Next to my bed lies a dormant copy of Japanese Made Easy. It has now been at least six months since I've given up my fan-tasy of speaking this inscrutable language. I'm far past the stage of actually trying; past the stage of wondering if some osmotic exchange could take place if I sleep near the cassette; past the stage of wistful resignation. "Ah, if only I could but download this stuff into my brain."
There, I've done it again, turned to the megabyte analogy. You see, computers are not only changing the way we write and do our payrolls, they are entering the realm of allegory, of mythic thought. Computers are the metaphor of our time.
If you're over 40, you've already noticed some changes in yourself not covered in the owner's manual: You don't remember anyone's name anymore - telephone numbers yes, (that will go later), but not names. Think of it as a minor erasure on your floppy disk, perhaps due to a power surge that came when you hit 40. And, as you contemplate the loss of a little "gray matter," be comforted knowing there's a disk drive manufacturer by that name.
Reality is becoming more virtual by the minute. Anyone who doubts this should watch a little television. Content aside for the moment, consider the form. Sure, it looks like a computer monitor. Not to worry. A West Coast researcher has developed a laser projection device that beams a video image into the retina of your eye. In other words, the movie - not just the monitor - is now literally inside your head. And coming soon to a TV near you is interactivity, as computers reach out and touch someone. Who needs the tactile world when we can slip into a cool gray metaphor - and interact?
Imagine the virtual conference call of the not-too-distant future, in which executive Jones-san, gloved and goggled, is standing in his virtual telenetwork room in New Jersey, shaking hands with the air, or, dare I suggest it, bowing to his virtual partner in Osaka. Remember Peter Sellers in Being There, walking around the streets of Washington, DC with a remote control device, trying to change the channel? Well, the spin for the '90s would have us co-opting computer commands. Seems to me there was a song called "Sample and Hold" a while back - that's the right idea. A command from the Apple menu, "Show Invisible," could bring some interesting results. My favorite command comes from software for a digital sound workstation: "Heal the Separation." Really. It's used to make seamless edits. The first time I saw it I thought I had clicked my mouse into the virtual Field of Dreams. Was anyone else trying to heal the separation? Where was James Earl Jones? What if everyone in the world tried to heal the separation at the same time? A wild evangelical possibility suggests itself here.
A stage, a soapbox tent in the Midwest, a sweaty barker standing in front of an enormous mainframe under the Klieg lights. Before him, there's a mass of humanity with Power-Books and Newtons wired to spectacles and 3-D headsets, a few pioneers with portable, total isolation helmets - not to mention fiber-optic lines connecting us to the home audience, literally glued to their transponders, receiving not only sight and sound (with an optional laugh track), but virtual sensation as well. The pitchman is in full frenzy: "My friends! I want you to put your hand on your hard drive! I want you to feel it now! I want you to put your other hand in the air. And I want you to heal! Heal the separation! Heal it now."
Then I snap back to reality - hands on the keyboard, writing, clipboarding the tail end of my associations and pasting them into the old inner scrapbook. My 3-year-old daughter comes by wanting to do a drawing on the computer. She is still a relatively blank disk, slowly getting programmed. Yesterday, out of the blue, she looked me right in the eye and solemnly pronounced "Smoke alarms save lives." My wife and I share an all-too-rare breakfast together. I get up to get the half-and-half, which has been cleared/deleted/blackholed from the refrigerator where it has been since time immemorial. I return and inquire of its whereabouts. My wife looks at me wearily, departs for the kitchen, and returns with the miraculously rematerialized half-and-half, and a triumphant yet bemused expression. "I know who you are," I say to her. "Oh?" she replies. "You are the FINDER." Her response, while not com-puter friendly, at least acknowledges that I am not a geek or a weenie, nor have I been absorbed by the Borg Collective Mind or the Body Snatcher Podfolk - yet.
I guess it's time to shut down.
