Digital Nation

Did anyone catch PBS’s Frontline documentary Digital Nation last night? It was one of the more sad and sobering docs I’ve watched in a long while. Although I use computers far more than I’d like, I keep a few toes in the Luddite camp on the issue of digital technology and how it has severed some key elements that used to make life fun. To wit, the tangibility of physical objects and the joys of eye contact and in-person human relating.

Much of this program focuses on children and how steeped in technology their lives have become. In one extremely sad segment, young South Korean Internet addicts were filmed at a “detox” facility, trying to learn how to be kids again because Net gaming had taken over their lives. Digital Nation showed them learning how to jump rope and go outside to play in the 3-D landscape. Wow. These kids had been manipulated so very far from their instincts that they truly did look like they were being tortured by having to pry their fingers away from their keyboards. Apparently PC Baangs, arcades in which kids can play video games in stacked cubicles, are very popular in Asia—to an extreme extent. One child actually died because he played for 50 hours straight without bothering to pause for food or water. Just what we need—another source of addiction in the world.

Another segment examined the in-class behaviors of both grade school and college students. Obviously I am way out of the loop on this one, as I had no idea that children were allowed to bring both cell phones and laptops to school and use them while the teacher tries desperately to convey information. Once upon a time, this would have been considered extremely rude and distracting--probably because it’s extremely rude and distracting—and would have been banned. Producer Rachel Dretzin interviewed one vice-principal who seemed to be spending his days monitoring students’ Internet surfs during class. Give me a break! We’re paying educators to cyber-babysit?? How ‘bout either issuing students dumb terminals so they can’t be chatting on Facebook during class, pulling the plug on the school’s router, or….imagine this!...not having individual computers in the classroom? Is it really such ignoble idea to teach kids how to pay attention to one thing at once, instead of 5?

One high-schooler from affluent Chatham, NJ, proudly boasted that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d read a book. Couldn’t remember…. He was shown referring to an online version of Spark Notes for Romeo and Juliet, as he simply “didn’t have enough hours in the day to read the whole thing.” He seemed quite pleased with his “accomplishment” of having ingested the summary version in less than 5 minutes. No doubt the demands placed on him by Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, and MySpace are so onerous that he has no time to consider the pedestrian words of one of history’s greatest writers. Would anyone like to join me in slamming him up against a wall and shoving the complete works of Shakespeare through his smug little eyeballs?

And thus we stumble upon the popularity of books with titles like The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30).

As old, cranky, and out-of-touch as I may sound, it’s hard to be middle-aged and have known another way. Life used to have much more time in it. Much more serendipity. And much more pleasure. Relating the majority of our time to a machine has made us, as a society, much colder. More calculated and pragmatic. We want exactly what we want, and we want it NOW.  Just as technology serves our every whim, we expect people to do so as well. It has fashioned us into digital creeps.

I'm not sure where we're heading with all this. I try not to be xenophobic toward these "natives" of cyberspace, but it's tough to not feel some apprehension sneaking in. If we have ostensibly gained so much from the glut-of-information age, then why don't I feel happier? Smarter? Kinder? As effervescent as pink champagne? Why do all my most cherished memories not involve sitting around staring at a screen? Yesterday I stood on a long line at the PO, where everyone had tried to endure the wait by whipping out their smart phones. A 6-year-old boy whose mom had left for a few minutes was wandering up and down the line aimlessly, searching in vain for someone to look up from their screens and acknowledge him.

Some days it feels like that for me, too.

 [I like this topic. For further info, see my November blog entry, “Apocalypse How?”]

Some Thoughts from Child-hood

I have just started reading Julia Child’s My Life in France. It is a beautiful book full of luscious description of a time that is no longer. Opening in the late 1940s, the first chapter depicts her experience as a young, naïve American having her initiatory meal in a restaurant in Rouen. She and her new husband, Paul, feast on a lovingly described lunch of salade verte, baguette, oysters on the half shell, sole meuniere, strong black pressed coffee, fromage blanc, and a bottle of Pouilly Fume. Child touts it as “the most exciting meal of my life,” accentuated, no doubt by its distinction as her very first lunch in her newly adopted homeland, a place that suited her to a T.

