SpeECH TOPICS: The Yin and Yang of Modern
Life: Material Chores in a Digitized World
The march of progress over the past century has given individuals greater control over many aspects of their lives. Certainly from the mid-1950s onward, virtually every innovation of consumer technology has increased people’s autonomy, allowing them to do more things independently, whether it be placing a phone call, getting cash from an ATM, or baking marbled rye in a bread machine.
For better or for worse, it’s a help-yourself world—and that includes chores as well as pleasures.
Something else has changed, too. Much of our lives now take place in the digital sphere. To paraphrase tech guru Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab, people are increasingly moving digital bits around rather than atoms; they are manipulating information rather than material. E-mail has largely replaced "snail mail." The content of thousands of heavy vinyl LPs and slightly less heavy CDs can now be fitted onto a tiny medium of similar weight to a single vinyl LP. Money used to be heavy metal, then it became paper, and now most of it is bits and bytes shifted between computers.
Yet there are certain aspects of modern life that simply can’t be digitized—they remain stubbornly material. Even telecommuters have flesh-and-blood bodies that need food to eat and shelter from the elements. However much of our lives we spend on the telephone, in cyberspace, playing computer games, or consuming electronic media, the household chores still need to be done in the material world.
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