Hear the talk:
At first I was startled: a terrible vision of the modern world at its worst. Three people within twenty feet of each other -- a mother, a daughter who flew five thousand miles to be with her mother for less than a week, and the mother’s new husband, me, who had not seen his full grown step daughter for three months.
And what were three doing? Staring into separate computer screens.
I thought this was bad -- but then I saw it another way. We had been together all day, talking, interacting. Long ago, in the evening we very well could each be curled in a corner reading a good book, communing with minds outside the setting we were in.
The modern day equivalent of those long ago readers now sit at computers. Not only is this not bad, I suddenly realized how much better the modern day habit is than the old one of one person plus a book.
One of us three is doing what many have done for many years - many years now: watching a movie. But she didn’t have to go out to see the movie. She brought the movie home and watched it on her computer, where she could pause it if she wished -- and she did, and where she would be undisturbed. Today, you have an option -- several of you could go out to a movie house, or the movie can be brought home for anyone to watch whenever they wanted to watch it.
The second person sitting in front of a computer screen is surfing the web. For what? I am not sure, nor does it matter. She spends countless hours collecting information, educating herself before she makes a purchase, educating herself about medical problems that sometimes plague her. Before she does anything, she studies the question from all angles, and the web is a vast storehouse of information.
She, like a book reader, can, if she wishes, summon up the words of the dead. But today, through her computer, she can also commune with the living, with the countless millions who have access, anywhere on this round globe, to the magical computer. She can learn from them; they can learn from her. The possibilities are limitless -- and far more profound perhaps than reading a book.
The third screen in this small house? Me, writing this right now. Just as a computer brings information in to me from out there, the computer helps me bring thoughts out of my head unto a keyboard which has the magical ability of printing out my words which I will then broadcast, words that you are at this second hearing over this radio station.
Three people, three screens, and each treating the screen differently: doing research, watching a movie, typing thoughts onto paper. We three are here, together, in one room, but we commune with worlds out there. So long…
Copyright © 2007 Henry Morgenstein