"I'm On The 6:17; Where Are You?"

"Every advance in the history of communication has brought us in closer touch with people far away from us, but at the expense of insulating us from those nearest to us."  - Ted Wurmer, Fortune, 6/23/97

We all love stories about Magic Lamps. We love the idea of the lamp itself, the hapless person who "discovers" it, but, most of all, we love the Genie inside.

Why? It is not because he/she is cute and witty; it is because Genie is going to fulfill our desires, most commonly in the form of Three Wishes.

And so, we find ourselves staring all day and, some of us, part of the night, into our little magic lamps: BlackBerrys, iphones, laptops, and now, ipads.

And, I'll bet that most of us, perhaps even the most intense lamp-lookers, have been wondering: what are we looking for? Well, we are looking for Genies, that's what we are looking for: our little people-genies who can fulfill our wishes, do things for us, give us things, tell us something we think we really need or want to know. 

Like, "Honey, I'm on the 6:17; where are you?"

Where are you, indeed, as the great Zen teacher, Alan Watts, might have said. Most likely, Honey is not available because he/she is busy looking into a lamp-screen for a significantly different message about her daughter getting into Princeton, his Ford stock reaching a new high/low, or the house of dreams finally coming onto the market. You've been  taking the 6:17 every evening for nearly twenty-five years, and, here's news, this does not make you a Genie, at least not The Genie.

"A wealth of information 

creates a poverty of attention."- Herbert Simon

What are we looking for? What in this world or another are we looking for that causes us to risk our lives and lives of others, while we read or even write texts while driving an automobile? This is the first time in the long history of lamp-gazing that we insist on moving fast through traffic while doing it. Even Aladdin didn't try to arouse his djinni, while flying at 80 mph on his carpet!

We have all seen the men and women of their mutual dreams sitting across from each other in trendy restaurants, wearing ensembles perfectly chosen for the moment. Are they gazing into each others' dreamy eyes? No! They are looking intently at the screens that they have carefully and strategically placed on the table next to their respective knives and spoons.

Lately, I've been re-reading Orwell's 1984. Passe' you say? Not a bit. In the opening chapter, Winston Smith sits in his own living room, positioned so that the telescreen cannot see him. He is about to commit a fatal act, beginning a diary (for the younger audience: a diary is an early form of personal blog, composed on real paper with a real pen and meant to be strictly private. No, really, it's true).

That scene made me wonder: do we have any real conception of how much more The Genie inside our updated telescreens knows about us than we know about Him/Her? Are we rubbing our Lamps and fulfilling our Wishes? Or, are the Genies rubbing us instead, in order to get valuable information.

In other words, who is really in charge of the Wish Factory?

We cannot provide a solid answer here, but, perhaps we can do a service by raising the question itself, and offering some advice, naturally in Wish form:

 

1. Once a day, at least, we wish to turn our Lamps completely off for a minimum of one hour. Our boss, spouse, offspring, BFF's will get over it. 

2. Or, we wish to pick one day per week or perhaps a morning and an afternoon, and do the same. 

3. Or, since we are truly brave: we wish leave the Lamp at home. (Yikes!)

We agree that this exercise is much harder to do than we might think. After all, most people cannot even ride across town with their car radio/cd player turned to Off. Still, we think it's a healthy exercise. 

Who knows, upon closer inspection, the people living nearest or with us, might even turn out to be the best answers to the best Three or More Wishes we ever made. And we might begin to look pretty good to them as well.

Ed Note: My copy of 1984 is a Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, 1999, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. I recommend reading it again, if you have not done so for a while. If you never read it, turn your Lamp off for three days and do so. Orwell is not the smoothest fiction stylist; he was much better as an essayist, we think. But, he still has a lot of relevant things to say and, yes, there are sex scenes.