This week I felt it entirely necessary to buy myself a huge computer monitor—though not the largest one that was available. As my eyesight sinks slowly in the West (floaters not withstanding), I could no longer endure my twenty-two inch screen. My new one is twenty-seven inches, and just about fits on my desk. The thirty-two would have been too much—and this feels like I’m typing on a billboard as it is. Plus, this was two hundred dollars cheaper.
As with other improvements in technology, there often comes a corresponding lack of satisfaction. In 2003, I was perfectly happy with a fifteen-inch screen. The world of computing was fresh and new to me, and I was about to embark on a world of discovery—eBay, blogging, The Big Broadcast with Rich Conaty. Those were the fun things. I knew of Rich, having heard his program over the airwaves on AM radio in both the early 1980s and late 1990s, but discovering his program online was possibly the best thing that happened to me in that decade. In the course of it, I got to know Rich, launch my own radio program, and interview him for it before the decade’s end.
The commercial blandishments of the internet of twenty years ago were fewer. Ads would pop up unbidden on the screen, but there was a rogue air to those appeals. They were piratical, certainly shady, but blatant. The baked in algorithm now prevailing was just a soon-to-be billionaire’s dream. The notion of Citizen as Sitting Duck had not been explored. There was a sense that everything you looked at wasn’t being used to sell something to you—nor was there any incentive to keep you on the site. Not that there wasn’t an inherently addictive quality to scrolling for your heart’s desire on eBay; you could indeed stay up all night looking at the World’s Garage Sale. That effect was not calculated—it just happened, particularly if you were a collector. And how I did collect!
The product is no longer what any advertiser is selling—the trade is in human eyeballs, even bleary and astigmatic ones like mine. The incentive is now to keep you watching and scrolling in an endless loop of intermittent reinforcement. Adding to the profit is that the ads are no longer confined to your clunky desktop. The advertising—via the calculated time suck—is portable and follows you to bed and to the bathroom.
The awful internet will not let you go. I have no smart phone but I find myself being thrown images of desire on Facebook—no, I’m not talking about dirty pictures. As I sit late at night, preparing to shut down the machine until the next day, I am assailed by material designed to keep me watching and scrolling. Mark Zuckerberg keeps throwing photos of old houses at me (usually designated as “deserted” or “demolished in 1957”), old cars (which I have come to loathe—the 1949 Pontiac looks like a clown shoe), click-baity list articles (“You Need to Throw Out These 35 Things NOW!”), and miles and miles of “restoration” videos, in which someone sandblasts the rust off an old screwdriver. I am particularly susceptible to that last genre, much to my everlasting discredit.
If you have and use a smart phone, you have no doubt been assailed by TikTok. The whole point of TikTok is to keep you watching TikTok. TikTok is like nothing so much as a television in which the remote has been commandeered by a hyperactive child. Your eyeballs can not focus away from it. Maybe the little brat will light on something good, finally. I have thus far managed to avoid the lure of a flat phone, but I know if I succumbed I would feel not so much delighted as used by the application.
Facebook, on which I linger with others of my age and blood pressure, has something called “Stories” which as just as maddening as TikTok but sometimes without sound or even motion. One might give you something to read and take it way before you’ve finished reading it. This is the equivalent of that same hyperactive child snatching a book out of your hand. But why would you need a book? You have oodles of online content, curated for your particular taste (by the algorithm). Oh, and here’s a 1952 Chevy! Vroom, vroom!
I used to be fascinated by television. I had a TV in my room from the time I was ten years old and I watched everything. I watched cartoons, situation comedies, and old movies—and all those commercials. I grew so weary of relentless television by my teens that I unplugged my set and stuck it in the closet. I still can’t bear to sit through commercial broadcast television over 40 years later—it’s even more annoying than I remember, which is saying something.
How I felt about TV then is how I begin to feel about my computer now. I am here by necessity, though I feel compelled to know what my online acquaintances are thinking. I also like to have a place to deploy topical humor, some of which may not go over well in this column—and some of it would be quite stale by my publication date. But lately I find I am using my computer to express how much I resent the ubiquity of computers. Like everything else in life, they were fun until they weren’t. Now they’re everywhere, including in your pocket and soon to be in your dreams. To say that they will ultimately be doing your job is a given.
At least I now have a large enough screen to see what I’ve gotten myself into.
