Luddite buys Google speaker … lives to tell tale
Google Home device may actually be the first feminist tech device
I’ve written about the dangers and risks of tech a few times for this column; the most recent of these was called “Less social media may be good for all.” This title wasn’t my idea; my thinking was (and is) that no social media for kids is definitely good for all. I suspect an editor felt that a more measured tone would temper the shocking nature of all my Luddite crazy.
But I’m not really a Luddite: I bought a robot speaker thingie. And not only is it fabulous (podcasts! BBC Radio 4! Every song, like, ever!), but I think it just might be the first feminist tech device.
The day after the speaker was installed, I was trying to describe a song to my husband that the kids and I had heard on the radio because the host had been waxing rhapsodic about its time signature changes guided so beautifully by Steve Gadd. My husband used to be a working drummer, so he appreciates the Gadd. And then I stopped and said, “Wait a minute! Hey Google! Play ‘We Belong Together’ by Rickie Lee Jones!” It started playing the live version. “Hey Google! Stop! Play ‘We Belong Together’ with Steve Gadd on drums!” It played a YouTube recording of someone playing the drum part of the song very loudly. “Hey Google! Stop! Play ‘We Belong Together’ by Rickie Lee Jones, the original recording!” No, it wasn’t instantaneous, but we still got there in the end. I looked proudly at my husband: “Cool, right?” He answered in his usual deadpan monotone: “I can’t even remember what life was like before this.”
Putting his sarcasm aside, the truth was that we’d managed to harness a family moment from earlier, when the kids and I were in the car debating what the time signatures were and how the changes reflected the meaning of the lyrics, and then piggyback another family moment on top of that, this time including my husband. The moment became richer — more fleshed out, more inclusive.
The next morning, my middle daughter asked what I was humming, and I said “I’M SO HAPPY YOU ASKED! OK Google! Play ‘La Mer’ by Charles Trenet!” And then we listened to Bobby Darin’s version and talked about why hit songs in one country might be translated for another country.
Later that day, my six-year-old son asked me, a propos of nothing, how to spell banjo. “Do you know what a banjo sounds like?” I asked. “No.” Cue teachable moment! “OK Google: play banjo music.” It played some weird synthesizer music. “Hey Google — stop. Play Steve Martin on banjo.” It played “King Tut” from one of Martin’s comedy sketches. “Hey Google! Stop! Play Bella Fleck and the Flecktones.” And there was Fleck playing his brilliant banjo version of “The Final Countdown,” which makes it sound like a medieval folksong.
How does any of this help women, specifically? Well, the reality is that women are still overwhelmingly the default parents and caregivers, shouldering more of the child-rearing and housekeeping than men. It’s not how we want it to be, but it persists for a variety of reasons I’ve already written about in this section. The point is that, as someone who regularly finds herself in the middle of a variety of household and/or parenting tasks while still trying to actively parent, I’ve found that any teachable moments that could be enriched with tech have been thwarted by two things.
First, walking over to the computer a couple of rooms away to look things up on YouTube is a series of small failures just waiting to happen: honestly, I’m almost always too busy and distracted to make that trip. The speaker, however, I can command while making lunch or combing burrs out of the dogs’ fur. I can call to it from the sofa — no need to unsettle the kids from our cuddle or story time.
Second: if I actually do drop everything to venture online (kids following like eager ducklings), we’ll have to navigate past advertising and click bait and all the things designed to divert and addict us, and suddenly half an hour has gone by and we’ve been enticed into a video-watching chain, the severing of which will surely end with whining and pleading for “just one more.”
No one tries to grab the speaker and abscond with it to download “Minecraft” or scroll inanely through emoji menus, as happens with the iPod and iPad. Rather than pinging for attention, or flashing lights, colours and sounds to demand our fixation, the speaker is wonderfully closed and inert — a small, smooth grey totem sitting on the kitchen counter, waiting patiently for a spark of human curiosity or interest it might help along for a moment or two, before it falls wonderfully quiet again.