Have you ever thought about email. I mean really thought about it; it's wonderful capabilities and terrible shortcomings. As hackneyed as it sounds, we haven't quite figured out how to use this whole 'e' thing yet. Email, Econnect, Ebooks (how is that possible?) Eserver, Ewaiter, Efood ad nauseum. I'm not aware of any precendent of such debauchery of the English language.
What ever happened to the quill and parchment? What have we accomplished, what have we given up, by using email and other sorted gadgets, i.e. weblogs?
I've been keeping a journal on and off ever since I graduated high school. And like most boys in high school, I took mechanical drawing. In this class you must write in all capital letter, which I loved to do. My dad writes this way so naturally I wanted to. Recently however, in my journal writings I've made the executive decision to write in cursive. You wouldn't believe what came to follow! Instead of quickly writing according to custom, I had to think about what I wanted to write and how to write it. In essence, I had to think. Cursive by definition is superfluous. Heck, I suppose writing in general is too. But cursive trumps everything. Totally unnecessary, totally time consuming for our 'on demand' Egeneration.
I know certain individuals who wait with eager anticipation for snail (I bet the USPS didn't come up with that) mail correspondance. Like lil' kids around Christmas. Now we've reduced conversation to who knows what.
Neil Postman, who is (I believe he died a couple years ago) one of my favorite social critics, wrote this in Amusing Ourselves to Death concerning the boob tube:
What is television? What kind of conversations does it permit? What are the intellectual tendencies does it encourage? What sort of culture does it produce?...Thus, in answering the question, What is television?, we must understand as a first point that we are not talking about television as a technology but television as a medium.
He asked questions that nobody even thought of or bothered to think about. So I ask, why even bother with this computer thing?
Again, Mr Postman:
Although I believe the computer to be a vastly overrated technology, I mention it here because, clearly, Americans have accorded it their customary mindless inattention; which means they will use it as they are told, without a whimper. Thus, a central thesis of computer technology--that the principal difficulty we have in solving problems stems from insufficient data--will go unexamined.
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