All Luddites Should Be This Funny

Most Luddites are humorless creatures who "hate" computers. If this is (fair & balanced) hebetation, so be it.


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By Rosa Brooks

When I was a child, I worried about whether the human species could survive the nuclear era. Would we fecklessly blow up our civilization, leaving only a few wan, radioactive mutants to stumble into the post-atomic stone age?

There was no Internet back then, of course. Today I no longer worry about nuclear catastrophe, because I'm too busy batting away e-mails and conducting frantic Google searches. I now worry about a different question: Can the human species survive the Internet era without devolving back into chimpanzees?

It doesn't look good.

Start with e-mail. I still remember those happy days in the 1990s when I thought e-mail was the best thing since sliced bread. Yes, I bought all the hype: E-mail would bring absent friends closer and enable us all to communicate so much more efficiently, quickly and deeply.

Hah! That was before the advent of spam, and before I understood that e-mail had dangerously lowered the threshold for bugging people with frivolous questions, passing on unimportant information and sharing one's intemperate and obnoxious thoughts.

I now receive about 200 e-mails daily. On one typical day, 100 are spam and must be deleted before they morph into pornographic pop-ups; 27 are from listservs I rashly signed on to and now cannot shake off; five are from a high school friend who persists in the delusion that I like receiving lawyer jokes; three are from my second cousin, who shares that delusion.

Seven messages are from my students, five of whom lost the syllabus and wonder what they should read for the next day's class, and two of whom pose questions like, "I'm having some trouble understanding international law and wondered if you could just explain it to me quickly." Five messages are from people who wanted to share with me evidence of a vast right-wing conspiracy encompassing Dick Cheney, Jack Abramoff and alien life forms. Fifteen are from people who want to share evidence of a vast left-wing conspiracy involving same. Three more are from people who harbor serious doubts about my patriotism.

The remaining 35 messages are important and often time-sensitive: My husband wants me to know that on no account should I try to use the dishwasher when I get home, as it will flood and destroy the kitchen floor; the baby-sitter urgently wonders if we have any infant Tylenol; and my great-aunt wants to know if the girls liked the Christmas presents she sent.

I can't answer all these messages, even the most important ones. I can't even keep track of them. They come in; I fleetingly register their existence; they're buried in an avalanche of new messages. I walk around with a permanent nagging sense of inadequacy and anxiety. As for BlackBerrys and instant messaging? The very thought makes me feel ill.

And then there's the Web. They call it "surfing," which is a joke because most of us are actually drowning in it or having our arms bitten off by sharks. It's no longer possible to stay informed just by reading the morning paper. Now, no day can begin without reading four online newspapers and 17 blogs, each dedicated to exposing the shameful ignorance and treasonous ideological folly of all the others. We can all have our own blogs, so we can join in the game. And because there is nothing to keep us civil, we quickly succumb to the Internet version of road rage.

The worst of it? All this stuff lasts forever. That e-mail to colleagues in which you suggested your boss might be a hermaphrodite; that embarrassing photo taken by your former fiance; that blog post in which you kind of exaggerated your role in saving your platoon from insurgents? They're all out there somewhere. And someday, someone will find them and use them to crucify you.

I know, I know. There's much that's good about the electronic communications technologies that have proliferated in the last 15 years. But we're facing the usual human problem: New technologies have arisen faster than effective norms for dealing with them. As a result, the more evolved our technologies get, the more we all act like lower primates.

Ogden Nash put the problem nicely in a 1953 poem called "A Caution to Everybody":

Consider the auk;
Becoming extinct because he forgot how to fly, and could only walk.
Consider man, who may well become extinct
Because he forgot to walk and learned to fly before he thinked.

Does anyone out there know how to save the human species from devolving into so many Googling monkeys? If so, speak up! Just please, please don't send me an e-mail.

Rosa Brooks, an associate professor of law at the University of Virginia, also writes a weekly opinion column for the Los Angeles Times.

Copyright © 2006 Cox Texas Newspapers, L.P.

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