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Column Bells and whistles that annoy and save
By JEANNETTE BATZ
Reporters stand five deep in line in
the hallway, waiting to use the conferences free Internet access to check
their e-mail. I contemplate my usual e-mail -- soppy inspirational messages,
long stupid jokes, graphics I cant open, online shopping promotions and
the odd (I do mean odd) news tip. I keep walking.
In the grand ballroom waits an air-conditioned, fluorescent-lit
picnic lunch -- an attempt to relax us before the panel discussion, when we
will hear how the Internet is making newsprint obsolete. Shy at picnics, I spot
a nice older man from India and plop down next to him, hoping to talk about
yoga. Turns out hes a panelist, founder of a news.com Web site.
Awkwardly slathering mustard on my veggie burger, I stare down at
the red-checkered tablecloth, hoping for inspiration. Glancing up sidelong, I
see him pull out a keyboard the size of a small mouse. A real mouse. Delighted
to demonstrate, he shows me how he can pick up and send his e-mail anywhere,
via this tiny keyboard. To prove it, he asks my e-mail address, which
unfortunately takes three tries to spell clearly, and after considerable
fumbling with the tiny keys, he gleefully sends me an e-mail, something on the
order of, Hello, I met you at the picnic and enjoyed our talk. I
will get it next week when I return to work, he promises.
I try to look eager. A woman joins us, nearly setting her cell
phone in a puddle of spilled mustard, so desperate is she to keep it close.
Those people are probably still out in the hall, I realize, missing the picnic
while they wait for their lightning-fast electronic communications. What does
it mean to feel so important that you have to check your e-mail every few hours
from another state, be reachable anywhere at any hour, get beeped and buzzed in
the middle of other peoples presentations?
Gathering my nerve, I ask my new friend, and he surprises me by
predicting an anti-tech backlash any day now, from people not wanting to
be tethered.
Ah, but we do want to be tethered. People love answering their
phone in public, blushing and apologizing for popularity made manifest. Maybe
its because we dont feel known anymore, the way everybodys
known in a small sleepy town, down to their baby-day nicknames and adolescent
quirks. The globes too big for such close attention; there are too many
of us, too much happening too fast. Trying to ignore the pace is like trying to
jump rope slowly when the turners are speeding up.
Besides, why bother forging deep abiding connections when you can
have the instant adrenaline of being paged, e-mailed, phoned in the middle of a
meeting? You can ride that urgency, that sense of being needed. And youll
never have to be alone with your thoughts, silent enough to hear your deepest
needs -- or Gods.
Its that relevancy and that need, a voice
reminds me. I look up, startled. My friend is now sitting at a long table on
stage, and the voice is coming from the man next to him, an expert on
cybermarketing whos now asking newspaper publishers in the audience the
big question: Are you selling links?
Virtual links, he means, on the global Web. It is vast, yet its
exploded cosmology remains oddly personal, even provincial, like fraternities
at a big state university. All we care about, he explains, is
our little niche in the marketplace.
A niche is a cozy-sounding place -- but are users
really getting the personal attention they crave? When we hear, Yahweh
called me before I was born; in my mothers womb, he pronounced my
name, it means something quite different from the Web site that flashes
obligingly, Hello, Jeannette Batz, welcome back.
Technology, I tell myself dramatically, has made it harder to
grasp the deep significance of a personal savior. Harder to be truly alone.
Harder to hear the voice of God.
Five nights later, Im in a bed and breakfast on the edge of
Iowa, hearing the voice, not of God, but of my mothers doctor. It is 11
p.m., and he is calling from his cell phone to say shes in the ICU on a
ventilator, theyre not quite sure whats wrong but Id better
come home.
By 1 a.m., Im sitting numbly at my mothers bedside,
staring at a tangle of gray electric cords and blue plastic tubes and clear
tubes piping water droplets, watery blood, dark gold urine, thick creamy liquid
food. I sit helpless, listening to the exasperated sighs of the oxygen machine
as it breathes for her. This is technology as high as you can get it,
everything rigged, monitored, calibrated to the drop. Watching the numbers rise
and fall as the machines attend to the invisible fluctuations in my
mothers stressed body, I am overwhelmingly grateful.
She was thrown into respiratory collapse by what they will
eventually diagnose as Legionnaires Disease, and she will spend nearly a
month on the ventilator, sedated into what the nurses call twilight
sleep. She is flushed with fever, but the room is chilly, anonymous as
cyberspace, a dim-lit blue-gray womb of metal and plastic and gray-washed
sheets. The nurses and techs dont know my mother; dont know that
shes playful and tender and adores babies and animals and tennis and
Snickers bars and hates to hurt anybodys feelings.
They dont even know her first name.
In the end, it doesnt matter: They call her Baby, Darling,
Sweetheart -- and its not patronizing in the least. They, and their
machines, are taking intimate liberties with my mothers body, caring for
her in ways only a mother ever did. Below the shrill alarms, the litany of soft
words assures her, You are safe, we will handle you as gently as we would
our own.
They dont, always, but the endearments take the affront out
of their rapid jostlings.
She is being called by a loving name.
Technology does distort our sense of identity, time, space and
priority. Technology also saves our loved ones lives. And when it comes
to intimate human relationship, technology doesnt change a thing.
Jeannette Batz is a staff writer for The Riverfront
Times, an alternative newspaper in St. Louis. Her e-mail address is
jeannette.batz@rftstl.com
National Catholic Reporter, October 13,
2000
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