“When that happens to me, I just click the Google button twice,” my landlady said, giving me a knowing look.
I had just told her my Internet had stopped working.
“Exit the window, and reopen it. Almost always works.”
I am 99 per cent sure the router (which I don’t have access to) just needs to be reset, and her advice will be completely ineffective. But I don’t want to sound like the know-it-all 20-something that I am, so I shut up and let her repeat this advice, so I “won’t forget any of the steps.”
I call these techniques — popularized but used not exclusively by people my parents’ age — “technological rain dances.”
I’ve seen people blow on their stereo systems, shake their iPhones, and reboot with a persistence unknown to most other arenas in their lives.
While these rituals affect the technological problems around us about as much as a tribalistic rainmaking dance does the weather, we tend to engage in them with an almost superstitious urgency and fervor.
And I am not above such rituals. My two-year-old Macbook’s screen regularly goes black for five-second intervals, and then resumes as if nothing has happened. While I know my work will reappear momentarily, I find myself frantically scratching at the mouse pad and pounding the keys as if the only thing that will bring back the sale section of Anthropologie.com (without which I WILL DIE) is me typing as much gibberish as possible in the those five seconds of dark, soul-searching doubt. And at the end of the five seconds I remember to breathe, realizing I only had to wait. However, some part of me likes to think I’ve played a part in the resuscitation of my faithful computer.
What is most disturbing about these “strategies” is not how ill-equipped modern society is to deal with its own inventions (see Shop Class as Soulcraft by Michael Crawford), but how they utterly expose my complete dependence on technology. And I don’t mean my dependence on the Internet for true essentials, like bus times, emails from Mom, or assignments.
I mean my dependence on the Internet for distraction, for exactly the sort of mindless activity I crave when I come home from a long day of class or a stressful conversation with my supervisor. Having my Internet fail can darken and frazzle my mood instantaneously. Because I don’t own a smartphone, my reliance on the wi-fi at my home is still stronger, revealed even more powerfully when something goes wrong.
No one is going to argue our society has grown dependent on technology. What is interesting to me though, is when we, an ultra-modern people, are deprived of technology, we become utterly irrational in our attempts to recover it. We are reduced to primal instincts — rituals we certainly know will have no effect, but which we perform anyway — like dancing to make rain.
Real rainmaking, as performed throughout history by native peoples, was employed to invoke rain from the gods when it was desperately needed. I think about this as I check my email, scan through the Facebook statuses of my friends, that this habit has become as necessary for my daily survival as water. And so when it grips me, this paralyzing need for the Internet, I try (and often fail) to remember my true needs — good food, exercise, companionship, love, prayer — and to seek them in kind.
Flickr photo (cc) by jaffera
