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A Luddite’s Lament

By James Utt
By James Utt

I heard a story at a brunch that should have shocked me, but sadly did not. An acquaintance was walking along Heisler Park and spied a blue whale remarkably close to shore. He excitedly shouted to the person next to him to take notice of this magnificent sight. This happened to be a young man who had his face buried in his tablet and without looking up, said, “I’ll catch it on Youtube.”

Warming up for a doubles match at beautiful Alta Laguna Park last fall, I noticed that the guy I was hitting to was on his cell phone. Guess he was a good multi-tasker or he didn’t need much concentration to keep the ball in play against me.

Not so long ago, my date and I joined another couple at one of Laguna’s more trendy restaurants near Forest and Glenneyre. I knew it had to be trendy because I was the oldest person there. When seated we could not help but notice that several young couples were not talking to each other but had their eyes glued to their cell phones.

Signs and wonders.

Would it be too much to ask that our community to use social media less? That we actually speak in real time with other people? That we live a bit less plugged in? I do think it would fit in more with who we are and who we have been as a community.

It is lonely out here in anti social media land. I am told I am being a cranky old guy, missing out on so much, in danger of being left behind. The guy you warn your Thanksgiving guests about. “Watch out for Uncle Jim. After a couple of drinks, he’ll go off on Facebook or Kindle. Just try and get him back into the football game or get him another scotch.”

True, I am the only person I know who is not on Facebook. Own a Kindle? Please. Amazon recently sent out an email stating that books would soon go the way of the rotary phone. I think that would be a loss of immeasurable proportions. Books are to be held, looked at, given as gifts the receiver can see, touch or even write in. “Hey, I just bought you ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Kindle edition.” I think not.

Twitter, Instagram? Aren’t there other things we could be doing, especially in our fair town, instead of retreating to these? Last season, the University of Michigan lost a game on the last play because their punter fumbled a snap. Thanks to Twitter, he was getting death threats within the hour. What a big step forward for human communication.

Americans spend an average of five hours a day with digital media, more than half of that time on mobile devices. According to a UK study, we check our phones 221 times a day. It seems we are headed for a time where not being a participant in social media would indicate either eccentricity, social marginalization, or old age.

Dr. Sherry Turkle of MIT has been researching the effects of the overuse of social media on Americans. She has found that the new communications revolution is degrading the quality of relationships. Professors gaze out at a room full of semi-engaged multi-taskers. In the online dating world of infinite choices, it is more difficult for emotional commitments. Most alarming of all is that young people are not learning how to be alone. “It is the capacity for solitude that allows you to reach out to others and see them as separate and independent,” she writes.

I fear we are beginning to lose the most human thing we do and that is to have face to face conversations.

Back to that trendy restaurant I spoke of earlier. Even though I am a baby boomer, my date was a much younger woman. Must have been my fame as a writer, which has spread from one end of Third Street all the way to the other, that got her attention. After what I thought was a fairly intimate dinner, I envisioned further plans for the evening. As we were walking toward my car, her cellphone rang.

“Oh, its my friend Krista. I’ve got to see what’s she up to.” She was still speaking on her cell as I opened the car door, still totally engrossed in her conservation. I had anticipated a sexual encounter, but I now had no desire other than to take her straight home and say goodnight.

 

James Utt is a retired social science teacher who has lived in Laguna Beach since 2001. He misses his chalk and blackboard.

 

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7 COMMENTS

  1. Hello,
    Greetings from in front of the screen James! A quote by neil Postman for you:
    “Today, there is a completely different meaning of the word “community”.
    I think people mean by “community”, when they go online, is that they want to find someone who shares their interests or perhaps agrees with them about some matter.
    The older meaning of community was not that you and I had the same interests, but we lived in the same place and we had to negotiate our differences in order to live decently, so that a community meant a working out, a negotiation, of differences in the interest of social solidarity.
    A community now, on the Net and computer technology generally, is something completely different”. – Chris

  2. The circle is closing and we will all watch it happen on YouTube. Here’s to another well written and thoughtful article, thank you Jim!

  3. Thank you for the article! As a fellow Luddite – I’ve been feeling the same way lately. I went to a restaurant recently where they had a portable electronic device on each table so that you could play video games while you eat, that way you wouldn’t have to talk to the person across from you. Sad.

  4. I love reading a Luddite’s column on my computer. I dream about being a Luddite. Ah, the good old days when my Palm Pilot only organized my addresses and calendar.

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