https://www.danerickson.net/electrical-digital/
Maybe I’ve just become a cynical and grumpy old man, but sometimes it feels like things electrical, and now digital, are completely unnatural.
Before you freak out about how much electricity, and now the Internet, have changed our world for good, I know. Living in a pre-electric world was a much harder existence, but perhaps a bit simpler in some ways. I’m thankful for both electricity and the Internet. But I often wonder if we’ve really just fucked ourselves up?
We can now produce unlimited bright light whenever we want. We can turn night into day. And many people do just that. They stay up until wee hours under electric lights while staring at blue light. I’m guilty. And we all know how this artificial light can screw up our sleep patterns. If you live in the city, when was the last time you could see the Milky Way at night?
Electricity has turned the world into a place that never stops. We are awake and burning 24/7. Before electricity more people lived by the natural rhythms of the sun. And I might assume that was better for the Earth.
I’m a musician. Truth be told, one reason I dislike playing electric guitar vs. acoustic is this: There are too many damned cords in the way. The grumpy old man in me hates cords. They get twisted and tangled constantly. I remember I used to love setting up a new stereo system when I was a teenager. Now I dread setting up anything that includes a mess of cords. It’s annoying and unnatural.
If you know a little bit about analogue vs. digital signals, you know there’s quite a difference. Analogue recording actually reproduces the sound or the image being recorded. Digital recording turns the content into little bits of information. When we watch or listen to anything on the Internet, we only get a decoded replication of the original. Granted, that decoded replica is usually perfect, but maybe that’s part of the problem.
Perfection is not truly possible by humans. So that fact that digital sounds, images, filters, etc. are perfect replicas of the original is humanly unnatural.
We can take this a step further and look at how we present ourselves on social media. None of us, and I mean not one single fucking one of us presents honest representations of ourselves on the Internet. Everything we say, do, and show goes through our own filters. We often create what we believe is the best image of ourselves, leaving out the negative. We have become disembodied voices and images. In a sense, we ourselves are no longer real as we assume digital personalities on social media.
Then there’s another one of my pet peeves: logins and passwords. How many different logins and passwords have you had over the years? How many times have you forgot one? Just like a mess of twisted cords, continually having to use logins and passwords just doesn’t feel natural to me.
So, the electrical/digital world is artificial. Some of us who remember the world before the Internet may occasionally long for things to go back to the way they used to be. I know I do. In fact, I often toy with the idea of going dark online after I retire. I doubt I will, and I’m not even sure it would be possible.
So then, the next best option is to make the best of these tools that defy nature. And by that, there are a couple of important points:
I encourage you to be conscious of the fact that the electronic/digital world is not really a natural world. It might be becoming our new norm, especially in the current pandemic. But we should always make a point to step away from these unnatural options.