August 24, 2004
The Displacement of Technology... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes."
I remember the first television set my family got. I must have been 4 or 5 years old, and one Saturday morning, with great fanfare, in came this huge new piece of furniture. It looked more like a mahogany sideboard than anything else, and you opened a tiny cover to reveal the small TV within.
It was tucked in a corner of the living room, and faced the side of an over-stuffed chair. That's right. The side. If you sat in that chair, you had to turn your head 90 degrees to the right to watch TV. And all the chairs and the couch in the room continued to point at each other, ready for conversation, with no thought of viewing the television. Amazingly, this setup remained in place for several years.
I asked my mother recently why they put the television in this awkward position, and her answer was simple: That's where the radio had been.
--
So, it all made sense, and so she reminded me as well of a piece of furniture which had always been described as "the radio cabinet with the legs cut off." By the time I knew it, it was a carved piece, "antiqued" olive in the style of the 60's and set off in one corner of a subsequent living room.
In its heyday, it was ready for any radio you wanted — large, small, fancy, simple — the point was, you could open its carved doors and turn the radio on. And if you sat in that armchair in that first living room, the radio could play directly into your right ear, and it still worked well when there were others in the room.
My mother was a young girl when the radio cabinet came into her life, and it must have displaced something else, but what it displaced is lost in time. What she does recall is that the radio cabinet traveled around the living room a bit before the furniture and the radio all found mutual accommodation.
And so it is with all the technology in our lives.
--
Believe it or not, I got on this track while trying to make sense of this latest Olympics. You see, in 1996 in Atlanta, it was the first Internet Olympics, where more than you could ever imagine was suddenly available online. And in almost real time. Two years later in Nagano, you could avoid the Internet if you chose, but with wildly different time zones, the sudden proliferation of 24-hour cable channels kept scooping the major network.
This time around, the tone in the prime-time network coverage no longer pretends that you watching in real time. American swimmer Aaron Peirsol got out of the pool, looked up to see that he was disqualified, walked around for a couple of minutes and then got his gold back. In real life, it was more like a half hour. I guess it's too much to ask for them to put up an old-fashioned silent movie slide stating "time passes" before the action is resumed. There is an implicit assumption, a cut-to-the-chase expectation that the viewer's time will not be wasted. After all, what we're watching is ancient history.
It occurs to me that just as we make accommodations in our lives for the physical trappings of technology, we now do the same with information. Let's try to remember what got gently but firmly displaced to make room for the new. Our grandchildren just might ask.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
Back to Five Minutes List
