[Moon-dæg] Thoughts on Screens (A Break for Re-Alignment)

Introduction
Screens
Privacy
Closing

{To realign the four part series that are usually written for each Monday in the lunar month, this week’s entry for Moon-dæg is a standalone. Image from Wikipedia.}

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Introduction

Great comedy should make you think as much as laugh. Greg Proops’ The Smartest Man in The World is a good example of this kind of comedy - even if much of the thought provoking stuff that Greg speaks of is done during the “boring, preachy part” of (nearly) each episode. Nonetheless, something from episode 149B is strangely thought-provoking.

While answering a question (starting around the 47:15 mark), Greg paraphrases a part of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: Guy Montag’s wife Mildred asking him “when can we get more screens?”

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Screens

As a person born in the mid 80s, I can still remember what life was like when the only screen that time was spent in front of was the TV screen. Whether it was a broadcast, or a video game, or something off the VCR. Computer screens were around, but they were generally just used for homework.

This isn’t about tooting my horn and saying that those days were better, but rather about wondering if something was lost as screens have became more and more ubiquitous. To speak in Marxist terms, things that are now done on screens but that could be done without it - like the writing of this blog article for instance - are being separated from their creator by these viewing machines.

Yes, it’s my hand typing these words, but they’re being put into my word processor in the same Times New Roman typeface that anyone else with a word processor uses. If I were to hand-write this entry, I might not be able to transcribe it, but it would have a different and unique feel, written in a font that is very much my own.

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Privacy

Perhaps it’s a matter of privacy. If you write something on a piece of paper, then you have almost complete control over that paper. There’s really very little that can happen to that paper that’s outside of your control, either directly or indirectly.

Typing something up in a word processor, though. There’s less privacy there, the threat of viruses, or of remote operators manipulating your system through a hack of some kind make this definite. Plus, anything that only exists digitally is much more difficult to entirely secure, since its existence is much more ethereal.

After all, what you’re reading right now are words, but really these words are made up of pixels, and those pixels are made up of signals that tell them to be one color or another.

So not only is there a lack of privacy on the modern computer, or at leas the threat of it, there’s also a certain lack of concrete-ness - it all looks solid, but at it’s base its all very abstract.

Yet, strangely enough, there’s more trust inherent in the lack of privacy and concreteness related to digital content. Although, maybe trust and the belief that other people will be decent enough to not destroy your online, wired, connected world are the substances that will be used for the new walls that will go up between people, the walls that will come to replace the wood and the drywall that have all been circumscribed by invisible connections traveling through wires or airwaves.

"'Fences make good neighbors,'" as Robert Frost noted, and hopefully fences made of trust and discretion will be more effective than those of wood and steel.

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Closing

Check back here on Wednesday for an entry on the newest news, and on Friday for a hunt for the good in Manos: The Hands of Fate!

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