ALAN writes:
My grandfather, my father, and my uncles never used a computer or a cellphone. I imagine they would have looked upon such things with a combination of doubt and suspicion. That they would have regretted living without those things is highly improbable.
All of them read newspapers. My father read newspapers every day of his adult life except for the years he spent in the South Pacific during World War II. Friends told me that whenever they saw him in the 1940s-’50s, he was always carrying a newspaper.
When attempting to read “news articles” on the Internet today, you may have to navigate through a maze of blurbs, codes, and distractions merely to have the article appear in front of you, after which the item you are reading (1) may appear and then vanish momentarily and then reappear, (2) may bounce up or down on your screen, (3) may be blocked from view by more advertisements, (4) may be written by semi-literate adolescents, (5) may omit critical information, such as exact locations, which evidently is now classified as Top Secret, judging by all the articles I have read in which a team of private eyes could not find that information, (6) may still be there if you look for it two hours later or may vanish without notice into oblivion, (7) may inform you about events on the other side of the planet while purposely and at the same time withholding information on significant events in your own town or neighborhood, and (8) may reveal not a trace of awareness of the newspaper reporter’s traditional obligation to report the Who, What, Where, When, and How.
To which my father, grandfather, and uncles would say:
“We never had those problems with newspapers. No newspaper ever asked us to prove we are not a ‘bot’. Newspapers did not play games with us. When we read an article, it did not bounce around the page. It stayed right there in front of us. We did not have to plow through a forest of distractions. Our concentration was not interrupted by advertisements popping up out of nowhere. We could understand what was printed perfectly well without cutesy color pictures.
“Reporters were not adolescents. They could write sensibly. Local news developments were reported in plain words, not concealed by conspiracies of silence or sugar-coated in delicate phraseology in order not to hurt the feelings of lawbreakers, bureaucrats, or shysters. Nor did we worry about mysterious people or groups “tracking” our reading habits and recording that information.
“The daily newspapers were as reliable as dawn and dusk. Their writers excelled in reporting local goings-on. The news was never delayed because ‘the computers are down’. We were never at the mercy of websites and ISPs. We had our newspapers firmly in hand; they could not ‘disappear into cyberspace’. The printing presses and newspaper vendors were always there and did their job. And newspapers cost a lot less.”
