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"I went back to science fiction to try a few experiments …and my first experiment was a disaster…"
- Alfred Bester
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| Hearing Aid | ||
| A service that allows people to anonymously talk with another person who only listens. |
This is another completely unique idea of Brunner's. There is also an interesting technical angle to Hearing Aid, but I don't want to discuss it (to avoid spoiling the novel). It has to do with the manner in which a call to Hearing Aid is done without creating any kind of record, thus ensuring the privacy of the session.
| Stonkered or clutched or quite simply going insane, someone reaches for the phone and punches the most famous number on the continent: the ten nines that key you into Hearing Aid. And talks to a blank though lighted screen. It's a service. Imposing no penances, it's kinder than the confessional. Demanding no fees, it's affordable where psychotherapy is not. Offering no advice, it's better than arguing with that son (or daughter) of a bitch who thinks he/she knows all the answers and goes on and on and on until you want to scream. |
| From The Shockwave Rider,
by John Brunner. Published by Harper and Row in 1975 Additional resources -
|
This remarkable book is deals extensively with technology; issues like privacy and the consequences of keeping vast amounts of data of all sorts on one network are extensively reviewed.
And yet, the key themes of the novel deal with how to stay sane in a world of technological complexity. In the case of Hearing Aid, a powerful technology is employed to allow everyone in a society in which there was little real privacy to have an essential human experience - a sympathetic, nonjudgemental listener.
This excerpt from the book details an experience of a user of Hearing Aid:
Miraculously, there followed no disaster...
The complete anonymity provided by the Hearing Aid service was the result of a special computer tapeworm provided at the inception of the service:
The following statement by philosophy professor Jacob Needleman makes a very strong statement; in the world of The Shockwave Rider, there is support for this important part of the human experience:
From a public veephone at the railcar terminal linking Tarnover to the nearest town
he called Hearing Aid, for the first time in years, and for one dark lonely hour poured
out the secrets of his heart. It was a catharsis, a purgation. But long before he had
regained his room he was shaking, haunted by the fear that Hearing Aid's famous
promise ("Only I heard that!") might not be true. How could it be? It was absurd!
From Canaveral the tendril-ears of federal computers wove through his society like
mycelia. No place could possibly be immune. All night he lay awake in fear, expecting
his door to be flung open and stern silent men to take him under arrest. By dawn he was
half-minded to kill himself.
The poker who
wrote Precipice's original tapeworm was pretty good, but you could theoretically have
killed it without shutting down the net — that is, at the cost of losing thirty or forty
billion bits of data. Which I gather they were just about prepared to do when I showed
up. But mine . . . Ho, no! That, I cross my heart, cannot be killed without
dismantling the net."
Simply put, there is nothing, nothing in the world, that can take the place of one person intentionally listening or speaking to another. The act of conscious attending to another person — when one once discovers the taste of it and its significance — can become the center of gravity of the work of love. It is very difficult. Almost nothing in our world supports it or even knows about it.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Shockwave Rider
More Ideas
and Technology by John Brunner
Tech news articles related to The Shockwave Rider
Tech news articles related to works by John Brunner
Hearing Aid-related
news articles:
- OK2TALK Like Hearing Aid From Shockwave Rider
- Blahtherapy - You Vent Anonymously To Strangers
- Talkspace Anonymous Therapy App
| 'Courier Commons' By Tomorrow Lab, From Karl Schroeder (and Bruce Sterling?) |
| Mouth Haptics Invented By Frederik Pohl In 1965, CMU Now Has Prototype |
| True Crime Live Podcasting In Fiction |
| Zoom Adds Real-Time, Live Translation |
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'The pokkecon rang again. *The coffee’s for him?* Tsuyoshi said.'
The Jetsons imagined so much future.
'Rod placed the brain inside the panel... the horse raised its head, wiggled its ears, blinked twice, gave a tentative whinny.'
'Pina2bo would have to operate full blast for many years to put as much SO2 into the stratosphere as its namesake had done in a few minutes.'
'Chain of hotels that specialized in non-human service.'
'But then... not every bulldozer operator works on the Moon.'
'Griff found the white and pink map distracting and switched it off using his tongue mouse.'
