A Book Lover’s Neo-Luddite Lament in the Technological Age

By Anastacia Mott Austin

My children will never use a typewriter. They’ve never seen one so they don’t feel its absence. What’s worse, their children may never know what a pencil is. Or paper.

I miss paper. We haven’t quite lost it completely, but the end is near. I spent my summers as a child sitting in a tree immersed in old books with yellowed pages. I can still smell the slightly mildewy, dank odor of all the stories crammed in there, all the characters crowded together, elbowing each other to get out.

It’s only through my sheer stubborn will that my own children do not spend their summers in a dark room, hunched over laptops reading MySpace pages from kids who live in Denmark (or creepy middle-aged men pretending to be their peers).

I realize that I sound like an old fart – which I can tell you I’m far to young to actually be – or at least like my parents, lecturing about walking to school uphill and barefoot, i.e. "When I was a kid we went outside and played," as my kids stare at me with doughy, blank faces. They’ve never walked to the neighborhood store by themselves, or ridden their bikes out of my eyesight. And I blame technology.

I looked up sex predators online and found one of the little blue squares indicating the creeps in my neighborhood – on my house! I zoomed in and realized that the pervert did not in fact live at my house, but across the street and two houses down.

That’s not the only problem with technology. I now type faster than I can write, and my hand cramps when I try to write longhand. I have not sent or received an actual paper and ink letter for years, but I’ve sent thousands of words through cyberspace. If I’m honest with myself, some of my best friends are known to me only through my online mom’s community.

What will be lost if computer technology takes over everything? Maybe it’s not the end of the world. Paper kills trees, some would argue. True, although computer and tech waste are far more toxic and harmful to the environment. And there’s just something about being able to hold a physical piece of writing in one’s hand that feels like a connection to something real.

The New York Times reported in December of 2000 that 27 pages of original text on graph paper by James Joyce sold at auction for over $1,500,000. The UC Davis Magazine Online writer Barbara Anderson wrote in their Spring 2001 issue, "Computers have given us the ability to write quickly and to edit even more quickly. But if Joyce had written Ulysses on a laptop, what, if anything, would be lost to us now? What about those lined-out words, those notes in the margin, even that coffee stain on the bottom – what do they say about the creator and the creative process that isn’t said when all you have is a document displayed on a computer monitor or a printout of that image? What’s the intangible quality that a tangible work has?"

(Note the irony that it is the online version of the UC Davis magazine that contains this question.)

The technological changes that occurred during the 20th century boggled many a grandparent’s mind; "When I was a little girl, they didn’t have automobiles yet where I lived," my grandmother used to tell me. She died some years ago, and didn’t experience the explosion of the computer age. She didn’t know what e-mail was, and wouldn’t have used it anyway, too "new-fangled" for her.

Yet developments in the computer industry have moved at the speed of lightning in a far shorter period of time, and continually evolve with new inventions and newer versions of now-obsolete software and hardware every day. There is now the iMac, the iPod, iTunes, and soon the new iPhone. What’s next, the iMarriage? iKids? Come to think of it, programmable children sound rather appealing. But you get the idea.

There is a growing minority of folks who question the need for all of this technological speed; what do we need to be doing so fast? Do we really need instant mail, instant photos, instant video? While we’re trying to download every new thing right this minute, are we missing the minute itself?

There is (of course) a brand-new word for people like that: Neo-Luddites. Named after the Luddites of the early 20th century who were textile workers, carpenters, people who performed their tasks by hand. The Luddites would protest and sometimes sabotage the "new" equipment of the Industrial age that was making their jobs obsolete.

Now in the technological age, those who protest the speeding up of all things tech are called Neo-Luddites. Wikipedia defines a Neo-Luddite as someone who "claims that technology is a force that is doing or may do any or all of the following: dehumanise and alienate people; destroy traditional cultures, societies, and family structure; pollute languages; reduce the need for person-to-person contact; alter the very definition of what it means to be human; or damage the evolved life-support systems of the Earth's entire biosphere so gravely as to cause human extinction."

Except for the last one, that does sound a little like me. I do think that life would be improved by spending more time outside, soaking up sunshine and spending time with other actual humans, instead of inside an office, alone, absorbing cathode rays.

But do I think existing technology could be responsible for human extinction? I don’t know.

Hold on a second, I’ll go look it up online.