Pond Square, Highgate; Charles Ginner, 1932

JOHN HARRIS, at the Center for Literate Values, has an especially wonderful essay in the latest issue of his journal, Praesidium, on the negative effects of electronic technology on reading, writing and thought. Harris contends that working on computers has actually made him physically sick, but the cultural phenomenon is his main concern. E-culture is dehumanizing. He writes:

The electronic media have taught us, both as broadcasters and receivers, to value fireworks. Nothing else gets through. Our children send crude tweets and jeopardize their professional future by posting debauches or brawls on YouTube, all because (I am convinced) they want desperately to demarcate some sort of individuality, and the only means of distinction available through Internet and iPhone is strident vulgarity. I believe, indeed, that this search for difference at all costs accounts for excessive and obscene tattooing, wearing of rings in noses and lips and foreheads, spiking and bizarre coloring of hair, shaving of heads, and other kinds of repellent self-defacement so common in young people now. That is, e-culture has left them so alone and insignificant at their various “world at your doorstep” terminals that they settle for drawing any kind of notice. To be remarked as a “freak” is at least to be remarked.

— Comments —

Anti-Globalist Expatriate writes:

While he makes many valid points (and doesn’t touch upon many others) regarding the coarsening of our culture resulting from instantaneous, always-on, ubiquitous online communications, with regards to issues such as his skin tumors and eyebrows and hands, this man is a crank.

I’ve been using computers of various sizes, form-factors, keyboard conventions, and display types almost every day for 37 years, and I’ve never experienced any of the symptoms he claims, nor have I met anyone who has suffered them. With regards to paging through old, moldy first editions, nobody except primary scholars should be doing that – and nobody in his right mind believes that typography, layout, and production values are irrelevant for printed works, much less online oevure.

He’s old, cranky, and uncomfortable with technology. That’s OK. I’m old (probably not quite as old, but no spring chicken), cranky, and utterly at ease with technology.

Mr. Harris is obviously an intelligent man, yet he simply can’t be bothered to examine the literally thousands of physical keyboard options available for his iPad; and based upon his commentary, he seems ignorant of the fact that he can use the built-in touch keyboard in landscape mode to make it bigger. He oughtn’t to be blamed for not knowing such thing; but he ought to’ve asked someone more knowledgeable than himself about such matters whether there were any options which suited his situation better.

It’s a pity that Mr. Harris’ more important points about culture are buried in his anti-technology rant.

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

Overexposure to screens, whether in the course of “word processing,” as we nowadays barbarously put it, or in the “leisure activities” of so-called video-games or “surfing” on “social network” websites, or in other even less reputable pastimes, sickens the person who indulges it.  This was obvious even to my mother, who warned me in 1962 that spending Saturday afternoon in front of the television set was bad for me in every way.  When we ignored our mothers and wasted the afternoon in front of the television set, we felt sick and we were sick.  Contemporary screen-addiction being worse than the forty-years-ago type of screen addiction by magnitudes, the consequences must also be worse by magnitudes.  The symptoms that John describes are entirely plausible and John’s suggestion about their cause is entirely plausible.

The affectlessness of my students, who are constantly screen-involved, via their insidious cell phones and “tablets,” is a disease, and the disease is screen-caused.

Anti-Globalist writes:

I spend more time in front of various screens that many of teenagers today, and yet I’m not affectless, I don’t suffer from so-called ‘carpal tunnel syndrome’, nor are my eyebrows falling out, nor have I been ‘sickened’ by it.

The general problem with younger people in this regard is that their parents have failed to teach them the difference between the real world and the world portrayed on their screens. Many, many younger people in Western societies seem to lack any sort of self-awareness, and the distractions of electronic displays don’t help in terms of forming an identity.

Children absolutely must not be overexposed to these technologies, because blurring the lines between the real and the abstract inhibits the development of character, perception, and insight. And they certainly shouldn’t be exposed to the sex, violence, and general degradation of what passes for ‘popular culture’.

The ‘disease’ to which Dr. Beronneau refers to isn’t caused by ‘screens’. It’s caused by ignorant, disengaged, selfish, self-centered, undisciplined, non-judgemental, non-confrontational ‘parents’, who’re hardly worthy of the label. Mr. Bertonneau is engaging in the same kind of logic which leads liberals to conclude that the solution to the societal problem of violence is to outlaw guns; he blames the tools, rather than those who wield them.

But both Mr. Harris and Dr. Bertonneau make the mistake of assuming their personal preferences and prejudices with regards to technology in general are anything more than opinion. My life and the arc of my career prove otherwise.

 Laura writes:

It seems that you all agree about the mental and psychological effects. The question is whether there are also physical effects. Here is one report on employees suffering depression and sleep disorders from prolonged screen use.

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