Historical February–March 2000 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
In 1919, the famous journalist Lincoln Steffens visited the new Soviet Union, and upon his return said, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” Ignoring his ability to prognosticate, I felt a little the same way when I recently returned from a brief trip to San Francisco. Along with eleven students and two other administrators from Crossroads School, I had the opportunity to attend the National Association of Independent Schools People of Color Conference and Student Diversity Leadership Conference.
During my flight and while in San Francisco, I witnessed the continuing merger of technology and humanity, and if nothing else, it works and works hard.
However, as I walked the streets of San Francisco, (I did not see Karl Malden anywhere), I wondered how this new technology would affect those of us who choose to live in cities.
On the flight out, I had one of those experiences where you know you are in the middle of something symbolic.
I sat next to the window blissfully reading my Howard Gardner tome unencumbered by conversation with the stranger next to me. Fortunately for me, there was no way that I would be disturbed since she was listening to her music on a Walkman, so we existed in amiable silence.
As I read and she hummed quietly and moved her head back and forth, we both found our attention wandering to the person on the aisle.
He pulled out his hand held DVD player, placed the tiny earphones in his ears, inserted a disc, and watched some Arnold Schwarzenegger adventure movie while the two of us leaned over and gawked.
A Connecticut Yankee had plopped down next to the two of us and just went about his business while we still lived in the technological dark ages. Sitting there, the three of us formed a picture of techno-evolution: I was the literary Cro-Magnon on one end, the woman in the middle was a hi-fidelity form of higher life, and the two of us could see what, if we were efit enough to survive, we would become. Once in San Francisco, I continued to be struck how our technological apparatuses have influenced how we do something as basic as walk.
On my first morning as I returned from Starbucks (there were five in less than two blocks from my hotel-this is truly the new global superpower as Dr. Evil should have realized), I saw a young man in a suit that appeared to be talking to himself, discussing what sounded like stock transactions.
As we approached each other, I realized that he was on his phone but the only way that I could tell was by the tiny earphone and little piece hanging down in front of his face. (You know the kind that people on the home shopping channel or the people on television ads wear.) Everyday in San Francisco, I saw more and more people wearing them, and it seemed after a while, that nobody was talking to the person next to them but everyone was animatedly speaking with someone on the phone. Many years ago when my wife and I were on our honeymoon, we enjoyed the company of another newly wed couple where the husband was an economist, who spent all of his time on the computer communicating with other economists and creating econometric models, and the wife was an anthropologist who spent all of her time observing people. Many of our conversations centered on whether it actually takes face-to-face communication to define a community.
The new husband insisted that with the advent of e-commerce, e-mail, chat rooms, and the research available on the Internet, we have created a post-interpersonal community that will be larger, more diverse and more global than any community in history. People will communicate with more, not less; people and the cyber community will be better than anything that we have had will.
The wife was dumbstruck and horrified by this vision of everyone sitting in front of their computers and not speaking to other people, and felt that if this picture came to be a reality, we would lose any kind of human community we have.
When adults discuss the possibility of a “virtual school” with children working on the computer at home instead of attending a school, they immediately mention the service that schools perform of socializing children and teaching them how to interact with others. Similarly, several colleges have recently expressed concern that students are spending so much time emailing each other that they are missing class or failing to join in activities that bring people together.
As more and more adults have the opportunity to work at home in front of computers, what will replace the water cooler where we meet and discuss those awesome Rams?
I read recently that in the very near future in California, a majority of people will work in non-traditional settings like the home and not need to go into an office. Will the freedom to work at odd hours liberate us to spend time with our children or engage in tasks in our communities during the day? Or will it make all of us work even more hours since we will never leave our office? Maybe the increasing technologization of our world may signal a return to cities as people hunger to be in close proximity to other people and to things to do.
If we work at home at night, we can get our hands dirty in the community garden during the day or take our kids to the new Skinker-DeBaliviere playground.
If we spend all day on the computer, we will need to go over to our neighbor’s house, and walk there in the process, to get our conversation fix. if we can carry our laptops and plug in anywhere, why not work at Kaldis or the new Genesis coffee house at the corner of Delmar and Des Peres, and take a break by speaking to the stranger next to us. How long can we look at movies on tiny hand held recorders before we rush to the Tivoli to see the real McCoy? Maybe there is an inverse relationship going on here.
The more we join in a landless, ethereal, virtual community, the more we will need to plant ourselves in an on the ground, person to person community, and where better for immediate and intimate interaction but in cities.
The economist and the anthropologist might both be right.
We need both communities, we benefit from both, and by having both, we continue to redefine what it means to be human.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, February–March 2000.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Archival transcription note: Printed phrase says better than anything that we have had will; source anomaly retained without invented correction.
Original source: SD_Times2000_02.pdf, printed page(s) 5; PDF page(s) 5.
