Virtually yours: Are screens replacing us?
The creative imagination and technical ingenuity with which people are adapting to and transforming our locked-down condition are inspiring reminders of humanity’s remarkable resilience and inventiveness under pressure. Artists, writers, musicians, teachers and entrepreneurs of diverse persuasions are producing all kinds of entertainment and products and services of great utility in getting us through our endless days and nights of forced confinement. Apps and platforms galore keep us connected to friends and loved ones across town or at other ends of the earth. Then again, some friends of mine in the teaching profession are lamenting the mandate to move their classes online.
Not only is it stressful to learn the new technical skills to manage the formal demands of remote learning, but the nature and quality of student-teacher (and student-student and teacher-teacher) relations and the loss of unmediated interaction, not to mention the extracurricular revelations of being on campus together, where random encounters and casual conversations account for some of the most valuable social and pedagogical digressions, are greatly diminishing the informal benefits of high school and college experience.
Virtual teaching and learning are probably better than none at all, but as our social and cultural lives migrate to screens and our incredibly shrinking worlds are extended only by our devices, we are in danger of becoming permanently dependent and dehumanized beyond recognition, like kids so accustomed to texting on their phones that they don’t know how to have a conversation.
As someone deliberately several steps behind and intentionally removed from the latest gadgets, and a user of the computer only as absolutely necessary, and with no television in residence, and no mobile device, I am no doubt missing a lot of information and diversion, but I also feel a lot calmer than I would if my phone were going off all the time or I were trying to keep up with all the bad news fit to tweet. I find the silence of the prevailing stillness centering. I am able to feel grounded in a personal space happily free of gratuitous agitation. I can even sometimes follow a thought, as in these columns, from conception to contradiction to something like resolution, or at least an approximation of an idea.
I’m glad that others are able to find comfort and stimulation and helpful distraction in the infinite universe of the internet, but sometimes I just want to sit quietly in a room and read a book or step out for a walk beyond the reach of calls and messages. The pandemic that has captured and imprisoned us and held us hostage to its threat of infection is reducing us to virtual replicas of ourselves, little boxes on screens that are replacing our physical beings with persuasive representations but not quite convincing simulacra. This reduced reality may improve on an otherwise intolerable isolation, but what if we become so accustomed to its convenience that we forget more actual pleasures?
I am constantly receiving notices of one event or another available on the shrunken screen of my laptop, but alluring as they sometimes seem I find myself forgoing them for other forms of doing nothing. For example the annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association, or ALTA, the only organization I belong to, and where over the years I’ve met some of my favorite and most interestingly literate, intelligent, artistic and eccentric friends, will be held this year online instead of in a hotel, and all the panels, readings, workshops, speeches, roundtables and awards ceremonies will mean nothing without the coffee breaks, the personal conversations over lunch or drinks in the hotel bar, the groups spontaneously forming and going out to a restaurant someone has recommended.
To be abstracted into scheduled formal virtual events is to lose the chance of actually meeting someone who might enrich your life in ways that have only tangentially to do with the announced topic and that will never fit on a screen.