My hotel room has twelve lights that stay on after I turn off the last lamp before bed. There’s the green smoke alarm, the dvd standby light, the microwave clock, the dim orange bedside cd player/alarm clock, the ghostly screens of the two laptops.
And then the phone with the flashing red message light that won’t turn off and the tiny flashing green light that says line 1 is in use even when it is not, the red television power light.
The printer standby light, the blue light around the power plug of my laptop, the flashing green of the EVDO card.
The path to the bathroom is lit like runway lights at an airport. Contrast this with the warm glowing plug-in lights on the baseboards of upstairs hallways leading the way to the stairs or the toilet. Lit-up angels or Snoopys or ladybugs.
Or compare it to the Pennsylvania farm where I was raised. We had three kinds of light at night when we went to bed – the stars, the moon, and the headlights of passing cars, maybe a dozen throughout the night.
I think most of us don’t often realize how much things have changed in our lifetimes. We say the words, or we read and hear them, but they don’t capture what it means in our collective (un)conscious, and in our bodies, neurologically, to have added cell phones and answering machines and GPS.
It’s the background changes that matter most, the 12 lights at night. The technological domination of our lives – and it is totalitarian, affecting work and leisure and relationships and our selves – is changing how we define ourselves as humans.
This has been happening for as long as we’ve been around. Inventions, advances in technology and major shifts in thought and consciousness have changed what it means to be human. It’s interesting to be living in a time where the changes are happening so quickly.
So I say good night to my 12 lights, like it’s an electronic Waltons. And then because it’s fun to get scared, I imagine that they are watching. Rather than worry about Big Brother, it’s a dozen Little Brothers, collecting information to send to Google or to the FBI (are they co-branding yet?).
Ray Lewis heads up the tax consulting business, Tax Therapy, based in Boulder and San Francisco. Ray writes about everything from finance, taxes, business and technology to sports, travel, politics and music.
He was formerly a technology consultant at The New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and served as a faculty member of The Sawtooth Writers Conference in Stanley, Idaho, an annual event dedicated to teaching fiction and poetry to gifted teenagers.
