Friday November 5, 2005 A Nation of Blues and Reds

Friday November 5, 2005 A Nation of Blues and Reds

I’m still struck by the image of the U.S. map shown on television broadcasts of the Presidential Election a couple of days ago. There were 48 contiguous states plus Alaska and Hawaii and the vast majority were all colored red, with New England, the Great Lake, and the Western-most states the only ones in blue. There were two striking messages that came out of that image. One, so few blue states controlled so many electoral votes. Two, why were those blue states on the outskirts of the country the only ones voting blue while the rest of the country was solidly voting red?

You could make a broad generalization about these states being progressive on the leading edge of breaking trends. Illinois, California, Washington, Oregon, and New York and the New England states could all be lumped into a category of heavily populated by upwardly mobile urbanites and suburbanites who view themselves embracing change and adapting to new ideas and ways of doing things. Being a card-carrying member of the computer revolution, I have marched in lock step with nearly every major advance in electronic and computing technology since the early 1960s.

What is becoming increasingly apparent to me in today’s world is we’ve reached a point where the technology revolution has run out of gas. The computer I’m typing this blog on is identical in operation to the computer I worked on in 1965 aboard a ship sailing in the Pacific between Australia and Asia. The earlier one had vacuum tubes and transistors and was the size of a walk-in refrigerator, but it functioned exactly the same as this chic Sony Vaio sitting on my lap. The same computer engine can be found in cell phones, digital cameras, set top boxes, digital camcorders, I could on.

All that has happened in the last half of the 20th Century is we’ve repackaged a technology that was developed to make humans more productive during the Second World War, deciphering encrypted codes, directing rockets and artillery shells toward their targets, keeping track of the flow of men and equipment as an Army moved into battle. The computer programmer of the 1950s would understand much of what the programmer of today is doing and the computer architect of the past could easily converse with computer designers of today.

What has begun to happen now is that we’ve produce far more computers than any one individual can use. I would be willing to bet that in every household in the blue states, you’re likely to find far more computers on average than you would find in the households of red states. I’m counting the computers in microwave ovens, white goods, cars, audio equipment, television sets and cable boxes. The gear head households in the blue states would have more computing gear than the head-of-households in the red states.

The reality is we really don’t need all that equipment but we keep buying it because it adds features. How many car owners really use their navigation computers? How many cell phone users use anything but the talk and listen function on their phones. Kids use ring tones and do text messaging but that’s to be expected. They’re kids and have time on their hands with nothing better to do than find new things to do with their phone including play games. And the equipment manufacturers and their marketing consultants have worked long and hard to create needs for us to buy all this new equipment. They have successfully replaced the vinyl record with CDs, the videocassette with the DVD, and now, the CD with MP3 players. They have also created a new must have gadget in the personal computer and portable digital assistant—the electronic Rolodex and pocket calendar in one.

Add to this the cell phone, answering machine, e-mail and instant messaging and you have turned the average person into a multitasking fool. However, is it possible that a large proportion of the country—those painted red on the map—really don’t want this fast paced life? I hear stories on NPR in which successful college-educated professional are getting married and moving to small towns to raise their children in a “normal” environment, safely away from the rat race all of them left to seek out the simpler, slower pace of small town America.

At 17 years old, the life in Middle America is what I left and have resisted returning to for a number of reasons, most of them probably irrational. I needed the energy and intellectual stimulation of the go-go urban centers. I needed the sense of being on the edge of what the human experiment was producing. As I’ve gotten older my fascination with that on-going human enterprise continues unabated. I lament to think that the number of places you can go in this country to get that kind of experience is limited to a handful of blue states on the perimeter of this great nation. My great fear is the collective will of this country to embrace the challenges of the future is slowly being broken.