• by Jack Feuer , October 1, 2008

Ever listen to New Age meditation DVDs? It's the "music" made by monks in the jungle or medicine men on a mountaintop. Or, it's captured by a microphone stuck in the sand--notable by the absence of any actual singing--but plenty of dissonant humming, clicking, crashing waves and the occasional mating call.

No? OK. Take a serrated steak knife and slowly saw the tail off your cat. What you hear when you do that is what New Age meditation music sounds like.

This is a great metaphor for digital civilization, which has turned even the simplest act of daily living into an exercise in dissonance.

That cyber-truth hit home with a vengeance last weekend during a trek to Santa Cruz to find an apartment for my kid and his buddy, Couch, who are starting school there in January.

Couch (no relation to the furniture) was the driver. He has a Scion with a GPS. It was the first time I used a navigator, and when we got lost, a sultry female electronic voice took us smoothly right back on track.

That was digitally enhancing.

Then we got to Santa Cruz, where we stayed in a rattrap beach motel that had cable, but the remote didn't work.

That was digitally depressing.

We brought with us a fairly substantial list of cribs for rent from Craigslist.com, apartmenthunterz.com and Rent.com. Yay, digital.

But by the time we got up there, they had all been rented for weeks. Boo, digital.

The dissonance grows when these devil-spawned devices work as badly or worse than the analog machines they have replaced. For example, I've gone from a Selectric that occasionally slipped a ribbon to a sleek wireless laptop that is crawling with viruses even though I keep buying and installing state-of-the-art anti-virus software.

Meanwhile, I hope you've all been reading my MediaPost comrade Cathy Taylor's blog, "adverganza," in which she relates in agonizing detail how she can't even switch providers without a Sisyphean journey up and down the mountain of lousy service, indifferent tech support and digital's most common output: inhuman arrogance.

Life was so much simpler when all you had to do to make technology work was put Reynolds Wrap on the TV antenna's ears.

A young digital Jedi I've been mentoring suggests that I get on Twitter, because he thinks my anti-technology snark will play well at 140 characters or less. But Twits make me homicidal--and anyway, why do I need more dissonance in my life?

Because you know that sooner or later Twitter or any social medium will screw up as much as old-fashioned telephones did--only faster and at the worst possible moment. (Come to think of it, old-fashioned telephones rarely screwed up.)

And therein lies a caution for every planner, creative director and untitled Mindshare executive: When you craft digital campaigns, make sure to build in Plan B for when dissonance kicks in--that absolute worst moment when your digital play blows up because the browser went bonkers.

Now, excuse me--I have to get to the gas station. We're going back up to Santa Cruz this weekend, and I'm buying a map of Northern California. You know, in case that GPS bitch decides to reroute us to Fresno.