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The whimper 'round the world
By Lee Kucera
When America Online purchased Time Warner last week for $166 billion, the merger was touted as a technological milestone for a new era of high-speed, multi-media Internet potential. An AOL spokesman said the partnership signifies that we are "moving toward a society where people will never have to be disconnected from the media world."
That, apparently, is his idea of good news.
We already spend a substantial portion of our time faxing and emailing and home shopping and video playing and cell phoning and day trading and Net surfing. Now we get to look forward to doing it all simultaneously. Talk about multi-tasking.
The seeds for this domination of technology over everyday life were sown in the '50s, with universal access to television. In a few short decades the innocuous little black-and-white electronic box--initially a novelty--became the ubiquitous soundtrack of our lives, with scarcely a murmur from anybody other than a few extreme individualists. A recent study released by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that kids in America spend an average of nearly five hours every day "plugged in" either to TV or video games.
Excuse me, but is this, as the saying goes, rocket science? To figure out that children who spend half their waking hours planted in front of an electronic screen are not exercising, in any active sense, their intellect, curiosity, initiative, creativity, imagination, verbal fluency, writing skills, reasoning power, capacity for cooperation? I forget who said that the world will end not with a bang, but with a whimper; but it is striking to me that we have simply handed our homes and our children over to a powerful medium whose influence is arguably catastrophic to their well-being. And this monumental shift in human orientation has happened apparently without anybody giving it much thought.
Similarly, many millions of dollars are being spent nationwide to install Internet connections in classrooms, with very little documentation to support the premise that computer instruction enhances learning. Dr. Larry Cuban, professor of education at Stanford, has pointed out again and again that there is no real evidence that spending tons of money on high-tech equipment in schools raises test scores or creates faster learning or enables more effective teaching. In a recent newspaper article, Cuban asked, "If most skills in maneuvering software applications can be quickly picked up by adults (It's true. If I can master a new software program in a week, anybody can) why spend so much money on wiring schools, and buying hardware and software" which will be obsolete in six months anyway? Alas. Emerson knew his country well when he said that if someone builds a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to his door. With parents and corporations and politicians cheerleading for computerized education, whether it makes any sense or not, what chance is there that a few lone voices of reason--even one as prestigious and authoritative as Cuban's--will be able to stem the tide?
We are creating a seamless, no-boundaries environment of round-the-clock technological input where face-to-face human interaction is increasingly diminished. That culture was foreshadowed by the pervasiveness of television, and is further exacerbated by the current use of cell phones all the time, any time, any place, under any circumstances, without so much as a twinge of embarrassment. If this is where mega-mergers such as the AOL-Time Warner buyout are leading us, all I can say is, Please. Somebody disconnect me from the media world.
(P.S. I looked it up. It was T.S. Eliot. His poem, "The Hollow Men," reads, in part, "There are no eyes here/In this valley of dying stars/In this hollow valley/This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms." It concludes, "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but with a whimper.")
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