E.T. Phone Home

It feels like science friction, the technological addiction. E.T.’s parents probably let him have it for losing his phone, especially before sending a pin. Thank God for Google Earth. No telling how they would have found him if all they had was a paper map from the Earth welcome center.

Or maybe E.T. was grounded, and his phone was securely in his mom’s purse, where she stowed it after taking it from him as punishment for failing to do his homework or neglecting his chores. Perhaps he texted a friend from the dinner table or got caught cheating at Terrestrial Pursuit. Questions for the philosophers to disagree about.

Maybe we’re behind the times on this crazy planet with water and land, fire and ice, mountains and plains, and in a more advanced civilization, even the Baby Boomers grew up with smartphones, email, and Zoom meetings. But we didn’t, so back in 1982, when I was a world-weary ten -year-old, calling a spaceship sounded like science fiction. For our sake, E.T. built that monstrous machine to ring up his mom & dad to let them know he needed a ride home. He probably could have just sent them a pin.

When I was growing up, through my teens and into my twenties, before embarking on a road trip, it was necessary to pull out the atlas or gather the maps in the glove box and determine one’s own route. The phone stayed home, where it was tethered to the wall. Mounted on it. Sure, we had cordless receivers by then, enormous things exponentially larger than your iPhone or droid. My next door neighbor would have been over the moon and sideways around Jupiter if he had known that one day he could have a droid in his pocket. I imagine he would have pictured a pocket C3PO or R2D2.

I remember tracing my routes with highlighters and making decisions about which roads to take—interstates and US highways or state and county roads. If you know me, you know I’m avoiding interstates whenever possible. There’s a sadness to them, as well as a sense of urgency: someone needs to get somewhere fast, without slowing down or stopping, maybe rushing to a deathbed or rescuing someone they love. It’s a funerary feeling on the grey interstate, until you reach a city, then the science friction (no, it’s not a typo) feeling returns. I imagine it’s especially intense in Seattle, what with the space needle rising above the skyline. It’s the skyline that controls these feelings—billboards, pulpwood farms, gas stations, and fast food joints have the funeral pulse while skyscrapers, lights, architecture, and other modes of transportation feel futuristic, full of radios playing space age love songs. Definitely a techno beat.

I can’t remember the last time I used a paper map or atlas. I don’t miss trying to refold road maps, as that was an endeavor rarely successfully completed by anyone, MIT engineering grads included. However, I do miss the process of choosing my route, studying the names of the towns and counties (sometimes choosing a route to go through a town with a specific name, like Bethlehem, Cairo, or Egypt, all in Georgia). I haven’t given away my choice, and my settings are firmly set to “avoid freeways,” so my pocket bot shows me three available routes. I can still rebel and deviate from the route, fully assured that my course will be set to rights without even stopping at a service station to ask for directions.

Remember the in-between years? After the internet but before the iPhone, when we would go to mapquest on our desktop computers and print our routes? What a pain in the ass that was, even though we didn’t know it at the time. What is it about middle stages of progress that seems clunky in retrospect? The VCR. The fax machine. Dial up.

We’re currently outprogressing ourselves, creating machines that are more advanced than we are: faster processors of data, input-output at lightning speed. Calculators on intergalactic steroids do jobs humans once did; everyone is afraid of being eaten by the machines we create, yet none of us can resist. So we carry our miniature processors in our pockets and pocketbooks, even wear some of them. Everyone has a smartphone.

So much today feels like science fiction to me, but smartphones are the trifecta of the friction: we’re so dependent on them, so trusting of our technology, that I will get in my car to drive hundreds of miles away without consulting a map, instead either typing in or verbally telling my phone where I want to go. It responds and maps my route, plays the music I want to hear, and lets my mom know if I’m running late.

I still don’t like Reese’s Pieces (the texture of the peanut butter is wrong), but I no longer need an intact fourth wall to believe that E.T. really called his parents in another galaxy, and I no longer wonder about the odds of him catching them at home. Turn on your heartlight and send a pin.