Wireless and/or Clueless
KANFER, STEFAN
Culture Watching Wireless and/or Clueless By Stefan Kanfer Perhaps the most anthologized, and least insightful, utterance by a Canadian is Marshall McLuhan's "The new electronic...
...Teens have always fought with each other, but “something about the detached disembodied nature of communicating online has contributed to the explosion and rampant flaming that often happens between teens...
...Chances are you own, or will soon acquire, a digital camera, thereby ending the time you spent going to and from the drugstore to have your film developed...
...Culture Watching Wireless and/or Clueless By Stefan Kanfer Perhaps the most anthologized, and least insightful, utterance by a Canadian is Marshall McLuhan's "The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village...
...They have reduced distances, opened doors to the unfamiliar, and made life easier for a lot of us...
...Racial, sexual and gender stereotypes...
...In addition, “children with emotional, behavioral and learning problems may be more influenced by violent images...
...Have the electronic media stifled the totalitarians...
...THOSE are not the worst features of the electronic global village, though...
...Sexual exploitation and violence toward women...
...If the material cannot be called up from cyberspace, forget about it...
...Often the desired passage comes up instantly...
...I have enumerated its dark Satanic threats and soul-destroying aspects...
...Merriam-Webster defines village as "a settlement usually larger than a hamlet and smaller than a town...
...Electronic insensitivity is not restricted to cell users...
...With sound reason, the critics (and I count myself among them) warn of the wired and wireless generation’s excesses: the invasion of intellectual space, the clueless scholarship, the student malice, and the decline of attention...
...They have lots of papers to mark, and many a contemporary student has received a "gentleman's (or lady's) C" without bothering to read the original texts...
...In Totally Wired, What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online (2007), Anastasia Goodstein discusses the neologisms “cyberbullying” and “flaming...
...The trouble is, they are seldom used in moderation...
...In the past, magazines like Time employed people to compile scrapbooks of nine New York newspapers...
...At one time the assembly lines at Ford General Motors and Chrysler provided employment and benefits for hundreds of thousands, now laid off or retrained for other, less remunerative jobs...
...It may well be that our children and grandchildren will look back at this flawed information and communication age with nostalgia and envy...
...Now the average college sophomore researching a paper on, say, Plato's Republic, is unlikely to start by ransacking the shelves of relevant scholarly studies...
...In the far reaches of Afghanistan, or wherever Osama bin Laden is keeping himself, the terrorists of Al Qaeda have no trouble getting their film and radio messages out to the world via the most modern devices...
...The aural attack begins upon entrance...
...Odds are that he or she will turn to Google, which offers 746,000 references to the Republic including a brisk summary of the book and its critiques on Wikipedia, the Net's free encyclopedia...
...It issues from the voices of passengers on their cell phones...
...Those of us who live in villages know that our neighborhoods are safe because every face and tree is familiar...
...But those barriers have proved immeasurably high and incalculably strong...
...The former refers to the intimidation of a chosen victim by other students, via computer...
...Scores of other electronic aids allow us to save hours, reach our loved ones with ease, and shop for everything from food to clothing to medicine to furniture without leaving the house...
...The irony is that today there is a powerful yearning in the Rust Belt for that very labor...
...Exhibit A: The People’s Republic of China...
...Indeed, one of the most effective research engines, Lexis-Nexis, advertises that it offers news stories from the majority of Englishlanguage periodicals worldwide back to 1986, and that there are a number of articles ranging as far back as the mid-1970s...
...But their fundamentalist Islamic beliefs remain intact, as if they were living, dressing and murdering in the 14th century...
...Examining the 1930s, for example, writers could peruse the sports section of the Communist Daily Worker as well as the harrumphing, Roosevelt-hating editorials of Hearst’s red-bannered Journal-American...
...Some children “accept violence as a way to handle problems...
...When that got into full swing, the poet William Blake condemned the “dark, Satanic mills” rising in England’s green and pleasant land...
...The use and abuse of drugs and alcohol...
...In fact, they recently boosted the Chinese leaders with their intense coverage of the carefully orchestrated Beijing Olympics...
...Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood...
...And if you never want to get lost again, you can buy a GPS...
...You are reading a copy of an intellectual magazine that only exists online—something that was inconceivable a short while ago...
...It could of course be argued that since McLuhan died in 1980, he had no idea of what the electronic future would bring...
...they can also be extraordinarily brutal...
...The electronic version of Cliffs Notes adds a "Resource Center" that contains "books, websites, and more for further study...
...They are represented by weaker unions than the United Auto Workers—if they are represented at all—and long for the days that will not return...
...Perhaps the professor will insist on deeper digging...
...Formerly it meant "being such in essence or effect though not formally recognized or admitted...
...To some, these little phones have been a blessing...
...The same holds true in the new millennium...
...Still, this age offers some exceptional technological benisons...
...The Global Positioning System is a satellite-based navigation instrument that determines a car’s position anywhere on earth, and tells you how to reach your destination over the most convenient roads, day or night...
...It observes that although “some games have educational content, many of the most popular emphasize negative themes and promote: “• The killing of people or animals...
...Criminal behavior, disrespect for authority and the law...
...Yet something is missing: the serendipity only an authentic, wellequipped library can offer—the happy, accidental discovery of out-of-print volumes, forgotten pamphlets and periodicals that can’t be found on the Net...
...But the evidence was all around him even in the ' 70s, when the personal computer was in its infancy...
...In its way, the information and communication era is not very different from the industrial age...
...They understand how computers work, and how the cable news networks can be manipulated...
