Patent #004: The DrEmscaper

On the train? Waiting in line? Just plain bored and need to kill some time? Technosphere introduces the DrEmscaper! Secure snugly around your cranium to escape reality into a personally optimized holographic DrEmState that exceeds your wildest dreams. Packages sold in the G, PG, and PG-13 varieties.

The Most Popular Song In The World

Things heard in Slovenia: Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”

Patent #003: PrayerPhone Old-fashioned Phone Booth

Technosphere Inc. introduces the PrayerPhone, it’s newest product in the You Need It! line.

Feel like you’re not being heard? Tired of being placed on holy hold, or losing reception during critical spiritual moments? In co-operation with your local government agency, Technosphere Inc.’s new PrayerPhone booths make sure that He hears You! Standard rates for multi-media messaging and data roaming may apply.

Patent #002: Moggles

Technosphere Inc. introduces Moggles, it’s newest product in the You Need It! line.

Near-sighted? Far-sighted? Not only can we correct your vision, but Technosphere Inc.’s newest Moggle technology (re Moggles: The Are You Going to Mug Me Goggles for Paranoid Citizens) is now available for lenses compatible with your super trendy Almost Bare glasses frames.

Patent #001: The Modern Divining Rod

Technosphere Inc. releases the Modern Divining Rod under their You Need It! product line.

Historically, the “Dowsing” or “Divining” Rod was used to locate ground water or precious metals. Now, updated and Technofied by a specialized team of You Need It! scientists and psychologists, the scope of Modern Divining Rod is unlimited, giving it the ability to lead you to your every desire! Order yours now and receive a $30 rebate.

iGIRLS

The jury is out on Girls. Some say it captures the voice of a generation. Others argue the show sets us a generation backwards in the struggle for women’s and minority rights.  But love it or hate it, like the head cheerleader in a Midwestern high school (or at least this is the way it worked in mine), Girls is, for better or worse, the show that everyone is talking about.

Lena Dunham’s most recent project set off its most vehement critics by featuring an all-white, highly privileged cast of characters, played by young actors whose actual lives seem not so distant from the fictional ones they play.  (Lena herself is the daughter of artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham; Marni is played by Allison Williams, daughter of NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams). A latecomer to HBO GO, by the time I started watching the show, most everyone else had already pledged allegiance to either the pro- or anti-Dunham party. Those in the anti- camp cited the show’s racial, gender, and class bias in varying degrees of egregiousness. And while I agree that the show isn’t exactly out to promote a progressive social agenda, what really struck me about Girls was its dependence on phones.

Without the iPhone, the actual plot of Girls would fade from a washed-out slice-of-life to a blank slate; phone calls, texts, and GoogleMaps give structure to a narrative that would otherwise be (even more so) reduced to a rich girl’s rambling. For example, how else does Hannah, alone in her bed, communicate to the audience her pining for Adam but by a close-up of Adam’s name on the ubiquitous rectangular touchscreen? We watch her place the call, and then hang up before he can (would he, even?) answer. Watching her retrieve handfuls of spaghetti and rotisserie chicken from the fridge, while also desperate, just doesn’t quite capture the same anxiety of today’s dating world. The same cellular dependency is also reflected in the friendships between the show’s four main female characters. After a night in Bushwick with Adam turns sour, Hannah is rescued by her pal Marni, who tracks Hannah down via the Drop Pin she texts from GoogleMaps.

Other major plot points hinge on exceptional cell service. Marni and Shoshanna call the reckless Jessa repeatedly from the waiting room of an abortion clinic that more resembles a spa than anything else, leaving voice message upon voice message to remind their sassier counterpart of her imminent appointment. Jessa, meanwhile, is hooking up with a cute skinny guy she picked up in a bar. How they came to meet? Jessa let him place a call on her modest flip-phone and, presto, she skips the abortion for a little action in the bathroom stall. In a later episode, Jessa runs into her boss at a warehouse party, an encounter that precipitates only after she responds (accidentally) to a text message from an unknown number: his.

I remember noticing a similar trend when Gossip Girls first aired, another hit show set to the tune of New York City’s young elite. But Gossip Girls’s version of the phone-dependent plot seemed to reflect a lucrative contract with Verizon Wireless more than some underlying truth in the way the plots of our actual lives unfold. (Or at least the way daily life unfolds for wealthy young girls living in major metropolitan areas.) Even still, though I’ve never been to a warehouse party, and while I don’t run in the same exclusive circles as do the children of art and entertainment’s elite, Dunham’s technology-induced anxiety resonates with me, and, I suspect, others, on a deeper level than I’d like to admit.

