RDH - The Age of the PC May Become a Footnote in the History of Home Entertainment Systems

The Age of the PC May Become a Footnote in the History of Home Entertainment Systems

June 20, 2007

"But this must be some sort of extended joke; as the author of this website, aren't you an advocate for the power of the PC to enrich the human experience?" Yes, but I would prefer better speakers (and a little less data compression), more movie channels, and maybe a nicer monitor.

The results of a twenty-six-year comprehensive study of American PCs are in, and the news is perhaps better for Hollywood than for Microsoft. The so-called personal or home computer has not lived up to its promise of changing the face of American life. In fact, personal computers may be responsible for actually lowering the quality of life of those who use them.

The survey—conducted by the author according to his now-standard "extra" double-blind procedure, in which neither he nor anyone else is aware of the existence of the study until it is time to look at the results—began in the age of the TI-99/4A (released in June 1981, or less than six months after the debut of Rush's Moving Pictures; this was also exactly four years after the introduction of the Apple II and two and a half years before the first Macintosh) and ended nine days before the release of the iPhone.

An imaginary questionnaire submitted annually to every person who owned or regularly used a home computer system looked at three categories—a number that grew to sixteen as innovations like electronic mail or instant messaging and Internet porn and DVD drives became more generally available to the average user. But since it is a rather difficult task to look at millions of imaginary surveys, the author has culled the information and distilled the answers into an intelligible, albeit heavily interpreted, set of annotated data.

PC Usage: An Imaginary Questionnaire Filled Out by the Author

1. Do you use your computer to write? Yes, and though at first this seemed like a novel thing to do—something that might give me a little bit of an edge over my old-fashioned peers and forebears—I had eventually, and rather secretly, to admit that in fact the computer posed more of a distraction to writing than a catalyst. For one thing, much of the time that might have been spent pouring words onto the page was spent fiddling with the computer itself, not to mention buying and installing the endless upgrades. With the ubiquity of electronic mail by the late 1980s, and with the arrival of the World Wide Web by 1993, the urge to switch to other tasks became a positive addiction. Worse, the fact that these tasks involved so much writing and reading gave me the illusion that I was some sort of intellectual pioneer. While secretly hoping that all this multitasking was increasing the size of my brain, I was actually frittering away my thoughts, passively giving them over to others or, at best, practicing endless stream-of-consciousness in "letters" to my friends and family.* Only, perhaps, with the requirements of my job did I gain a little bit of discipline, but to this day I have to admit that though I may be able to type like a demon, the likes of Charles Dickens (to take one of many examples [I cannot even bear to mention some of the others: Balzac, for example]) seemed to have no trouble turning out huge novels without the benefit of electric lights or a portable typewriter or health insurance or even a ballpoint pen or yellow ruled legal pads or the Aeron chair or microwave popcorn.

A word about books. Unless you're Harold Bloom—said to have been able, as a student, to read a book about as fast as one can turn the pages—the average book takes several hours at least to read, and that's just too much time spent in front of the computer. If you can afford a lightweight stand-alone "reader," fine; I hope, for your sake, that no one steals it.

2. Do you use your computer to read? At first, I used my computer only to read over what I myself had written, before printing out a final copy on a rather noisy "letter quality" printer (a sort of automated typewriter that reminded me of a player piano). By the mid-1990s, of course, I began to take advantage of the era of the free newspaper. I felt ecologically pious for doing without a paper copy and rather smart for "navigating" across the Atlantic and elsewhere for my news. But in retrospect I think I was reading for the wrong reasons. It's one thing to enjoy a newspaper—to literally spread its wings and fold it and refold it—over buttered toast, orange juice, and coffee, and quite another to sit at a monitor for all the world as if you are shuttling from one form of work to another. Besides, newspapers are forced to scratch and claw for sales. You have to learn to take their car bombs and assorted violence to mosques and minarets with a grain of salt. ("Web logs,"† a subcategory of newspapers, should be similarly read only insofar as they are a pleasure rather than an obligation.)

