pluggedin

Plugged in

by Bob on October 7, 2007

Plugged in. That's what we are supposed to do with an electrical plug when we want to use an appliance. We plug it in the wall to get electricity.

In societal mannerisms and nuances, being or getting "plugged in" means that we are inviolately in the grid of humanity, and its social network and services. We "belong" in a serious way to society-at-large.

Someone recently came up to Boston from New York City, homeless and penniless. He was able to get "plugged in" to Boston by going to a homeless shelter and also to a day center for the poor and asking people what to do. They told him, and he got a bed that night in a shelter and food and clothing. That's getting "plugged in" to a local society very fast. Other cities and towns are not so supportive. One gets lost and abandoned on the pavement of the big metropolis or small town's church steps. It all depends on the people in the community who do indeed "belong" already and their charitable nature and actual hands-on willingness to help.

Getting plugged in is hard in general. We walk into a strange town or city as a stranger, and we can be ostracised. Thrown out. Forced out.

Getting unplugged either by bad fortune or desire is the flip side of the figurative coin. That's a terrible mess, getting forcefully unplugged by society against our own wishes.

Maybe we unplug ourselves for a good reason. Well, that's okay. But they say it's never a good thing to burn one's bridges. But there are differing theories on that in particular. Sometimes, some scholars contend, that is it necessary to burn bridges, to short circuit the social and otherwise societal network we belong in, for the better.

Another kind of unplugging is distancing oneself from the past if it is painful enough. Like throwing a bunch of old personal papers or even love letters into the fireplace to burn up in smoke. To have a catharsis of sorts.

Other societies have burned and banned books which the society feels it is not appropriate for its citizens to read anymore as it would cause harm. This was the extreme point made by Ray Bradbury in his brilliant "Fahrenheit 451" book which was later made into a movie. The whole world was turned upside down in essence. A job of a fireman was not to put out fires, but to cause fires to burn books which were forbidden to be read anymore. People were only allowed to look at the most rudimentary of comic books, or quite importantly to only be able to watch a big television screen for their entertainment and information. Big Brother indeed. But there was a movement of activisits who took to memorising books whole, illegally, before they were burnt, and being able to recite them to future generations.

In many religions, in the real world, there are special people whose job it is to memorise and recite the whole religious text of the religion. So that, in case the holy book is lost or burnt or other wise destroyed, the divine message will not be lost.

This was actually an interesting premise of an original 1968 Star Trek TV episode called "The Omega Glory". The message had been garbled but not totally lost.

Being unplugged is a harsh thing if we don't want to be unplugged. We are then like the Pharmakos in ancient Greece.

Getting plugged in usually is a wonderful and exciting experience in a societal way. It gets us a home, meals, job, friends and family.

Dr. Tim Leary in the 1960s said "Turn on, tune in, drop out". That was a conscious unplugging from one societal model and into another. Whether it really worked or what it resulted in, is still debatable.

A more insidious kind of plugging in or being plugged out or just simply plugging out can be found with escapism in our modern technological society when technology, which is usually indistinguishable from sheer magic as the old wise aaying goes, is over-used and runs our lives rather than our running the technology. We see this with the tacit surrentder of human beings to cell phones, iPODs, Walkman, TV, internet and the like. But it's a seeming societal sumbolic drug of choice and avoidance in the moderate to extreme case, locking out other human beings and true interpersonal interaction.

I used to see this when I was a young child. TV was new back then. When friends came into the living room and were having a nice friendly conversation, it abruptly stopped once the TV was turned on and the soma took hold on the viewers.

Television and its descendents have a habit of taking over our senses and unplugging us from interpersonal interaction, as Bradbury showed in his book.

We have to be careful about when we unplug something, or plug into something else. It might send us to places we had never wanted to go, if we were sensible.

Now, MTV invented musician's "Unplugged" sessions. That was a good use of unplugging something. It had been an old musician's tactic to see how good a musician or band really was: to get rid of the electronics and hear the real playing.

Nowadays it's gone off the deep end. Everything seems to be "sampled" and electronically modified in post-production sessions. There's hardly any real music anymore.

So I guess the moral is to watch out for plugs and outlets.

Bob Dylan did sing in his 1965 song "Subterranean Homesick Blues" that "Don't follow leaders/Watch the parking meters" and "The pump don't work/Cause the vandals took the handles".

So, we must watch our figurative parking meters in society and life to see that we are not in a state of reckless abandon from the real world of other people and what social interaction means in person.

Bob Dylan knew it in the 1950s. We should listen again. We might learn something and avoid the numbing effects of modern technology being over-used to put us emotionally to sleep. We should leave that to Dionysus as the ancient Greeks did. And Dylan did sing in the song "You don't need a weatherman/To know which way the wind blows". Yeah, Bob knew, way back then.