In the introduction, which includes a charming photo of the young couple sitting side-by-side in their cozy study, Child relates how she and Paul meticulously documented their time in France for friends and relatives via a series of photos, datebooks, letters, sketches, poems, and cards. Paul handwrote his brother 3- to 6-page journalistic accounts every week, incorporating sketches, photos, and mini-collages out of ticket stubs and newsprint. Also a faithful correspondent, Julia added her own typewritten versions about what she’d been cooking and the human drama unfolding in her new French home. I imagine the delight the recipients must have taken in receiving these items, made with such creativity and care, much as I recall the pains taken by my mother and aunt, both artists, to handpaint and assemble collaged greeting cards for every holiday during the 1950s and 60s.

The middle of our last century was a comparatively sensual and sensuous time. Little in our world was “virtual.” TV programs, perhaps, but TV was still a novelty and had a certain delineated quality, as video had not yet become a ubiquitous presence. Other than that, just about everything happened in ways that we could see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. And slowly—much more slowly.

When I consider the wild popularity of Julia Child’s book (and personage) in 2009 America, it’s hard not to imagine that some of it derives from our culture’s steadily inching away from the sensual, tactile world. A recent study found that the average American adult spends 8 1/2 hours/ day in front of a screen, including (mostly, sadly) TV, computers, mobile phones, and other devices. I have always loved how books look and feel, visually and tactilely. So much is now being done on screens that we have fewer and fewer experiences that involve apprehending in 3-D. For example, I love holding them, smelling them when they’re new, seeing how cozy they make a room when stacked end-to-end on a tall wooden bookcase. The art on their covers, the fonts used in printing, the texture of the paper and its sometimes-deckled edges that press rough and sensuously against a fingertip. There is something about hearing the crackle as you open a new hardcover for the first time that extends beyond the promise of the knowledge that lies therein or the kindred soul you may just meet inside. And that something has to do with the physical object itself.

I am saddened to see that so many people have purchased Kindles and other e-books and seem to like them. This summer I bumped into one and its owner while eating breakfast in Mendocino County. I could tell just by looking at him that he was a genre reader—most likely sci-fi—and so consumed books the way some of us consume cereal. He was really in it for the story; the wrapper was unimportant. And so, he loved his Kindle (while admitting that he also loved books—and had shelves-ful back home). We spent quite a while debating the relative pros and cons of the device and its impact on the book business. And no doubt, it’s had a huge impact on the business that may only get worse as prices drop and young people decide that their entire world must be virtually lived.

But for me, it comes back to a larger question. What will we have in the end if the entire world is flattened onto a computer screen? And are we so compelled toward those backlit images that real life, with its lesser controllability and order, has taken a backseat? As a world, we have become “busy.” Computers were originally designed to “save time” and “make things easier.” And certainly, in many instances, they do. Yet, people never seemed as busy to me as we have since we became obsessed with our electronic toys.

We are being manipulated, sold an ever-greater bill of cybergoods due in part to our human propensity toward grasping—wanting ever more. Like hamsters on a wheel, we try to wring juice from this digital experience and wonder why, despite all our virtual “connecting,” at the end of the day we feel more exhausted than satisfied.

Tangible things and experiences, human interactions and sensual pleasures enrich our lives in ways that computer-generated experiences do not. Having a meal like Julia Child describes satisfies so much in us beyond merely the exquisite delight to our tongue. Going outside on a fall day when the leaves are at their peak, smelling smoke arising from fireplaces as dusk descends, hearing ducks flying overhead honking righteously on their migration south. These are realms into which our keyboards can never lead. It’s sad to think that someone would choose a sterile electronic device over a real book. And equally sad that so much of what is “real” in life has flattened into a randomly generated series of pixels.

I will leave you with a photo of Julia Child's kitchen, which has gone the way of the Smithsonian. Perhaps that's a statement in and of itself. Perhaps when End of Days hits, they'll find us all huddled in that Institution, ogling our former possessions and remembering what it felt like to be at play in three-dimensional space, cuddling objects we could actually see, touch, hear, smell, and taste.