Luddite Postscript

Are you around my age? In your late thirties? Know anyone in their mid twenties? Here's how you can blow their mind: tell them that when you were in college, cell phones and the internet didn't exist. You wrote letters by hand on paper and mailed them to your friends. You talked on phones with chords in your dorm rooms. If you were out and needed to reach somebody, you found a quarter and a pay phone and made a call. When you did research, you went to the library, talked to librarians, and found sources by actually touching card catalogs and books and magazines.

I haven't been a full-time college student for fifteen years. Now I am. One big difference is that people can bring laptops into class. I don't think laptops even existed when I was in undergrad, so in the early 90s there was nothing but people, notebooks, and pens and pencils in a classroom. Now you can come to class with a laptop. As the professor talks and the discussion ensues, you hear the low rumbling of fingers on keyboards.

And I don't really like it. In my Arts in Education class about 10 of the 50 students bring their laptops. As the class proceeds, if you glance at them you see the glow of their computers on their faces. And if I think of those 10 students in particular, it seems like they are never really in the class. When they raise their hand to ask a question, I always think "oh, right, you're in here." Or when they speak it seems like they just stepped in the door. Somehow those with pens and notebooks are more present, have been more on task, have been more connected to the room. Us computerless folks haven't thrown up a barrier between ourselves and the goings on.

Sometimes I sit behind the students who bring their laptops, and I always see what I thought I'd see. They have three or four windows open, they check facebook, play games, and sometimes take some notes. Exactly what I would do if I'd brought my laptop. Which is why I don't.

Still a Luddite, Maybe More So

My life here at this Ivy League school of some repute includes a LOT more technology than my previous years. When I was teaching high school, I did have computers around, but the bulk of my days included students, books, and lots of conversation. Old school. But now I've got to do research on the computer systems, my assignments are due through the internet, I (sadly) bought my first cell phone, technology in education inevitably comes up a lot . . . on and on.

But I'm still not convinced. Here's an example.

At first blush, it seems like it's a lot easier to write a paper with modern technology. I've got a computer, I can spell check, grammar check, find a quote online in seconds, juggle paragraphs and phrases with the click of a mouse, cut and paste to my heart's content. But I said things are easier with technology, and easier isn't the same as better. Like Wendell Berry says, he'll buy a computer for his own writing once someone surpasses Dante. Shakespeare wrote with a pen (or a quill and scroll or something). Some noticed that Nietzsche's writing declined once he put his pencil down and started to use a typewriter. Socrates was even worried about what would happen to our thinking once we shifted away from oral language and started to write things down in the first place.

So is my writing any better with all this technology? When you have to write with a pen, and it's a lot harder to go clean up a sentence (much less a paragraph) that you just wrote, does that mean you write more slowly, and craft your prose with more care? Does that have an overall effect?

Here's what I'm SURE used to happen when people wrote with pens and pencils: the used to sit for an extended period of time and get lost in their work. Now when I type a paper on my laptop, I type for 5 or 10 minutes, then I check my e-mail, then I write for another 5 minutes, then I check the score of the Bears game, then I write a little more, then I check out something on YouTube, etc., etc. I've asked other people if they do the same, including my whole philosophy class, and most everyone says yes. There's no doubt this is diminished thinking and diminished writing. On the rare occasion that I do attend to one topic for a protracted period of time, my brain begins to piece things together, my thoughts reach a much deeper and richer place, and I have a chance at getting somewhere original. No chance when I keep fracturing my thinking and writing with little detours to the internet.

It's Going to Get Sentimental

My sister Sandy and my 5 year-old niece Ally came to visit a couple weekends ago. I've missed them dearly, and it was great to spend 48+ hours with them. We went to restaurants, parks, the children's museum, walked Harvard yard, went to Boston Commons, read 14 children's books, and I hugged Ally so hard I may have broken some of her young ribs. She even spelled out "I Love Uncle Stevie" in Jenga pieces.

But then they had to leave, and there was a gaping hole in my east coast life. The gaping hole had always been there, but when they came and went it became very visible. I was bummed for a long time. I realized that having a "heavy heart" isn't really a metaphor, it's a physical descriptor. That's how it actually feels.

Stretching My Brain Like Taffy

I hadn't realized, when choosing my schedule in September, that two of my classes would split my brain in two different directions: Philosophy and Poetry. In my poetry class your encouraged to never state anything outright, which does make some sense. We turn to art forms for when our regular language fails us. If you can state something outright, you'd put it in a newspaper article or an encyclopedia. But when you've got a mood, an emotion, an impression, an inkling, a question, or a curiosity, and it's difficult to "get there" and describe it, then you've got to use some kind of artistic language. Poetry still uses words of course, but it uses them in unexpected and inexplicable ways, as the only way to communicate what you're trying to communicate. Which means your language has to be fracture and fragmented, or as Emily Dickinson would say, you have to "tell it slant." You need to be roundabout, weird, metaphorical, unpredictable. It's probably been a good exercise for me to learn to write this way.

But then I had a philosophy paper to write, which is the exact opposite. Nothing should be muddled, nothing should be poetic. Not only should you not use metaphors, my professor said philosophers even avoid synonyms because it can confuse meanings and argumentation.

And with these two classes running concurrently, it was very, very hard on my little brain. It was like when I flew from Tanzania, where I had been immersed in Swahili for a year, and landed in Spain. I walked up to the information table at the airport, meaning to speak Spanish (which I could at one time), though still stuck in Swahili land in my head. I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came it. It was a language bottleneck, a glut that rendered me mute. I hadn't learned two languages, I learned two languages which canceled each other out.

And now I can't quite write a good poem OR a good philosophy paper.

Maybe I'll just go watch T.V. Those reality shows include lots of dialogue that is neither poetic nor philosophical. Which might be what T.V. is for.

Plato Made Me Miss My Train Stop

Early in the year I was reading Plato on the train back to my home. I was trying to sneak in some extra homework because time is always short in these parts. And the reading was so absorbing, I completely missed my stop. I took it all the way to the end, and then had to hop a train back. No mind though, I was enjoying that old greek and what he had to say. In fact, if you love reading, have you ever noticed that it's never a problem to have to wait for something? Is your plane delayed? Great, more time to sit down and read your novel. Got to the doctor's office early? No problem, more time to read. Imprisoned for the next 10 years? Good, you can finally catch up on that stack of books.