Techie Darwinism involves a new form of evolution

August 17, 2004|By Eric Gwinn, Tribune staff reporter.

Now you know how Charles Darwin must have felt.

Out in the field, the 19th Century British naturalist found example after example to back up his hunches about evolution: Dinosaurs could become birds; apes could become humans. The environment indeed forced species to adapt to succeed.

Look around as you trek through the wilderness of today's electronics store: Computers have become phones; phones have become video game players; video game players can show movies.

It's techie Darwinism. Consumer electronics have adapted to our I-want-it-when-I-want-it-and-where-I-want-it attitudes. Manufacturers have made hard drives smaller and smaller to handle gobs of music we can carry around in our pockets. LCD screens have become so clear that we can watch video on our cell phones.

And coming down the pike is a portable video game player with GPS built in, so conceivably it could use your real-world location to change the weather in the driving game you're playing. Talk about immersive.

While all this gear has evolved to fit into our hands, it also has changed us. It's acceptable now to slip into your own world of music or chats with your friends and blur everything else around you.

More of us are wearing our cocoons in public.

This isn't a revelation. The Sony Walkman is 25 years old. But there are more ways to slip into our cocoons than ever before. Have you been on a college campus after a class has ended? So many cell phones are whipped out so fast that you'd think there were some sort of emergency.

And as we acquire the stuff that allows us to withdraw into our own worlds, we become less like a community and more like nodes on a network -- still connected to one another, just able to choose whom and how we connect. If I don't want to make small talk with the stranger sharing my long grocery checkout line, I can pull out my Game Boy. Or surf the Web on my phone. Or turn up the volume of my MP3 player.

Such an encounter still could spur a conversation along the lines of, "Cool, what is that?" It's not as thoughtful an icebreaker as, "I've been meaning to read the book you're holding. What do you think of it?" But it's an icebreaker all the same -- as long as my music isn't drowning out all possible contact.

This node-to-node connection does have advantages. Because Internet bulletin boards connect people of similar interests no matter where they are in the world, Americans and Europeans can discuss world affairs and demonize their respective governments, not their citizens.

That flow of ideas didn't happen between the average American and the average Soviet citizen during the Cold War, so people depended on their governments and media for descriptions of the dreaded people on the other side.

If given a choice between going back or going forward, I choose to go forward. I simply will work a little bit harder to connect to the person in front of me rather than the gear in my pocket.

Just as Darwin doubtlessly thought differently of himself in light of his research on evolution, so are we confronting ourselves anew amid the evolution of our toys.


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