THE BLACK HOLE OF EMAIL-VERSE

 

Email changed many things. The word mail shouldn’t be confused with the mail of yore.

 

For one, email is supposedly delivered in seconds. This means that not getting a reply for many days (think--more than ten) can feel like an insult, specifically with personal emails.

 

Email goes into the ether and, without a physical presence, depends on some form of acknowledgement of receipt. In personal email, this means a reply. In business, it can be an auto-receipt. Without either, it’s in the who-knows-if cloud.

 

The other day, my email program let me know two personal emails bounced for some technical reason. I re-sent them, and they didn’t get a “bounce” message the second time. Later, both friends asked me why I had sent twice, as they got it the first time.

 

At the mercy of this non-physical world, I could only mumble something about the bounce notifications having to do with some protocol/permissions that someone somewhere on the interwebs explained in terms neither I nor my friends understand.

 

Marvelous thing, this email business. But I confess I feel helpless sometimes when I can’t understand or imagine its path to my dear ones or the professionals I am dealing with.

 

The mystery of carrier pigeons is, at least, something the mind’s eye can envision. Ditto for physical mail.

 

But email remains a black hole. It swallows, and when it works, it spits out.

PHONE PROGRESSION and PERSONAL EVOLUTION

 

The Israel I was born into had few personal/private phones. At that time, only physicians and government officials had a phone at home.

 

I was four when we got a line at our apartment, and we had to share it with a neighbor family. That meant any time the neighbors used the phone, ours would be dead. My father complained that their daughter was a teenager, and that meant (you guessed it) she was on the phone for hours. But who would this teenager be talking to when few families had phones?

 

Being the first two families in the building with phones also meant a line of neighbors at our door in the evenings asking to use our phone and each paying us the cost of a local call. It was a fixed equivalent of ten cents. In those days, one would never turn down a neighbor’s wish to talk on the phone to one of their relatives who were also lucky to have a phone. This meant we perennially had neighbors in our living room waiting for their turn. It was just fine.

 

About a year or two later, more lines popped up and we even got the neighbors with the teenage daughter off our shared line. The country was growing, and now most people had landlines into their homes.

Then came the modular phones, which meant a phone in every room. You’d think this provided privacy, but it didn’t because it was a single line and the dreaded click of a parent listening to my conversations (by then I was approaching the teen years) meant it was in fact less private.

 

Then came answering machines, and we didn’t run to answer the phone anymore because the machine would get it. Eventually the first mobile phones appeared, then the many lines to a single residence, and, you guessed it--- the smart phones. So smart, that they not only track us but listen to us.

 

By then I was living in the USA and our family was among the last to switch to smartphones. We were forced to when Verizon shut down the 3G network. I witnessed others who got a head start on these brilliant gizmos, carrying these little buggers from room to room, even sitting to dinner with their phone next to their plates.

This is exactly what I didn’t want to do or become. Me, a slave to my phone? No thanks.

 

We’re all caught up for the moment with phone conveniences. But I have learned a thing or two in the few years where others surfed smartly, and I stayed basic. I learned what I didn’t want and find that I now use my genius phone the way we used our first landline way back when. Ninety-five percent of the time it’s in a fixed place. It’s never “on me,” and definitely never ever at the dinner table. My phone is turned off every night. I disabled almost all notifications.  

 

Because I want to own a phone that doesn’t own me. I remember the days when life was richer because we were not awash in the phony (pun intended) notion that without a phone life’s bells cease ringing.

MACHINES AND (their) MACHINATIONS

 

March 28^th : many things happened on this day in history, but one less dramatic event caught my mind’s eye.

March 28, 1797 – Nathaniel Briggs patented a washing machine.

 

So what, you say. So many machines before and a whole lot more after, it’s a big yawn,

 

Evermore, we are not the drivers of machines but their slaves. If you ride public transportation or fly on planes, (machines) you will note that almost everyone is glued to their phones, (machines) and while we transport, it’s the machines that own us all the way.

We are located there, but we are not there. We are in our machines, increasingly serving their agendas, born largely of the greed or interests of other users.

 

Granted, this is an enslavement at will. The forced uses notwithstanding, (services and connections that don’t exist outside the world of the machines) we signed onto these dependencies ourselves.

I like my computer and especially email and WORD for my daily work. I like listening to recorded music, even if live music is often better. I’m as slavish to the mechanical world as anyone.

 

But something about it continues to cause me a low-level itch. What, I wonder, would it be like to cut all but the natural world out of my days if only for a few days?

 

I think about it, but short of taking rare Internet breaks I don’t do it.

Got to go and “do” the laundry now. I mean, my washing machine will do the doing, and I will sit here watching a concert given long ago and recorded on a machine.

©By Ken Benner