim says:

    I can’t picture you doing alone times in a cabin in the woods, no matter the motive or how frustrated you may be because your cell phone won’t turn on, or off or the microwave has unreadable labels or whatever technological hurdle you are facing on a particular day.

    Small cabins in the woods have spiders.

    Henry David Thoreau probably had a higher tolerance for spiders and outhouses than you do.

    However, I can set you up with a tent in the back yard if you wish, anything for you my dear, so that you can quiet those demons that modern technology has birthed.

    Sometimes all we need is a pair of headphones and our favorite album playing so that we don’t hear the sirens in the distance or notice the traffic on the street outside our window. Humans are remarkably adaptable, and I’m not sure I subscribe to the theory that the world is too busy now to support life worth living. There are lots of opportunities to take a breath, step away, recharge – whether one lives in a small town with one gas station or a block from Times Square.

    We only need be brave enough to find our opportunities and learn to use them.

    I think that modern kids are simply not being taught to enjoy being alone with themselves.

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