Technology: The Perfect Storm

We've just undergone a major technological perfect storm at our house. I am typing this on a new iMac. Next to me is my new iPhone. Kathie is in some school classroom typing her observations on her new MacBookAir. We have signed up and paid for a full year of lessons that we can schedule as needed. We have already taken three and I am building up a reservoir of questions for another session next week.

This is an uncomfortable feeling--this obsession with technology--because I have always had a shaky relationship with it at best. When VCRs were first becoming prevalent I thought they were a work of the devil and proclaimed that certainty at every opportunity. Then we got a new VCR to go along with our new Fisher stereo television and I changed my tune. The video tapes in our house multiplied like rabbits, until CDs came out and then the burgeoning CDs in our house pushed out the tapes. I'm still not sure where they all went. Now we have "My DVR" on our 60" Panasonic plasma and so CDs are quickly going the way of the tapes. I think we have managed to avoid the Blue Ray stage.

Since I am and will continue to be an English teacher, computers have always posed a special problem. There are spell checks to contend with and grammar checks. My great lesson plan about using the card catalogues and Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature have been made irrelevant by Google and Data Bases. The mindless hours I am now spending compiling photo slide shows have happened because of my new computer. I'm not reading as much. I'm not playing the guitar as much. Just imagine how much worse that wasted time must be for a high school kid.

I remember way back in the fledgling stages of our technological storm, I brought one of those miniature arcade game things you could buy with Frogger on it to the Fite-Garland household to mess around with before and after dinner. Jerry, who is even more of a dinosaur than I am (he is horrified if high school marching bands play anything more avant garde than "On Wisconsin"), didn't much like Frogger and the constant attention it demanded. "It's relentless. Like life," I told him.

Anyway, here I am bathing in my technology. Yet I am worried that it is doing bad things to my brain which is already slowly eroding because of the mental indolence I am enjoying in my retirement. I read Marshall McLuhan. There was even a time when I thought he was on to something. The Medium is the Message and all that still holds true for me.

I read a great article in this week's New Yorker by Adam Gopnik ("The Information") where he cautions us to be aware of "How the Internet gets inside us." It is basically a group review of a lot of books that all discuss how books are obsolete. He groups the books into three categories based on their reaction to the proliferation of technology: The Never-Betters; Better-Nevers; and "Always-Wasers."

The Never-Betters maintain that we are all privileged to be in the midst of a world that becomes more accessible by the nano-second. So what if no one reads Tolstoy anymore, they say. Tolstoy sucks anyway. We dinosaurs have to get over it. Sorry Jerry, the days of college fight songs and "Hold that Tiger" are over.

There are obvious problems with this approach. Part of the Never-Better argument is that each new wave of technology brought with it positive progress. The printing press is this group's most reliable example. But, according to Gopnik, the idea that the printing press brought about all that is good about western civilization is intellectually dishonest. Sure, the printing press might have propelled the Reformation, but it also propelled Martin Luther's anti-semitic writings. For every free thinker who used the printing press, there were plenty of petty despots and opportunists who used it to suppress rights every where.

The Never-Better position maintains that contraptions (printing presses, televisions, computers) don't change our consciousness; contraptions are part of our consciousness.

My computer and all of its connectedness is like, Gopnik explains, a spouse or a friend who you ask for help if you can't remember the first episode of The Lucy Show or the major exports of Brazil. It is like we are living in a library with everything in its collection. This might be bad if you never get out of the house or talk to someone with a differing point of view, but that is certainly not caused by the medium itself.

As Gopnik says, "Our trouble is not the over-all absense of smartness, but the intractable power of pure stupidity, and no machine, or mind, seems extended enough to cure that."

The Better-Nevers write more emotionally powerful arguments. They are, after all, wallowing in nostalgia for a world long gone. The Net seems to parcel out information in short spurts and bits and pieces of data. At first search there isn't much depth and this medium, the Better-Nevers warn, alters our brains at the neurological level. Well of course it does. How else would the brain be effected but on a neurological level. Gopnik uses a clever comparison to make his point. Lamenting the fact that the Net affects changes in how our brains work is like complaining that football doesn't just affect a kid's fitness, but the muscle tone that creates his ability to throw and catch a football. DUH.

Even though Gopnik does a nice job of pointing out the absurdity of their position, I find myself allied with the Better-Nevers. Kids don't read as much. People who go to the YMCA to work out go home frustrated on those rare days when the computer keeping track of their progress is down. Families gathered around the table for dinner are all looking down on their tiny screens, texting a message, catching up on that day's scores, or checking on a stock. Where parents used to tell the kids to pry themselves from the TV screen to join them around the fire for some family time, now they tell them to get off their computers or cell phones and join the family around the TV screen to watch Survivor or something equally horrible.

The problem is progress. There has always been some new machine that acts like our mind and there has always been some entertainment derived from that machine which threatens our mind.

Which brings us to the Always-Wasers. Their argument is self-evident and probably more than a little true.

Gopnik ends with a terrific thought:

"Thoughts are bigger than the things that deliver them. Our contraptions may shape our consciousness, but it is our consciousness that makes our credos, and we mostly live by those. Toast, as every breakfaster knows, isn't really about the quality of the bread or how it's sliced or even the toaster. For man cannot live by toast alone. It's all about the butter."