Technoplace

Lurking in the background of my last post is the issue of technology. While we live in the heavens by looking at the sky, we can extend our range even further with the telescope; while we create space by speaking, we can create an enormous space (of a qualitatively different sort) with a microphone and loudspeaker. All the powers by which we engage the world have a tool that can channel and magnify them.

As I come up on a business trip, my mind is especially on the cell phone. That little instrument makes me present both by hearing and by voice far, far away around the world. It’s a tenuous presence, admittedly, but at the touch of a few buttons—hey presto!—my wife is conjured up, is present to me; we speak and we hear. One of the oddest sensations is to talk on a cell phone in the middle of a group of people: one conversation continues around me, but at the same time I am far away, not only present in another place but vaguely imagining that place and myself speaking into it.

“Bilocation” might imply that I am equally present in both places, but it’s a weird sensation.

Even weirder is listening to the radio in my car. Here I am on the city street, now, in this familiar place, but suddenly as I hear the live voices over the waves I imagine myself transported far, far away. Strangely, I never hear the radio as voices speaking in my place but as voices speaking in their place, into which they draw me. Stranger still, I usually have no idea where the voices really are. While my speech into a cell phone puts me mentally into another place, into which I imagine myself speaking and from which my wife speaks to me, the radio whirls me out into an entirely indeterminate place. It is like reading a fairy tale in which the time and place are not specified: one thinks not of this place and this time, but of indeterminate time and indeterminate place. So the radio always makes me feel like I have personally been made present to indeterminate place—I am in the fairy tale.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I don’t listen to the radio much anymore.

The microphone is much worse than the radio. Right away, by the fact that it magnifies the voice so, it makes the speaker seem huge. I remember being at a Mass when the microphone was off through the first reading and half of the gospel; when it suddenly came on during the gospel, the priest seemed to grow before my eyes! In a Q&A situation, the speaker enjoys an immediate rhetorical advantage because he seems huge in comparison to his tenuous inquisitors—not to mention the fact that he can drown out their voices. At the same time, and for the same reason, the microphone does not create a communal place for many persons: it creates a monarchical place of one person with many subjects. This is one reason I don’t like it at Mass: even though I don’t usually want anyone speaking but the priest, at the same time I want the place of the Mass to be the place of the people praying, not the place of the SuperPriest and his auditors. The quality of the air is wrong. (As a side note, the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite was impossible before the invention of the microphone. That little detail gets left out of a lot of the hot air exchanges on liturgical subjects.)

But another factor comes in with the microphone. I have spoken of our senses of hearing and sight, but there also another sense, the “common” sense, which integrates all of our senses into one experience. The sugar cube is not a sweet thing over here and a white thing over there, but a single sweet and white thing; sight and taste are integrated into once perception of the sugar cube. Similarly, when I see and hear a speaker, both senses come together into a single perception of him or her. But the microphone disrupts that by making the audible speaker many times bigger than the visible speaker and in a different place. When the microphone kicked in at Mass that one time, the priest’s megavoice floated down from the ceiling. If I closed my eyes, he seemed to be an enormous person floating somewhere above my head; if I opened my eyes, he shrunk somewhat and remained located at the podium, but I could feel the stress of a non-integrated sensory experience. My common sense was reeling.

All these technologies are important and useful. I’m not so much of a curmudgeon as to deny it. But it is also important to notice their effects and use them appropriately. They greatly magnify the scope and power of our presence; they also spread us out and change the quality of our places.