Last week I was walking the short walk from my car to the coathouse, I think it was around lunchtime. There were three people walking toward me and two walking the same direction as I was, all of them with their heads down on their phones.
Yesterday, 8:30, I walked the even shorter walk from my condo to Starbucks. I was annoyed to see a line of half a dozen people that early on a Saturday morning but even more annoyed to see that every god...blessed one of them in line was also looking down and on the cell phones. I glanced around and, of course, this being Starbucks, there were more who had been served and were eating who were also on their phones.
Comes now Mr. Douthat UpperClassRoss under the lede above and writes,
Search your feelings, you know it to be true: You are enslaved to the internet.
Yes. Yes, I am.
...it requires you to focus intensely, furiously, and constantly on the ephemera that fills a tiny little screen, and experience the traditional graces of existence — your spouse and friends and children, the natural world, good food and great art — in a state of perpetual distraction.
...we are not using them within reasonable limits. They are the masters; we are not.
Which is why we need a social and political movement — digital temperance, if you will — to take back some control.
a culture of restraint that tries to keep a specific product in its place.
...online life breeds narcissism, alienation and depression,
...a digital temperance movement would start by resisting the wiring of everything,
Toughen laws against cellphone use in cars,
Then there are the starker steps.
I suspect that versions of these ideas will be embraced within my lifetime by a segment of the upper class and a certain kind of religious family. But the masses will still be addicted...
Yesterday, 8:30, I walked the even shorter walk from my condo to Starbucks. I was annoyed to see a line of half a dozen people that early on a Saturday morning but even more annoyed to see that every god...blessed one of them in line was also looking down and on the cell phones. I glanced around and, of course, this being Starbucks, there were more who had been served and were eating who were also on their phones.
Comes now Mr. Douthat UpperClassRoss under the lede above and writes,
Search your feelings, you know it to be true: You are enslaved to the internet.
Yes. Yes, I am.
...it requires you to focus intensely, furiously, and constantly on the ephemera that fills a tiny little screen, and experience the traditional graces of existence — your spouse and friends and children, the natural world, good food and great art — in a state of perpetual distraction.
Okay. It is distracting, yes.
Douthat is so reasonable he could be Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. He's so reasonable he's unreasonable. Yes. True to both.
They are built to addict us, as the social psychologist Adam Alter’s new book “Irresistible” points out — and to madden us, distract us, arouse us and deceive us.
Swine. I didn't know that. Wonder how they are built to addict us. Built to "madden, distract, arouse and deceive"? Herd of swine. How are they built to madden, distract and deceive us?
...we surrender our privacy to their demands; we wait on tenterhooks for every “like.”
Yes to first, I don't really know to "likes."
Go on.
Culture of restraint...Culture of restraint...Okay, sounds vaguely reasonable.
And the internet, like alcohol, may be an example of a technology that should be sensibly restricted in custom and in law.
"In law." Unreasonable. Where the fuck is he going with this?
online life is doing to us. It certainly delivers some social benefits, some intellectual advantages, and contributes an important share to recent economic growth.
Douthat links to things there, presumably supportive things. Breeding narcissism and alienation sound intuitively reasonable to moi. Depression does not, but what do I know, I'm depressed.
that it’s an opiate for the lower classes and an insanity-inducing influence on the politically-engaged, and that it takes more than it gives from creativity and deep thought. Meanwhile the age of the internet has been, thus far, an era of bubbles, stagnation and democratic decay — hardly a golden age whose customs must be left inviolate.
"An opiate for the lower classes." Ah! So we have dispensed with the we're-all-in-this-togetherness of "Search your feelings, you know it to be true." It's not "you," not us, it's "them." That is a pretty insensitive thing to write. Very Marxist thing to write.
In favor of that because the world, unfortunately, contains Russians.
and seek to create more spaces in which internet use is illegal, discouraged or taboo...
NO! as to "illegal" and I'm now no longer willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on "discouraged" and "taboo." He's being unreasonable.
Should we make it a felony? Three-texts-and-you're-out?
keep computers out of college lecture halls,
No.
put special “phone boxes” in restaurants where patrons would be expected to deposit their devices,
"Expected?" And if they don't meet expectations, what, no service? People constantly on their cell phones in restaurants--like Starbucks--is annoying, but really, they are only ones missing the "graces of existence," not Us.
confiscate...
"Confiscate," I see. No.
...smartphones being used in museums and libraries and cathedrals,
Note, he doesn't say "confiscate if they are not on silent," he says "confiscate."
create corporate norms that strongly discourage checking email in a meeting.
Why do corporate Them's get only "norms? To many Us's? "The lower classes" get felonies and confiscated. We in the corporate class get norms. I thought the Times was trying to get away from elitism.
Incoming!
Then keep going. The age of consent should be 16, not 13, for Facebook accounts.
Get computers — all of them — out of elementary schools, where there is no good evidence that they improve learning. Let kids learn from books for years before they’re asked to go online for research; let them play in the real before they’re enveloped by the virtual.
No, I'd be for that. I don't have a TV! Didn't want my kids exposed to TV so much, either. (I lost that marital battle.) That is not a starker step than "illegal" and "confiscate."
I'm down with that. I think. I don't really know.
Kids under 16 shouldn’t be allowed on gaming networks.
I don't even know what the fuck gaming networks are. Not gambling. Like play games? What kind of games? I can imagine there being "networks" where you play games but I don't play.
High school students shouldn’t bring smartphones to school. Kids under 13 shouldn’t have them at all. If you want to buy your child a cellphone, by all means: In the new dispensation, Verizon and Sprint will have some great “voice-only” plans available for minors.
Okay, I'm down with that distinction.
What
An
Asshole. Period there.
