Message in a Bottle
A study cited in the morning’s lying press showed statistics that kids were less likely to do drugs these days. The thesis these researchers had come up with was they were doping themselves on social media, a steady drip of dopamine pleasure, nearly constant in their waking, if somnambulistic, hours. Social media as narcotic….
You live down at the tail end of an island far from the tentacles of Facebook, you forget sometimes you’ve set yourself adrift from the continental shores of 21st century modernity, but as the riptides sweep you away and the land lines tear loose from the walls, those messages from the Mainland become fader and more indistinct, Morse code from telegraph poles rotting in the relentless rains.
For a confirmed xenophobe, this desire to stay in constant contact with strangers and family and friends is bemusing, like stuffing messages in bottles all day long and setting them loose on the tides. I had a buddy back in high school who was a ham radio operator tapping out code to other hamsters overseas and across the globe, who stayed up late in his room on the chance that meteorological conditions were ripe for some far away contact. “I talked to a guy in England,” he would tell me the following morning.
“Whadja talk about?” I’d ask. Invariably, nothing much, just name, serial numbers and rank. Where they lived. Age, maybe. I guess we just have this desire to make contact, to let someone know we’re out there, that we’re not alone. Same reason we send radio signals into space. Same reason we write blogs. Ironically, my buddy the ham radio operator slowly became afraid of human interaction of all kinds, what the shrinks call agoraphobic. I tried getting in touch with him some years after the last time I saw him, but he’d lost his job, moved away from his house in Missoula and now even Google can’t locate him. I imagine him holed up in some desolate place, tapping Morse code late into the comforting night, listening for an answer from folks he’ll never have to meet, all his bottles crashing onto lonesome beaches in places he’ll never see.
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Tags: 12 step program for twitter, agoraphobia, facebook addiction, ham radio, mental illness, social media
It’s rare that I see a Facebook page, and of those I come across I can’t see how they’d generate enough dopamine to match the worst 1970’s ditchweed that sold for $14 an ounce.
Then there’s the average overheard cell phone conversation, which is not much of an improvement. I’m not sure how far back you intended to go with your mention of previous communication devices like ham radio, telegraph, and the message in a bottle, but for me, none of them can hold a candle to the average cave painting or petroglyph from a few thousand years ago. Those folks had to work at what they wanted to say, and when they did it meant something. Bison. Horse.
I know what ya mean (cave)man, I hear ya.
I guess you can scribble bison hunting pictographs on the rocks, but geez, by the time some spelunker finds them 25,000 years later, the message might get garbled or lost completely. Course, the phone bills are lower…..
I was thinking more along the lines of Fred Flintstone yabba-dabble-doodling a nice still life for Wilma, or maybe Barney as the original intended recipient. Then, should we be so fortunate as to stumble across it 25,000 years later it still contains meaning for us, even across all those millennia.
Now fast forward to the year 27,017. How many of our present day social media posts will have future descendants gazing upon them in awe & wonder? Perhaps thankfully they’re electronic and will return to the atoms from whence they came. So we don’t have to look like complete ignoramouses.
I gotta admit, the bisons on those French caves will look positively erudite compared to the Donald tweet compilations in the Trump Library at the top of the Trump Tower in that crumbling building circa 27, 017.