The Experiment

In the evening of January 8, the Florida Gators and the Oklahoma Sooners played each other in Miami for college football’s national championship (with the Gators ultimately prevailing). Being at work during the game, I had decided to listen to the play-by-play on my headset radio. But at the last minute, I decided to go in a different direction, tuning instead to my local classical radio station and listening to classical music (and later jazz) for the duration of the game.

I went further. I never asked anyone around me how the game was going, and I avoided the break room TV area where the game was being shown. I had decided to see how far I could go without knowing who was winning.

I did this sort of thing during the Super Bowl in early 1984, played between the Los Angeles Raiders and the Washington Redskins. Usually a football fan, I deliberately avoided watching the game or exposing myself to any media that would give away the outcome. I went to sleep that night successful in that endeavor. The next morning, on the way to work, I was still doing well when my eyes accidentally passed over the news rack outside my work place. And fell upon a picture of the Raiders’ quarterback Jim Plunkett beaming with a huge grin over his team’s 38-9 thrashing of the Redskins. So then it was over.

I didn’t think that I would go that long this time, because I was surrounded by interested football fans for the duration of the Florida-Oklahoma game. For most of the night, I just heard classical music and couldn’t hear any outbursts of cheering on the part of my coworkers. But around 11:30, I couldn’t deny that, every five minutes or so, people would be breaking out in cheers and yells. So then I knew: the Gators were winning, and the game was almost over. Finally, once I pulled out of the parking lot onto the main road here in Gainesville, all doubt was erased: horn-honking, yelling, and very, very heavy traffic, along with groups of students walking toward University Avenue to celebrate.

In case you thought this entry was all about football, think again. All of the above I did in fun, of course. But during the time that I was avoiding the football game, I noticed the several coworkers around me who were totally engrossed in it. And it seemed as if they were involved in an alternate reality of sorts, with their thoughts and emotional reactions keyed into things that were invisible and seemingly unreal. Kind of like what you commonly see nowadays when you see people walking around by themselves talking on their cell phones in public. They may be communicating with others, but they present the appearance of being "zoned out" or of talking to themselves. In older times, this kind of behavior would be deemed abnormal. Nowadays, all I would have to do is stick a small gadget on one of my ears and then I could walk around anywhere in the open public, loudly yakking my head off and no one else thinking anything of it.

Are we really that far off from the scenario in the movie The Matrix, where the real world is completely supplanted a cyber/neural network that supplies all of the necessary environmental and emotional cues? Hey, I too am a 21st century human who loves escapist entertainment and thinks on different tracks, but I think I’ll opt for keeping at least one foot firmly planted in reality, thank you!