Beyond the Treadmill
by Natalie Flemme, media analyst
September 20, 2006
Rock hard abs, that’s what you’ve got to have. Buns of steel. Hardbodied, that’s what you’ve got to be.
Not so long ago, men exercised to develop strength and women exercised to keep themselves trim for hubby. Now they exercise to get them hard bodies.
To get those hard bodies we do reps. We repeat our exercises over and over and over.
Hard exteriors and repetition – now what do they remind you of? That’s right – machines. We want to be like machines. Like hardware.
Now that’s hardly an original idea. The reasons for wanting to be like machines have changed, though.
McLuhan argued that the machine had become a totem. Supposedly, earlier peoples had adopted animal totems to help them cope with the dangers of sharing the world with animals who often had abilities that people did not – they could be stronger, swifter, able to fly – and on whom their well-being depended. They had to kill these dangerous or physically more capable animals to survive.
Similarly, modern peoples were supposed to have adopted the machine as a totem to cope with the dangers of sharing the world with machines that were even more powerful than animals. Regulation of life by the clock was an example of how human society had internalized mechanical values. Instead of following one’s own inclinations one acted like a machine, performing a function according to an unvarying schedule beyond your control.
Nowadays, though, machines are less dangerous, simply because there are fewer of them. Mechanical systems are being replaced by electronic ones, by information technology.
Consider the record player. It was a mechanical system which transformed vibrations of a tone arm into sound. Today the MP3 player simply decodes digital information electronically. No mechanics involved.
Well, who’s afraid of a record player, eh? But life is more and more influenced today by electronic systems than by mechanical ones. Key aspects of our lives are, if not controlled, at least heavily influenced by information technology. Enormous amounts of data about each of us are stored away on powerful computers. It is, for example, impossible not to leave an electronic trail betraying one’s whereabouts to the authorities unless one goes to extremes – no cellphone, no credit cards, no going to the doctor when you’re sick, because your health card number will show up on a government database, from which it can be easily retrieved. In the old mechanical days they used to collect data, too, but they couldn't retrieve it easily.
But are we adopting the computer as a totem? Nope. We want even more than before to be like machines.
It appears that computers so frightening that we are unwilling even to think of what being like them would require. Instead of aspiring to the decoding and data storage abilities of modern electronic technology, we want to make ourselves even more like machines. We're going to have those hard exteriors now. And we're going to do more reps than ever before. And people are.
Machines are all about effort. Computers are about knowledge. We are so in awe of computers’ abilities to remember and manage facts that we are afraid to attempt to emulate it. Knowledge is the forbidden fruit, after all.
Or perhaps McLuhan had the answer. He noted that all technologies are an extension of the body. The wheel for example, is an extension of the leg. Often technologies become substitutes for the part of the body they are an extension of – people now walk less because they have wheels. He was afraid that electronic technology would encourage us to stop using our brains, and perhaps it has. It’s hard to emulate computers when the computer abilities you have to emulate are ones you have already handed over to computers.
Whatever the reason, instead of adopting a new totem we redouble our reverence for the old one, hoping it will protect us even more. We are Little Engines That Could. We work harder.
Society is full of experts telling us that if we just work hard enough, we can accomplish whatever we want. Self-help gurus make good livings telling us that. Dr. Phil makes a very good living telling us that. A large proportion of the people we meet every day tell us that, even though a lot of them aren’t making that good a living. But if you have faith, you live in hope, anyway. You have to.
But no matter how hard we little engines think we can, we can’t. Our powerful efforts are actually taking our train backwards. The more we try to retreat into a symbolic representation of a Mechanical Age which has now disappeared, the easier it is for an actual Computer Age to control us. Just like when the animals met the machines – it wasn’t machines that started becoming extinct.
What we don’t need, though, is a new totem. Computers are the creation of human beings and human beings can master them. The more who can master them, the less control can be exercised by the technologically adept.
Workers of the world, get off your treadmills and plug in to electronic technology! You have nothing to lose but your pagers!
Beyond the Treadmill © John FitzGerald, 2006
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