Tech and Addiction: Excerpts from What I'm Reading . . .

From "Hammer and Sickle," a short story by Don DeLillo in Harper's magazine, December 2010. This paragraph describes the main jonesing of minimum security prison inmates who were once high-flying, fraud-fueled, business tycoons:


We had TV but what had we
lost, all of us, when we entered the
camp? We’d lost our appendages, our
extensions, the data systems that
kept us fed and cleansed. Where was
the world, our world? The laptops
were gone, the smartphones and
light sensors and megapixels. Our
hands and eyes needed more than we
could give them now. The touchscreens,
the mobile platforms, the
gentle bell reminders of an appointment
or a flight time or a woman in
a room somewhere. And the sense,
the tacit awareness, now lost, that
something newer, smarter, faster, ever
faster, was just a bird’s breath away.
Also lost was the techno anxiety
that these devices routinely carried
with them. But we needed this no
less than we did the devices themselves,
that inherent stress, those
cautions and frustrations. Weren’t
these essential to our mind-set? The
prospect of failed signals and crashed
systems, the memory that needs recharging,
the identity stolen in a series
of clicks. Information, this was
everything, coming in, going out.
We were always on, wanted to be on,
needed to be on, but this was history
now, the shadow of another life.


And from "Bright Frenetic Mills" by Thomas Frank in Harper's. Frank, an historian of economics, decries the dumbing-down of journalism which is more and more responsive to market demands and thus deprofessionalized rather than providing in-depth analysis of cultural and political matters:

So powerful is our desire to believe in the
benevolent divinity of technology that
it cancels out our caution, forces us to
dismiss doubt as so much simple-minded
Luddism. We have trouble grasping
that the Internet might not bring only
good; that an unparalleled tool for enlightenment
and research and transparency
might also bring unprecedented
down-dumbing; that something
that empowers the individual might
also wreck the structures that have
protected the individual for decades.


Photo credit: Federico Morando via Flickr.
Painting: Optimism, by John Slaby