Vacation: Escaping Technology
Standing 372 feet underground in Jewel Cave the guide turned off the lights. This was a rare chance to experience actual complete darkness. As my eyes adjusted I was distracted by little blinks of light. A screen on a phone here. The blink of a camera light there. A child’s shoe with blinking lights sitting on my lap. Even deep beneath the earth’s surface it was impossible to escape technology.
I went camping this week with my family and it was a great chance to try and unplug from the world. That was the plan at least, and it wasn’t a real easy decision. I was tempted to bring my laptop along, even knowing how silly it would be to be typing away in a tent in the wilderness of South Dakota. The reality of our culture is that it is extremely hard, if not impossible, to really unplug from the technology of our world. Throughout the week I took note of situations where man and machine clashed with nature and the wild.
A herd of bison ran down the mountain side, crossed the road and crossed through the field next to our campsite. We stood in awe as the huge animals passed us by. They just kept coming, hundreds of them. The line of cars grew waiting for the road to clear. Amazingly, several cars cut to the front of the line and tried to wedge their way in between the herd. Safety issues aside, where in the world would these people be trying to go that they couldn’t wait a few minutes to enjoy these amazing animals?
At Mount Rushmore we watched a presentation at sunset. It was dark by the time it was over and the climax was when the lights came up and lit up the president’s faces. I looked out over the audience and saw hundreds of tiny video screens. I don’t know what I expected, but I was surprised to see how thoroughly our gadgets have been integrated into our everyday life. We all have a tiny computer and video screen connected to the end of our arms.
A tradition of this family campout is a slideshow to view pictures of the past 40 years of camp. Before the slideshow I was thinking that it would be so much more convenient to just have a group on Flickr where we could archive all these pictures. If the campsite had wireless we could just do the whole thing on a laptop. As we sat down for the show, a slide projector lit up a white sheet taped to the side of a cabin. We all watched captivated by the beauty of the pictures. The aged photos were so warm and real. The sound of the slide changing and the movement of the images as the wind gently blew reminded us that this was a physical thing. This wasn’t just some online community that we pretend to connect to. This was our family, and these memories were as real as the people sitting next to us. It was a beautiful thing that could never be replicated by Flickr and a laptop.
If it was hard for me to leave my laptop at home, it is going to be even harder for my son who will have lived his whole life with a mouse in his hand and on demand television and video games. He sat on my lap playing his Gameboy as I enjoyed the camp fire. I said, “Rian, look at that fire, isn’t it beatiful!” His response was “Why? What does it look like?” not even lifting his eyes from his Mario game. It’s hard to blame him though. That evening in the tent I turned on the fan. It wasn’t that I was hot or needed fresh air. What I wanted was the white noise. I couldn’t fall asleep without it.
