Word: modems
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...naive. Like a swing voter, I got sucked in by negative TV ads. When I moved to San Francisco in April, Pacific Bell was all over the airwaves with a spot that spoofed life in a cable-modem world, where neighbors have to share Internet bandwidth and end up fighting one another during prime time because their service has slowed to a crawl. This, the ad said, is why you should instead get the superfast phone technology DSL (Digital Subscriber Line). For $40 or more a month, it's supposed to let you surf at around 30 times the speed...
...took Pac Bell a month to dispatch a technician to my house to install the necessary modem and software. It also mailed me three extra modems, presumably in case the first one failed. My real problem was with the circuit they were building at the other end, for which four promised deadlines came and went...
...invention of the stirrup--enabling armored knights to fight on horseback--changed history. The modem has done much the same thing. It has supplied millions with a weapon that allows them to fire instantaneous opinions through the air like tracer bullets and thus engage in daily cultural warfare on a scale never seen before in history...
...argue this as a wondrous stimulation and expansion of democracy. On the other hand, the hair-trigger modem, wired directly to the adrenal glands and needing only a finger twitch to hit SEND, encourages a certain violence of opinion--impulsiveness that hardens more quickly than before into dogmatism. Once you've sent it, you're committed to it; you've got to defend it. On almost any subject--gay scoutmasters, say, or capital punishment or abortion--Americans tend to accelerate at unnatural speeds toward absolutes and sort themselves into fierce tribes to defend the absolute they've chosen...
Americans have always divided themselves into camps--proslavery and antislavery, say, or "Wet" and "Dry." But the computer modem revolutionizes controversy. Every man a king. Every person a moral philosopher (or blowhard) of instantaneous global reach. The written word, once a priestly prerogative, is now power in the fingers of the wired masses...