...But further study is the last thing on the mind of our sophomore, whose objective is writing a term paper without doing any actual spadework...
...Flaming” is a synonym for a barrage of insults conveyed electronically...
...Try finding those in the Time library...
...McLuhan’s romantic notion of “Spaceship Earth” implies an underlying belief in the essential sameness of humanity once you get past ethnicity, race, nationalism, and all the other walls that keep us apart...
...There is nothing wrong with showing the pages of a book on a computer screen...
...That nation brims with techies who know how to construct or copy any electronic device...
...The Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter years—or as it is known to Gen X-ers, the Jurassic Era...
...Older citizens are more likely to use noise-canceling headsets plugged into Right-wing AM radio talk shows like those of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, which turn the serious business of politics into mass entertainment...
...Nothing could be more different from a real village than today's global community, with its cell phones, iPhones, iPods, Bluetooth and BlackBerry devices, and scan-deep Internet search engines...
...now they go to the virtual library...
...In his chilling book, Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century (2000), Simon Garfinkel forecasts that “over the next 50 years, we will see new kinds of threats to privacy that don’t find their roots in totalitarianism, but in capitalism, the free market, advanced technology, and the unbridled exchange of information...
...At what cost, no one can say— not yet, anyway...
...Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire T o make this fort assume The furniture of home...
...Rather than bring riders together, cell phones have become a public nuisance separating callers from their resentful fellow commuters...
...The buds tend to be worn by younger Americans connected to a torrent of Top Ten albums and singles...
...But I must also acknowledge its life-enhancing creations...
...Academics are often overscheduled, however...
...In the global village, despite virtual “firewalls” and other software to protect the computer user, hackers work 24/7 at trying to invade personal security...
...Webster's has been forced to redefine virtual...
...But for the majority of talkers the device is merely an extension of the ego, a chance to yammer about inconsequential things to people a few streets away at the top of their voices...
...Instead of a clique not letting a girl sit with them at lunch,” Goodstein reports, “a group of friends can decide to keep her off everyone’s buddy lists...
...The trick, as always, is to balance the liabilities and virtues of our epoch...
...Many of them have cell phones with built-in cameras, capable of recording human rights violations on the spot...
...The illegal industry has given birth to the term “phishing” to describe what criminals do when they pose as representing a legitimate concern, such as a bank, to extract information about checking accounts, credit cards and Social Security numbers...
...two years ago hackers broke into the Pentagon database and tapped names and information about thousands of people who have attended its conferences...
...Visiting journalists carry the same devices...
...As for communication on a more local level, all you have to do is take a bus or enter a railway car in any major city to see what has happened to conversation...
...The paper goes on to warn that “studies of children exposed to violence have shown that they can become ‘immune’ or numb to the horror of violence, imitate the violence they see, and show more aggressive behavior with greater exposure to violence...
...Researchers once went to the library...
...Used in moderation, it is said they may sharpen motor skills and coordination...
...The trouble with this is not a question of accuracy (although Wikipedia has been notorious for errata), but of superficiality...
...at present it also means "simulating on a computer—or computer network—print or virtual books...
...Case in point: the crowds of hypnotized pedestrians sporting their ubiquitous earbuds or noise-canceling headphones...
...Actually, they are already here...
...That way they never have to experience the sound of silence or the occasional inspired thought...
...We live in an information and communication age, and are blessed to be doing so...
...it supplies the necessary quote or reference and we need nothing more...
...it now grosses more than movies and DVDs combined...
...Nearly two centuries later, in the bestselling Small Is Beautiful (1973), economist E.F Schumacher wrote of “soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, moronic work” in factories...
...They’ve all vanished into warehouses...
...The mid-1970s...
...Foul language, obscenities and obscene gestures...
...Only a Paleo-Luddite would wish to turn the clock back to a time when data were laboriously unearthed from piles of yellowed newspaper files and deteriorating scrapbooks, and communication between people in different states—let alone continents—was expensive, brief and unwieldy...
...In “September 1, 1939,” a poem written almost 70 years ago, W.H...
...Auden showed more prescience than many a futurist contemplating an E-world...
...THEN THERE IS the area of communication...
...The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry recently issued a paper entitled “Children and Video Games: Playing with Violence...
...Try finding those on the Net...
...The creation and production of them has become a billion dollar industry...
...Not at all...
...It doesn’t come from the hum of the motor, or from the artists of hiphop leaking from someone’s iPod or from the chatter of straphangers...
...All too soon the foul language goes public and “what’s up bitch, ho . . . becomes normal in the spoken lexicon...
...Even a strange dog on the street elicits attention...
...He concluded that “no amount of ‘bread and circuses’ can compensate for the damage done...
...The same holds true outside academia...
...So much for the similarity of those aboard Spaceship Earth...
...they can schedule meetings, conclude deals, let their spouses know they are going to be late for supper...
...Just as teachers may “never suspect that it’s the ‘good girls’ who may be tormenting their peers, cyberbullies are often kids known for being ‘on the right track,’ or the kids you would least expect...
...This suggests you have a computer and probably a printer, labor-saving machines that have changed the way we all work and live...
...In a real village, it is possible to pull the curtains to deter prying eyes, and to lock the doors against intruders...
...The images presented by some of these games can be extraordinarily realistic...
...Few adults have bothered to investigate the most ubiquitous electronic toys in the world: video games...
...Still, it is worth looking at some of the information we are getting, and some of the communication we are doing...
...Beyond privacy lies another technological worry...
...NONE OF THE ABOVE should be a surprise—historically new inventions bring with them curses as well as blessings...
Vol. 91 • September 2008 • No. 5
