Beeped Into Submission
by Jeff McGowan  

Why is it every time you do something you are not supposed to do, there is a little beep to remind you to be a better citizen? If you don’t put on your seat belt, a series of beeps occurs, until you comply by buckling up. If you press the wrong button while you are in the middle of a phone menu, a loud and discordant beep jangles your nerves until you can figure out what the right button is to press to stop the pain. Or what about when your bluetooth device or remote hand-held phone is about to go dead? A mournful dirge of somber beeps every thirty seconds interrupts your conversations and gets fainter and fainter, as if the phone is having a battle with cancer that will result in the passing of a good friend unless we immediately recharge.

Why do manufacturers choose the beep? It is obviously a conspiracy to control us, beeps engender a Pavlovian response. When the agony starts, you do whatever it takes to stop the sound.

This makes me wonder if everyone experiences the annoyance in the same way. For instance, since the Republican party has conditioned its membership to the point that it tells its membership what to think on a daily basis with talking points, could Republicans be secretly enjoying the beeps? For those of you who have seen the movie Sleeper, by Woody Allen, is the beeping sound the new orgasmatron for followers of Dubya?

Clearly it is beginning to feel as though the machines are running us. We must meet the demands of devices that are supposed to serve us, not the other way around. Make one mistake and it can cost you time and sanity trying to figure out how to mollify the device you are on. It makes me wonder, what’s next?

The sky is really the limit here. What if the government implanted chips in the road that sent signals to your car telling it that it was violating the law by speeding? Maybe for something like that they wouldn’t even use a beep but a fog horn or a recording of nails on a chalk board instead. We the creator will be reduced to mere slaves in an attempt to avoid auditory abuse by a small oligarchy of corporate magnates.

So what’s the solution? Damned if I know. A letter writing campaign or protest might be a good start. Perhaps we could convince moveon.org to do some fund raising for some large speakers so that we could organize rallies outside of the corporate headquarters of Motorola for example, where we would blare their beep at the side of the building where the CEO is located until he agreed to get rid of the sound.

In a world that increasingly sees large corporations and government treating the little guy as nothing more than a sheep that is part of a vast faceless herd, the little beep is perhaps a metaphor for what happens when we as individuals stop thinking and surrender to the collective glow of group thinking. We forfeit our individuality and quirkiness and are disciplined to the requirements of our possessions. Maybe if we spent a little more time thinking about the type of world we are creating for future generations, our children won’t be beeped into submission.

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