Are you talkin' to me?...

Today I got a long email from AdGoogle saying this blogsite had been approved to run ads. It was a nice email as emails go, and I read it happily. Two minutes later it occurred to me that a computer-generated letter had cheered me up considerably. On the other hand, if AdGoogle had turned me down, I realized I'd be very depressed. This is like thinking junk mail is meant for your eyes alone.

So I went to meet a friend at Starbucks and decided to wait for her outside, since the day was beautiful. As I stood there, leaning up against a Handicapped Parking sign, I watched a young man who seemed entranced with his cell phone. Studying him, I wondered how many times a day I communicate with something completely inhuman and respond with a full range of emotions: joy, rage, irritation and delight. Am I conscious of doing this? What is it doing to me? Interesting questions, since more and more of us are getting our strings yanked by machines.

Are you talkin' to me? Never an easy question to answer, especially if you're a clearly lunatic character played by Robert DeNiro. On Actors Studio, DeNiro refused to "do" that character for James Lipton, on the grounds that he's been asked to repeat Are you talkin' to me? four billion times in his career. He didn't add that Travis is not a real person and that Taxi Driver is a made-up story, but maybe he should have. We've all become kind of blurry about what's real and what isn't.

This is on my mind since hearing an interview with the author of Kluge, a book about our less than perfect brains. The interview led into a discussion of evolutionary biology, with the author confessing sadly that he didn't think our brains had progressed much at all. I beg to differ, since I hope what lies ahead is a big jump ::splat:: into a puddle of reality. I think we've evolved a bit from experiencing consciousness as a mass hallucination, in which we thought the gods were speaking to us from (variously) burning bushes, statues, and rain clouds.

In the not-too-distant future, perhaps we'll progress to understanding that voice mail, computer generated characters, and special effects aren't worth our spiked adrenal reactions. Maybe spam won't make me happy anymore, but it's a small price to pay.

Hey, I'm ready.