Never have I so questioned my own identity as a self-respecting, independent female as when waiting for boyfriends and almost-boyfriends to text me back. I’m prone to delete the numbers of late responders, attempting to regain some semblance of control over the situation and minimize further hours spent anxiously waiting for the phone to buzz. Whereas my own mother risked heartache on face-to-face dates at diners and drive-ins, the women of my generation run the risk of being “digitally stood-up.” If it’s happy hour at a bar and the guy doesn’t show, at least I can get up and leave. But texting, Facebook, and g-mail render the shunned fairly empty-handed, in terms of options to regain some sense of dignity and control. Waiting around for a guy who has given you the digital cold shoulder is pretty passive and extremely anxiety-provoking, and, ideally, something to be avoided. *Delete*

I can’t imagine how much more difficult it would be to combat the wireless stand-up or breakup if I were more engaged on other levels of what Marni calls the “totem of chat”: Facebook, g-chat, Twitter, etc. It’s been written about before, but the constant contact enabled by said totum perverts the intimacy of being in an actual relationship. Women are perhaps especially prone to wanting their committed partners to be constantly available and, of course, thinking of them.  The same potential for incessant communication allows commitment-averse men to waver on multiple fronts. But gender aside, anyone who is plugged in will inevitably struggle with maintaining boundaries, and also with post-breakup decorum after the relationship has fizzled. The ability to be alone is of course essential to being together, and when we fail, the chat-totem makes it even more difficult to let go. (You saw on Facebook that your ex- went where with who to do what this weekend?)

If Dunham’s Girls fails to capture the “voice of a generation,” then she at least pipes up for an especially anxious subset of the sexually active. Because even if your father isn’t as rich and famous as Brian Williams, that impulse to delete a guy’s number after a three-hour no-response window, i.e., the need to save yourself the heartache? It’s a self-protective reflex as natural and primal as pulling one’s hand away from a hot stove.

sure is bright out here: a squinty-eyed debut

A brief introduction to what Under A Rock is all about.

I don’t know how much of it was me, how much of it was my parents, or how much was growing up in a town of approximately 4,000 people (on a good day, in high tourist season), but I have acquired an almost allergic reaction towards the  Technosphere. Out in a cabin in Lake Placid, NY, the closest I came to popular culture re: music, video, music videos, and what my parents might have called printed “trash”  was dancing around the living room to my Mom’s old Janice Joplin vinyls. Weekly television hours were carefully monitored and matched the time I had spent reading beforehand. And even then, I squandered my weekly TV hours parked in front of PBS. Though later we moved to the slightly more happening metropolis of Indianapolis, up until age 15, the only CDs I owned were Destiny Child’s self-titled album and Mozart for Kids: The Magic Flute. Needless to say, I was not a cool kid in high school.

And I can’t help but feel that my being brought up under a relatively techno-proof rock is somehow connected to the knee-jerk melancholia I sometimes feel when my dinner date texts through our conversation, when pictures are promised to be posted even before the shutter clicks, and absolutely every time I am affronted with a  videogame console.

On a warm evening last week, I caught sight of a line of runners on treadmills, their ears all plugged up with iBuds and could have cried. Over the rush of traffic passing by on Houston, my friend turned to me and said:

We like to think we’re different. But we’re all ants.

So you won’t find me on Twitter or Facebook, there are 1,065 unread e-mails in my inbox, and my to-do list often consists of a Post-It stuck to the back of an iPhone equipped with exactly zero apps save one–The Free Graphing Calculator.

So the Technosphere just makes me queasy, a condition which I have only recently come to recognize as a serious disadvantage. Because there’s something to be said for the collective consciousness that the Technosphere supports (stuff like this, for example). The Technosphere often makes it possible for ideas  and art to go viral in a way that Post-Its never could. My techno-ignorance also detracts from face-to-face interactions–an inability to recognize Brad Pitt on screen causes peers to feel like they’ve invited their slightly touched Grandmother to movie night, but these reference points just don’t exist as tabs in the filing cabinets of my experience.

I have decided the cure to my techo-allergy the same way one might tackle a mild case of agoraphobia: simple exposure to the outside world. Having lived in Lake Placid, NY and Indianapolis, IN, I’ve now moved to the big city and can no longer afford to miss out on What Is Cool if I want to run with the in crowd or (as a more modest goal) make friends in general. Thus, this blog shall document my self-guided introduction to the Technosphere. But while embarking on said self-motivated quest, I also feel that there’s something to be said for stillness, for the Tangible, for being deliberately slow. Perhaps the discomfort I (we?) sometimes feel regarding the netted and wired circuitry of modern experience is not due to the Technosphere itself, but to an imbalance between the Techno and the Tangible. Therefore this blog is also meant to document my attempt to maintain a balance between the two. Reviews of popular Twitter accounts, crowd-sourced funding strategies, or the algorithmic composition behind Top 40 singles may be followed by a experiments in woodworking or bringing back calling cards over texts. Because part of me still thinks that’s how it should be in Real Life.