The Delirium Tremens of Technology

Since my wife is an earlier riser than I am, I often hear about breaking news stories while still in the groggy state of alphaland. Last Friday morning, I awoke to the news of Frank Sinatra’s passing, as “Come Fly With Me” blared through the fog of my slumbering consciousness. On Tuesday, I was informed that a satellite had spun out of control and that life as we know it would never be the same . . . for the next day or two anyway.

It seems that PanAmSat’s Galaxy IV satellite decided to try a triple lutz 23,000 miles up in space, leaving upward of 40 million Americans to face the slings and arrows of life without their pagers. As the story unfolded the news worsened. The Chinese Television Network might lose some of its satellite feed. Travelers might have to do without CNN’s Airport Network news. (Fortunately, Starbucks was unaffected.) CBS, relying heavily on Galaxy IV to transmit its feeds nationwide, was threatened. My God, what would we do if “Sonny & Me: Cher Remembers” was disrupted? Fortunately NBC had a backup so the “Seinfeld” final episode rerun would go on as scheduled. Thank heaven, the end of the world was averted once again.

OK, I do realize that there are some serious repercussions for medical doctors, hospitals and the communication of vital, perhaps even lifesaving, information involving critical care. But come on, we’re talking about pagers here. The phones still work. Remember telephones? You know, where doctors, nurses and patients actually talk to one another.

The problem is not with the Galaxy IV. Technologies go wrong all the time; that’s what toll-free complaint phone service lines are for--where you get to wade your way through a complex maze of recorded messages, wait an hour for a technician and then have him ask you inane questions like, “Did you plug it in?”

The problem is not the technologies; it is our dependence on them. No doubt Paleolithic hunters cursed their snapped bows and broken arrows, and medieval monks became vexed with their leaky quill pens, but only late-20th-century Americans would file a class-action lawsuit against a company for technology addiction. Remember when America Online was flooded with customers when they made their one-low-price-fits-all offer and for a couple of months they couldn’t reliably deliver Internet service? Hey people, what’s the suffix of e-mail? The post office is still in business. The phones are still working.

The trouble with posing the rhetorical question, “What did we do before technology?” is that it is a little like asking addicts what they did before drugs. Drugs are not the problem; addiction is.

And we’ve become addicted to technology. The delirium tremens has set in. We need our daily fix of television news, e-mail messages, pager-communications and cellular phone calls. We don’t just want to reach out and touch someone, we need to. Yes, a hundred years ago people did just fine without all this stuff. But that was then and them, this is now and us.

We are codependent with our technologies, and it is an addiction that cannot be broken without breaking the complex chain of technology that runs the modern world. But it is not a disease-dependency, so when technologies go wrong, don’t whine about it, live with it. Don’t curse the darkness, light a candle.