3. Do you use your computer to play video games? Yes, but less and less as the years go by, and perhaps only because I've never enjoyed the luxury of sailing the world's oceans on a yacht or fishing the chock-full rivers of 1920s Montana.

4. Do you use your computer to watch television and movies? Yes, though of course the audiovisual quality of the average PC still lags behind that of the average dedicated television, dollar for dollar. (And I still regret those hours wasted on poor-quality "streaming" video in the late 1990s; if I could get them back I would.) The fact that, on a PC, I have some say in the software used to play my selections once gave me a little boost to my self-esteem, before I realized that I was being falsely proud.

5. Do you use your computer to listen to music? Yes, but only when I'm forced to work away from my stereo, whose twenty-two-year-old speakers—more than seven hundred dollars in 1985—continue to blow away the sound I get from the ones I could afford with my current, now three-year-old PC.‡

6. Do you use your computer to get or share recipes? No.

7. Do you use your computer to share photographs? Yes, though I long for the days when photography was a hobby rather than an inevitability. There are too many photos of poorly dressed contemporary American middle-class people and their children circulating these days. I prefer to look at photographs from before the Second World War.

8. Do you use your computer to buy books? Not any more. I realized, eventually, that I was diminishing my life by not walking to the bookstore or spending time in the library.

9. Do you use your computer to buy groceries? No; I take pleasure in physically handling the food that I choose, and I enjoy the interactions at the cash register.

"But I love my computer." Some people—for instance, those who design and test video games for a living—really do love their computers, probably for some of the right reasons.

10. Do you use your computer to buy music? Yes, sometimes, because it has become pretty much the only way to really find everything I need, now that music downloads have decimated the music-store culture, partly thanks to the complicit actions of people like me.

11. Do you use your computer to work from home? Yes. I find, in fact, that I can avoid some of the stresses of family life by claiming I have to work.

12. Do you use your computer to stay in touch with friends and family? Less and less. It once seemed like such a great idea, but then I realized that there were better ways to stay in touch and that in an odd way, the computer, by allowing a sort of deception, made it possible to maintain the illusion of staying in touch without actually going to much effort to concentrate on the other person. Life can become, if you're not careful, little more than a multiplayer online game.

13. Do you use your computer for voice communications? Not anymore. It became too boring to do so, and besides, I felt like I was little more than a pawn, recruited to test new protocols. But I do recognize the role of computers behind the scenes in all of my phone calls, and for that I am grateful.

14. Do you look at pornography on your computer? Not really, though I'm as curious as the next guy, so it's not as if I haven't seen my share of it. Some of it can be amusing (an alien tuning into our Internet might get the idea that transsexuals are a more significant presence on this planet than they actually are, or that bondage is more popular than it really is), but it gets old relatively fast.

"What about MySpace and things like that?" All of us, in one way or another, have been guinea pigs in the modern project to commodify flirtation and other forms of human mixing.

15. Do you like your computer? Yes. It's fun to type, especially to music, and I also like how it can help me to stay informed about the war in Iraq or about what Hillary Clinton might be saying or wearing on any given day without having to watch television news.

16. Do you plan on getting another PC when your current computer becomes obsolete? Yes, unless of course a time machine becomes available, in which case I will shuttle myself back to a middle-class Northern Midwestern American suburb circa 1882.

It should be relatively clear from the answers to the survey that the influence of home computers—apart from their growing role in delivering audiovisual entertainment—has probably peaked and that, in fact, their utility may be on the wane as people get back to spending more of their time doing more important things than staring at a screen, as if expecting some kind of revolution in human consciousness.

*Take the case of James Joyce. What was an appropriate mode for a male writer trying to get into the mind of a woman (and naturally putting the focus on the phallus)—i.e., the famous last chapter of Ulysses—evolved into insanity in his next novel, which is unreadable to all but those who, like that real-life Bloom mentioned elsewhere in this article, prefer poetry to prose.

†The shortened form of this term is one I've never really liked, though I do take pleasure in avoiding it.

‡In one of the best decisions I've ever made, I bought speakers that were protected against overload by inexpensive, readily replaceable fuses. To this day, they are almost as good as new.