Porches are so passé.
They were once as necessary to any home as a bathroom, but for at least the last thirty years they have been completely forgotten, or reinvented in the back yard as a deck. They are like the Jitterbug, which though it is just about the most fun you can have standing up, is still, to most of us, little more than a piece of our parent’s history.
There is sadness in that my friends.
I blame the relentless advancement of technology for this. Porches were once the only place one could go to escape the hot, sticky dog days of summer. Once Willis Haviland Carrier determined that warm air blown over cold coils could control the temperature and humidity of an enclosed room, however, the only people left sitting on their front porches were smokers. Those who, having been ignominiously ejected from that cool, air conditioned space, were left to watch the wisps of gray smoke from their cigarettes dissipate in the stagnant air.
Sitting on the porch not only cooled you off (as much as that was possible), but it also gave you an opportunity to palaver with your neighbors. But if air conditioning had not already been in the process of ending that particular habit of nocturnal nattering, then radio was certainly doing its best to sever its jocular jugular. After David Sarnoff of RCA popularized radio and made it possible for most families to own at least one of those console behemoths, and both you and your neighbor had one, his infantile babbling suddenly became something you could turn off by turning on the radio.
And of course the more affordable radio became, the more radios a home had, the more splintered families became as individual tastes were given individual expression on individual radios.
Good bye dinner conversation, hello Fibber McGee and Molly.
Television followed the same general path of technological skullduggery as radio. If radio brought the family inside to the air conditioned comfort of their living room, thereby abandoning the breathless banter of their neighbors on front porches across the way, then TV did the same thing to the movie industry. Replicated across the breadth and depth of America, it pulled those same people, and hundreds of thousands of people just like them, from the congenial confines of a darkened movie theater to that same air conditioned room. Now, instead of listening to the static drone of “The Shadow” they watched the ludicrous lamentations of a fiery redhead in “I Love Lucy.”
The desertion of these movie goers did little more to the movie industry than to compel it to innovate and to attempt to improve upon the product it offered to its no longer adoring public. More importantly was what television did to those who traded the movie theater, with its throngs of popcorn munchers, for the darkened privacy or their living room, and later their bedrooms, as the number of TVs grew like the population of China. It splintered the larger public group of movie goers into smaller and smaller nuggets of TV watching humanity.
In short it did what radio did, only better. It isolated people from other people.
The technological advances of radios and TVs laid the groundwork for future generations of portable electrical whiz bang devices that allowed, yet again, the splintering of society. We all know what they were; 8 track tapes, cassette players, VHS tapes, DVDs. But, when compared to the glittering dome of the ubiquitous Internet, they were all like children constructing buildings with sticky popsicle sticks while envisioning the towering spire of an Empire State Building.
The Internet of course is the preeminent culprit responsible for the splintering of society. It has taken the technology of Radio and Television and added virtually every other communicative technology currently known and rolled it up in one convenient package. It is now possible to live, and some would say thrive, without benefit of human contact.
To those of you out there who even now are grabbing their computer monitors and throttling them as though it was my scrawny neck, let me just say this: chill.
I can’t be the only one who recognizes the difference between manipulating electrons to scroll text across a computer screen and a handshake, a pat on the back, or the faint brushing of cheeks to say, “It’s been awhile, so what have you been up to?”
Certainly that’s better than nothing, though, right? Better to scan the text scrolling across a computer screen than to remember, faintly, that last hello of so many years ago.
Maybe. Maybe not. The point of all this tripe is to suggest that over time it will become easier, even preferable, to manipulate those electrons than it will be to reach out and shake that hand.
I am almost certainly an alarmist. I do not want to be without the advances in technology I have spent these last minutes haranguing, but it would not take a monumental leap of the imagination to speculate that a future is possible in which human interaction becomes as mysterious a thing as the Jitterbug. It is not the stuff of Science Fiction, but probably where we will ultimately find ourselves.
I am as solitary an individual as most of you will probably ever meet, but even I do not want to be a part of that world.
