Sometimes I imagine the digital age is a bad dream from which I’ll awaken to find it’s 1976 again, and my biggest technological challenge will be pressing the butterfly switch to start my IBM Selectric typewriter.
Instead of a GPS, I’ll consult a map. Instead of an iPod, I’ll listen to the radio. Rather than a Nook, I’ll visit the library or the bookshelf in the basement. There won’t be 800 photos on my camera waiting to be downloaded. I won’t feel ashamed that I don’t own an iPad yet, or that I haven’t bothered to learn how to use 95 percent of the buttons on my 4G smartphone and 99 percent of the functions on my computer. I’ll be blissfully ignorant of cloud computing, Bluetooth and BlackBerry technology. The thought of declaring e-mail bankruptcy will never have crossed my mind, and I won’t be embarrassed to admit I’m a slacker on Twitter and Facebook.
While I’m not technologically illiterate, I am clueless about how electronic media actually work, and I’m just not that interested in finding out. That makes me a social outcast and less relevant than a rotary phone.
New York Times tech expert David Pogue hit the nail on the head last month when he wrote that it’s wildly unrealistic to expect most people to keep up with all the developments in electronic media.
“How is the average person supposed to know the essentials of their phones, cameras and computers?” Pogue wrote. “There’s no government leaflet, no mandatory middle- school class, no state agency that teaches you some core curriculum. Instead, we muddle along, picking up scattershot techniques as we go. We wind up with enormous holes in our knowledge.”
Thank you, Mr. Pogue.
I truly wish I’d spent second and third grades learning Microsoft Office instead of penmanship. Unfortunately, Bill Gates was barely out of diapers then.
Given the ubiquity of digital technology, sometimes I think the only hope for people like me is to attend community college for a year or two and get a solid foundation in computer science. Learn the language.
Taking a quickie class here and there, as I have, doesn’t begin to address the deficit and only reinforces a late adopter’s feelings of inadequacy.
Not that I would ever aspire to be online or plugged in most of the day. People who become highly dependent on digital devices — like many of our kids — may do so at their peril. Today, average Americans are bombarded with three times as much information as they received in 1960, according to research at the University of California, San Diego. For many people, visiting 40 websites a day is not uncommon.
“Thanks to our more or less continuous connections to the Internet and other electronic media, we never stop multitasking,” writes author and tech critic Nicholas Carr. “And we juggle more tasks and bits of information than ever before. That’s taking a big toll. Constant multitasking is associated with shallower thinking, weakened concentration, reduced creativity, and heightened stress.”
Last summer, Matt Richtel of The New York Times wrote that when people continually text, e-mail, play videogames and juggle several streams of information, they keep their brains in a constant mode of stimulation, which can become addictive — literally. Without the constant input, such people get bored, and their ability to focus and to set priorities decreases.
People consumed with electronic gadgets interact less with people, Stanford University professor Clifford Nass told Richtel. “Mr. Nass . . . thinks the ultimate risk of heavy technology use is that it diminishes empathy by limiting how much people engage with one another, even in the same room,” Richtel wrote. When we pay less attention to each other, he suggests, humanity takes a big hit.
I don’t know about humanity, but I know my peaceful dinner times took a big hit when my husband brought home his new smartphone recently. It goes off like a fire alarm every time he gets an e-mail. One day I may figure out how to turn it off.
Freelance columnist Mary Winter (mwinte@aol.com) of Denver writes for the op-ed page twice a month.
