Popular Culture Review Vol. 25, No. 1, Winter 2014 | Page 25

The 1988 Show 21 what we truly desire. Yes, yes, we think. The hologram is our only hope. But a holographic Tupac performing for us is one thing, yet even a fiill hologram of a person on the other end of the phone would still be unable to touch us, interact with us, be with us. What we really desire from our communications technology is something that could put the person we’ve dialed up directly in front of us. It’s not Star Wars that holds our dreams, that is, but Star Trek. What we need is a transporter. A teleportation device that will instantly make the Other appear in the room with us when we want to converse; the Other made flesh and blood, fully present, here rather than there. This, then, is the ultimate trajectory of the telephone. But notice: what the transporter ultimately does is allow us to have a face-to-face conversation— which is exactly what we had before all o f this technology got in between us in the first place. That is, we long for real, embodied, fleshed out presence. We know it is the only real, and only really fulfilling, form of communication. Communications technology thus truly wishes to destroy itself, to overcome itself, to give us what we had before it arrived on the scene and mediated our interactions. The dirty secret we have been dancing around is that we are actually trying to do away with communications technology. This will never succeed, of course—at least without true revolution. Because if technology of all kinds gave us what we all truly want—knowledge, health, well-being, flourishing, and personal face-to-face community—it would have to do so by virtue of its own non-being. This is the ultimate paradox that lies at the center of many myths surrounding technology. And it’s why we might rightly say that Dirty Dancing was the number one movie of 1988. Because that was the year that the movies got smaller, the year that watching a film could mean going home to be by yourself, the year we fell into bad faith and started to accept that we have no control over the change, the year we let technology treat us like babies and put us in the comer. 4. Everything Changes . . . Until it Doesn’t In the end, perhaps the reason we cling to the self—cling to the hope that we are the still point of the universe around which everything else dances and changes—is because in the performance of our lives, we want to think that we are the main characters. Though we have discovered that it is change itself that founds our identity, we have also seen that change is value-laden, full of the messy work of ethics and politics, and though the weight of existence can be heavy, we do not want to think that there could ever be non-existence.