As “Tiresias instructs Odysseus that, before he can go home, he must take his oar and walk inland until someone mistakes it for a winnowing fan—a tool for winnowing grain—and asks him what it is. In other words, as soon as he’s gone to a place where people don’t know what an oar is, then he’s gone far enough” (https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/05). This is interpreted as Odysseus needing to make one last sacrifice to the gods to make amends. I would do this with a smartphone, not to make a sacrifice to the true God but to show there is no place that a person will not know what a smart phone is.
On vicarage, I preached at Jesus Lutheran Church of the Deaf in Austin, Texas. Till then, I didn’t realize how isolated deaf people are much more so than blind people. With age, I’ve discovered how isolated just being hard of hearing can make you. They warn you about this.
“They” being old people doctors and agencies. As we start to lose our hearing, we have people repeat things. Then, since you can only say “what” so many times, you start pretending like you heard what they said. This will progress so that you’re missing so much of what’s really being said that people will stop talking to you. Your bubble of people grows smaller and smaller. “They” say this creeping isolating and cutting off can lead to dementia.
I don’t know about that. I do know that I am hard of hearing digitally speaking. I’m only finding out piecemeal just how isolated I’ve become. Books I’m listening to while I walk are usually nonfiction. Lost in the Valley of Death is about the gone-missing internet phenome, Justin Alexander. Never heard of him. I heard on sports radio the sportscaster use this phrase: “He was like a weasel on a woodpecker. That’s real thing. Look it up.”
I did and a 2015 article Snopes verified a picture a tourist in England snaped of a weasel on the back of a flying woodpecker. I sent it to my sons and sons-in-law. There would have been crickets had I been able to hear them. I didn’t send them this without verifying it. (I’ve learned this the hard way.) But 2015 is ancient for things digital. It was old news to them. Again, I never heard of it till 2024.
You know how young people – aka ‘not baby boomers’ – are deaf to the beeps, chirps, tones, “rings” emanating from their digital devices? That’s me: I hear “trending” and I am deaf to what follows. If you saw it on Tic Tox, YouTube, or Instagram, I don’t hear what you saw. If you say to me “I follow” and it’s anyone other than Jesus, I tune out to what follows.
I’m recently returned from St. Augustine’s House in Michigan as I write this. It’s a Lutheran Monastery. I went there when I was in Detroit in the late 80s. Some of the same monks are still there. They have the great silence from 8:30 PM to 8:30 AM, and a smaller one from 1 PM to 2:30 PM. They specifically exclude all digital sounds.
As Simon and Garfunkel taught us, there is such a thing as “the sound of silence”, and though often my tinnitus is way too loud in such silence, it’s not as painful as the ever present digital noises. When I was in Detroit, we lived in a parsonage five blocks from I-75. The ambient noise was very noticeable especially in summers when with no A/C your windows were open. In Austin, I live about three miles from I-35. I hadn’t thought the noise was that loud till the first ice storm 20 or more years ago stopped everything. I stepped outside and said to myself, “What’s that?” It was the silence, the absence of traffic noise.
Well, traffic noise can be white noise. White noise is beneficial in that, as I said, it helps with tinnitus, focusing, and going to sleep. Digital noise in effect is maybe not black noise, but it is noise that pokes, prods, pricks, and annoys. And this effect builds and builds till you either “will be assimilated” into the digital collective[i], dismembered from being pulled too many different directions, or go digitally deaf.
I’m doing the last and loving it.
[i] If you think the Borg Collective is only a sci-fi quirk, read about Soviet and China collectivism and the devastating results of it first by the Soviets and reluctantly later tried by China. Read Peking and Moscow, Klaus Mehnert, 1963.
