Dear Editor,
Every time I see a young person clutching their hand-held electronic soother and checking it every few minutes to get confirmation that other people still know that they do exist, I am reminded of the time I challenged one of my college classes to disprove my claim that they were heavily addicted to the use of their miniature computers and to social media by letting me lock their devices up in my desk for a week. They reacted as if I had suggested they stop breathing or eating, or drinking Starbuck’s coffee for seven days. Amid cries of “How would I stay connected?”, “My friends would think I don’t like them any more!”, “Everything would be so boring!” and several very emphatic “I won’t do it!” (remember it was only a hypothetical), I realized that I had exposed a dependency-connected nerve-ending that was so sensitive that the students seemed to suddenly become incapable of differentiating between a philosophical question and exercise and a real threat to their lifestyles.
I was never able to determine how many of them got the real point of the exercise, but I certainly learned a couple of important lessons myself: don’t dare to question the teachings of the Church of Technology or belittle the Holy Catechisms of Social Media and be prepared to suffer grave consequences if you do so. By offering such a challenge, I probably had, in the eyes of my students, revealed myself to be a neo-luddite, a heretic, and an unwelcome blip within the cyber universe they spent so much of their time in.
Maybe so, but at the very least I have both hands free most of the time and won’t be dealing with severe carpel-tunnel syndrome in my thumbs a few years down the road.
And I believe that I really did prove my point.
Ray Arnold
Richmond
