In With the `In Crowd'

Cable World, Sept 11, 2000 by Jim Barthold

Well, Labor Day's past, and summer's gone. And what a summer it was -- unrelenting dry heat in the West; unrelenting wet cold in the East.

What's that? You didn't notice? You spent your time browsing the Web -- and don't cable modems make this so much faster and more convenient? -- and watching Survivor -- and thank heavens MTV had those self-centered kids in New Orleans to get its seasonal attention -- or talking on your cell phone to your friend across the mall to burn those billions of minutes you buy every month.

Whatever. With all the indoor options available, you probably missed what was going on outdoors. It's not just the summer; this goes on all year long. Technology makes it more attractive to be indoors with gadgets than out with Mother Nature. You want vibrancy? Forget those fall leaves or spring blossoms; just turn up the screen's color. It's easy. It's on the remote, and if you don't like the picture, you can always change the channel. You don't even have to get out of your chair. Winter Wonderland? Isn't that on channel 65 at 8?

That's pretty much what Adelphia's VP-public and community affairs Tony Accamando was saying the other day, although he was much more gentlemanly and much less snide.

"Frankly," he told me, "I have some concerns about all this high technology because I think we have to be careful not to desensitize our society and become so dependent on technology that we lose personal skills."

As a techno-geek who pounces on the Sunday newspaper to read Circuit City, Best Buy and Staples circulars to see what kind of gadgets I can buy to frustrate my wife and trump my technologically competitive friends, my first reaction was to sneer.

Technological desensitization? Hasn't hurt me.

I'm a lifelong, card-carrying geek. As a teenager I surreptitiously tape recorded the family opening Christmas gifts. In the days of reel-to-reel tape recorders, it was a technological feat in itself to be surreptitious. It paid dividends when I taped my sister red-handed -- red-voiced? -- opening a present she later swore she didn't touch. There was no disguising the crinkle of plastic wrapping paper or that little-girl voice sing-songing, "Now my Fuzzy Wuzzy will grow hair."

Being anal, I've kept the tape all these years and use it to torture my sister in front of her children. And no, her Fuzzy Wuzzy -- unlike the marvelous Mr. T Chia Pet I gave her last year -- did not grow hair. As my parents warned, you couldn't indiscriminately open the packaging.

Despite working from a home office, I do still have some social skills, so I politely agreed with Tony, throwing in the occasional "uh huh" and "oh yeah" and "don't I know it?" as he questioned society's growing dependence on gadgets.

He agrees it's a positive that cable's technology expands vistas but cautions, "That's not to say all this is good for young people. Often we find young people in front of the computer and not outside playing or interacting socially with other kids."

Tony has a point. He has multiple points. We keep making it easier for people of all ages to know what's going on without really experiencing it. In the East, how many know that the so-called "killer" hurricane season is not materializing? How many know, that is, without consulting the Weather Channel or, better yet, Weather.com?

In the West, how many know it's hot and have smelled the burning wildfires? Or have you just heard about it on CNN or CNBC?

Are we becoming a pasty-faced, red-eyeballed society of watchers, not doers?

"How much technology is too much technology?" Tony had the gumption to ask this magazine's technology editor. "You can go down the line and say faster and more is better, but is it?"

Yeah, it is. It's better to have a cable modem than a dial-up. It's better to have a digital picture than analog. It's better to have the Weather Channel than Action News. It's better ...

"Somehow you never see people on their decks or porches anymore," he said whimsically.

I was out on my deck less often this summer than normal, but that had to do with rotten weather and a dearth of good summer reading, excepting the final installment of Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolo series, which I devoured.

"We're going faster, getting bigger, having more. But is it making us less human?" Tony wonders.

Even I, an antisocial hermit, hope not. I would have made greater use of the outdoors this summer if the weather had been more forgiving.

Of course, I would have had my laptop and my cordless phone and ...

So what do you think? Is more technology good, bad or is it just the way people use it? I think technology is like any addiction: If you can't handle it, get help; otherwise leave me alone -- I don't have a problem as I sit here on Labor Day weekend writing this column.