The Web of Technology, Stranded

Today I had an experience that started me to thinking. I took a trip into unfamiliar territory west of Portland—if you don’t go there every week, there are always houses in places there were none the last time you were there. So just as a precaution, I cranked up the little navigation app on my Droid phone. This picture represents several steps up, but I don't have a picture of me using my Droid to navigate, so it will have to do.

Now Bette does most of my navigating and I like that best because she has a really pretty voice—that is, by the way, the first thing I ever learned about her by experiencing it—but Bette is off doing something today. The voice on my Droid (there’s no reason not to call her Anne, I guess) isn’t very nice. It has a harsh mechanical diction to it. On the other hand, Anne gives directions EXACTLY the way I like to get them from someone I can’t ask any further questions.

Anne says, “Turn left on Oleson Road (which she pronounces correctly, with only two syllables) in one mile.” When I get close, she says, “Turn left on Oleson Road and continue on Oleson Road for point seven miles.” She even says “Stay to the right” and “Take the right fork” and other more sophisticated things. Although she is only a Droid app, she’s really good.

But then I got to noticing something. When I am finding my way to a place I haven’t visited before, I pay attention to everything. That’s not a program or a plan; it’s just what I do. Without thinking about it, I notice the road signs—not just the ones that describe where I am going—but all the ones that assure me everything is where it ought to be. I’m going to Bethany Center so Beaverton ought to be over there (and it is) and Hillsboro ought to be out there (and it is) and all is well. I notice where the sun is; or, it’s May in Oregon, where it brightest part of the clouds is. I notice how much water is on the pavement. I notice whether there are Red-winged Blackbirds in that patch of cattails. I probably shouldn’t, but I do. I notice whether I am coming to a commercial area or into a school zone.

Driving with Anne, I notice less of all those. Or I did today. Why?

Well, nothing against her. Her job is to know where I am, where I am going, and what my options are along the way. She does that. On the other hand, she gives me a lot of superfluous guidance, as I noted above. She doesn’t break in to reassure me that I am still on Oleson Road, as if I were concerned that I had wandered away, but she does things that are almost like that. She provides a web made up of anticipation, specific instruction, and next step instruction and I rely on that web. When I don’t have her, I rely on a web of my own making, which comprises the distances to cities whose locations I know, attention to the road surface, attention to the driving implications of the area, like a school zone, and so on.

So, it’s my web or hers. I really think mine is better. I also think it is better for me to be constructing one than to be receiving one. On the other hand, hers is so specific and it is hard not to confuse specificity with accuracy. Digital watches always LOOK more accurate than analog watches. And the regular anticipation and followup—anticipate the turn, make the turn, here’s what’s next—is almost liturgical. It’s very soothing.

On the other hand, I have little fragments of other contexts that attach to this experience and that aren’t really comfortable. For example, Anne relies on a GPS. The GPS has to know where I am. That means that a part of my phone record is “everywhere my phone has been for the last month,” which, since I carry it in my pocket and in my Camelbak, in everywhere I have been for the last month. It’s a little like an electronic bracelet, which wasn’t any part of my idea in buying a cellphone.

Then there’s Bertram Gross’s well-known little warning in his book Friendly Fascism: “When fascism comes to America, it won’t look like storm troopers with boots. It will look like Disneyland.” That’s a paraphrase, but it’s close and the reference to Disneyland is accurate. My little navigation system looks like Disneyland. And I don’t take what she tells me as part of a web of information, and add it to other parts which I produce myself. I could, but I don’t. I just do what she tells me and I get to the right place. I don’t get there by traveling on the roads that are “there”—not in the same sense that they were there apart from her narration—but by traveling on the roads she narrates.

My paternal grandfather was blind for most of his life and he liked to have people read the Bible to him. There were times, he said, when his location was really more THERE (it was the book of Romans in the example Dad told me) that it was the room in which he was sitting. He wasn’t in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; he was in Paul’s Letter to the Christians at Rome.

I said these were fragments of context, remember. I think I could be in Anne’s narration more than I am in Bethany Village. More than I am driving my Subaru. I think that, all things being considered, being really driving my Subaru through Bethany Village is the right thing to do.
And it if were just navigation, I think I’d just wave it off. But are we really relying on more and more things to tell us where we are and where we are going? Every time I log on to Amazon to buy a book, they tell me what other books “someone like me” really ought to buy. And they know “who I am” because of all the other books I have bought from them. The clerk at the local bookstore doesn’t know me; doesn’t know what books I have bought; doesn’t know what kind of books I like. The computer at Amazon is more…”personal.”

Are you worried too? Is it just me?