On Sunday, May 10, 2009, I watched a segment by Jeff Greenfield on CBS’s “Sunday Morning” news show with Charles Osgood and have transcribed it here. It is entitled, “Blackberry Mania”
Charles Osgood:
An underground trolley collision in Boston Friday night injured 49 people, including a train operator who reportedly was text-messaging his girlfriend when he hit a stopped trolley ahead of him. That’s an extreme example of a phenomenon that has been bothering our Jeff Greenfield:
Jeff Greenfield:
Can a writer from a long-ago age really see into the future? Well, Jules Vern was able to imagine submarines and rocket ships. Arthur C. Clark had a bead on communications satellites. But for my money, nobody nailed one of our era’s most defining and least attractive features better than did Jonathan Swift.
His best-known work, “Gulliver’s Travels” was first published in 1726; that is 283 years ago. It is best known for Gulliver’s dealings with the Lilliputians; a race of tiny men and women, consumed by tiny insignificant political battles. Cable talk-shows anyone?
But the real eye-opener is his account of Laputa; a floating island who’s citizens are so distracted by their deep thoughts, that they are completely disconnected from the real world. It seems, wrote Swift, these people are so taken up with intense speculations that they neither can speak, nor attend to the discourses of others. In fact, Gulliver reported, these folks are so utterly and completely disconnected from the world around them that the wealthier among them employ “flappers”. A flapper’s job was to give his employer a soft flap on his eyes because he is always so wrapped up in cogitation that he is in manifest danger of falling down every precipice, and bouncing his head against every post, and in the streets of jostling others.
So, just how prescient was Jonathan Swift? Well, have you taken a walk down a street in any town or city lately? Now, it’s not so much intense speculation that distracts our modern Laputans, but the astonishing array of gadgets that connects them with everything, except the world that is right around them. They’re plugged into music, they’re exchanging emails, they’re texting, they’re tweating, they’re manipulating portfolios, they’re managing their fantasy baseball teams, they’re befriending and un-befriending facebook pals. If I were a personal injury lawyer, I would consider a whole new specialty: “high-tech negligence lawsuits”.
Now, in the interest of complete accuracy, I should note one more aspect of Laputan life. It seems that the husbands of Laputa were always so wrapped in speculation that their wives found adultery almost too easy. The mistress and her lover, said Swift, “may proceed to the greatest familiarities right in front of her husband’s face.” Now, we didn’t manage to capture that sort of behavior with our cameras; not yet.
