The age of remote
BY
This may not be the "Age of Mobile" after all, in spite of what the GSM people are saying. It is shaping up to be more like the "Age of Remote" — remote being the popular name for that hand-held gadget that makes it possible for its owner not to have to get up from his comfortable armchair to switch on his television set manually - and having switched it on, to change channels manually.
Not so long ago one of my friends unexpectedly found himself deep inside the "age of remote." He is still not quite sure of what to make of it.
It started when he became the proud owner of a brand new television set, courtesy of the generosity of his children, who believed that his old television set, which had been in service for twenty-one years, should be honourably retired. One of the reasons it had been around for so long was that it had been the beneficiary of maintenance culture that had been carried to extremes - so much so that the repairman down the road had come to regard the old TV set as a steady source of income. Another reason was that the TV set was "tropicalised" - meaning that it had been built with NEPA in mind. I might also add that my friend happened to belong to that class of people who never, ever throw things away.
Having had the new television set installed, my friend was for moving the old one into a store that already housed such other milestones of technological advance as an ancient manually operated sewing machine whose brand name sounded like Gretzner; a broken-down HMV gramophone, an unserviceable portable annual typewriter on which, years back, he had learnt to type with two fingers; a disused gas lamp with half its crumbling mantle still attached; and finally one of those hot combs that were heated in a charcoal fire, and was his wife’s contribution to the clutter.
His wife objected to the old TV set being moved into the store, claiming that the already overflowing store could not accommodate yet another museum piece. And as usually happened in such matters, his wife’s wish prevailed. They toyed with the idea of selling the old TV set, but who would buy such an unglamorous, near obsolete equipment whose brand name had long ceased to be a household name? In the end they decided to give it away, and at least get thanked for their generosity.
The person to whom it was given was a young house painter who lived in the nearby village and who had been helpful on past occasions. He thanked them all right, but not as fulsomely as they expected. He seemed to be preoccupied with one thing: "Has it got a remote?"
"It did, long ago," my friend replied, "but something went wrong with it, and I can’t remember when I last saw or used it."
"How have you been changing channels?" Was the house painter’s next question.
"By walking right up to the television set, bending down and pushing some buttons."
"Do you still have the remote?" The young house painter asked. "Maybe I can get it repaired."
It took nearly ten minutes of rummaging in drawers and cupboards before they found it. It had gathered both dust and mould, and looked as defunct as anything ever did. The house painter carted away both the television set and the disabled remote control device, leaving my friend wondering why the device should be regarded as being possibly the most important component of a television set.
He soon found out why, and he did that when he, a slave to old habits walked up to the new TV set, bent down and extended his forefinger to press a button. That was when he discovered that modern television sets - at least the brand that his children had given him - must have been designed to be operated, willy-nilly, by remote control. Those buttons that stood out like knobs in the old set were hardly visible in the new set. He had to spend a couple of days intensively studying the Owner’s Handbook, in which at least a dozen pages were devoted to the subject of remote control.
He was just beginning to get the hang of it when a digital satellite decoder arrived, from the same source as the TV set. It too came with a remote control device. Before long my friend became hooked on "remote," and walking a distance of some three metres to the television set and manually changing channels now seemed like hard work. He found himself using his legs less and less. It had nothing to do with advancing age, as he discovered when his grandchildren, aged two and a half to eight, spent a weekend with him. Throughout their stay the struggle to prize the remote control device from their clutches was fierce - and futile.
Having finally mastered the remote control device and its uses - including how to operate a Timer button that tells him on screen that the stew he is cooking is being burnt to cinders while he sits goggling at the idiot box - my friend is now looking for fresh worlds to conquer. There are plenty of ideas to choose from, some of them especially suited to conditions in Lagos at this time. One could be an explosive device disguised as a gold wristwatch. When it is snatched at gunpoint in a daylight operation at Mile Two, the owner would activate it from a safe distance, giving the armed robber a nasty surprise. There could also be a heat sensitive, voice activated robot, shaped like a trinket box, that shoots poisoned darts at an approaching armed robber. Or, if he chooses to, my friend could wire and equip his entire house in such a way that everything in it is operated by remote control.
Mr. William (Microsoft) Gates’s house, appropriately named Valhalla, is said to be so wired that if he wants a window to slide open, all he has to do is speak to the window and his will is done. As far as I know the closest any Nigerian has ever come to that standard of voice activated remote control was when a man who was driving on the Third Mainland Bridge one night had a flat tyre. Finding himself without a spare, he "commanded" the flat tyre to be re-inflated. Miraculously it was. The man was a Pentecostal pastor, and he told this story himself as a personal testimony at a dinner I once attended.
One might even dare to dream of owning a remote control device that works on humans just the way it does on television sets. You could carry it around in your pocket, like a mobile phone. If your querulous neighbour becomes too noisy, you take out your remote control device, point it at her, and press MUTE. If the butcher with whom you are haggling over prices insists on speaking to you in an alien tongue, you press the button that selects the English subtitles for what he is saying. And people who are hard of hearing needn’t ever again be left out of conversations. Whenever they meet a person who isn’t speaking loud enough they simply increase the volume by pressing the appropriate button.
There is bound to be a downside to all this, of course. According to evolutionists, Man (i.e. homo sapiens) used to have a tail with which it swung from trees. Then, as he came to use his legs more and more and his tail less and less, the latter atrophied through desuetude and eventually disappeared. Monkeys, our closest cousins, kept theirs and are still swinging from trees. I have heard it said that, if we insist on being stuck in comfortable armchairs instead of walking up to our television sets to manually change channels, what happened to our tails could also happen to our legs.
Of course it is possible that there are people who do not regret having lost their tails, and probably would not regret losing their legs either. For them the Age of Remote is the golden age. They would not doubt wish to make the most of it.
December 2001