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This may all be a moral panic, a severe case of the older generation wagging its finger at the young. It was ever thus. Here we have the modern cultural critic

This may all be a moral panic, a severe case of the older generation wagging its finger at the young. It was ever thus. Here we have the modern cultural critic at work: He doesn't just wag his finger -- he deconstructs himself at the same time! So, when I point out that this guy just another in a long line of whining moral scolds, he can claim that he understood that all along! He was just being ironic! Isn't hipster detachment fun -- even when the guy's wrong, he's right! So, yeah, he's right: This is a steaming pile of Get Off My Lawn. The big clue is the part where he loses focus on the issue of focus (irony!) and starts teeing off on these kids today, who spend all their time on the internet gossiping with each other instead of reading improving books. Even the parodies of this line of argument are older than dirt: Before the Internet it was video games, reality television, cartoons, gangs, pop music, drugs, punk rock, hard rock, progressive rock, Jimi Hendrix, birth control pills, Elvis Presley, beatniks, Buddy Holly, swing dance, movie theaters, the wrong kind of books, jazz clubs, speakeasies, ragtime, billiard parlors, opium dens, all-night poker games, gangs... Even the interesting part, the bit about distraction, is old news. Distraction is, indeed, one of the modern world's biggest sources of stress, unhappiness and poor productivity, but that is nothing new. This guy accurately notes that concern about information overload dates back to Thoreau's unhappiness with the telegraph and the newspaper -- and I'd bet the Zen Buddhists would be willing to argue it goes back even farther. You're telling me that the Internet is somehow even more pernicious and distracting than leaving the TV on all day, which has been going on for sixty years? That workers in the seventies didn't find wired telephones and intercoms and water coolers and newspapers and muzak distracting? (I guess Demarco and Lister are precogs -- they railed about this stuff in Peopleware before the Web even existed.) And then, rather than talk about how to ameliorate the information overload problem, the guy throws up his hands and proclaims that we're doomed to a new Dark Age (!). Just as we have been since Thoreau. After all, what important things have happened since 1849? Being a moral scold is easy work. Each year you write the same essay with a couple of words changed.

tjr 18y ago
I'm not sure the internet is necessarily any "worse" than TV or whatever in this regard, but its threat is more disguised. When you're wasting time with superficial information on the web, you're still using a computer! And there is so much useful information on the web, how could using the web be a bad thing? On the surface, it appears to be a more productive activity than watching television. It is more interactive, and it does require more skills to get going with it than television does. But once you get past that, it can still all too easily turn into a waste of time.
- tjr 18y ago
  ...I should add, I don't think that the internet is the problem, nor is television, nor anything else along those lines. The problem, if it exists at all, is with the users of these technologies. The internet can be used for good, useful things, and for wasteful distractions. I think that some distractions can be fine -- some fun diversions here and there is not wrong -- but the users need to realize when they are letting the distractions take up too much time and reverse the trend.
  - mechanical_fish 18y ago
    Well, yeah. Now you're talking like Merlin Mann or the Rescuetime folks -- or, for that matter, a Zen Buddhist. Someone who sees the problem and tries to do something about it instead of merely starting a panic and yelling at some kids.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  There was a time when television was considered a valuable source of important information about the world. The idea that TV is intrinsically stupid didn't really have popular traction until Newton Minow's "vast wasteland" speech in the 1960s. I agree that the web is more subtle, especially today, when the chrome has yet to wear off. But no medium is free from time-wasting. History is replete with people whose reading and writing was arguably "a waste of time". It's certainly replete with artists, musicians, and writers whose tendency to focus obsessively on their hobby was bad for their finances and their health. Ramanujan arguably worked himself to death with mathematics.
  - thwarted 18y ago
    I remember back in the 80s there was this trend to outfit schools with a television in every room, as television was going to be some kind of teaching/learning holy grail. Then it was never used for that, and I remember a lot of the televisions going unused.
  - william42 18y ago
    I thought Ramanujan died because he wasn't used to England weather.

tjr 18y ago

I'm not sure the internet is necessarily any "worse" than TV or whatever in this regard, but its threat is more disguised. When you're wasting time with superficial information on the web, you're still using a computer! And there is so much useful information on the web, how could using the web be a bad thing? On the surface, it appears to be a more productive activity than watching television. It is more interactive, and it does require more skills to get going with it than television does. But once you get past that, it can still all too easily turn into a waste of time.

tjr 18y ago
...I should add, I don't think that the internet is the problem, nor is television, nor anything else along those lines. The problem, if it exists at all, is with the users of these technologies. The internet can be used for good, useful things, and for wasteful distractions. I think that some distractions can be fine -- some fun diversions here and there is not wrong -- but the users need to realize when they are letting the distractions take up too much time and reverse the trend.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  Well, yeah. Now you're talking like Merlin Mann or the Rescuetime folks -- or, for that matter, a Zen Buddhist. Someone who sees the problem and tries to do something about it instead of merely starting a panic and yelling at some kids.
mechanical_fish 18y ago
There was a time when television was considered a valuable source of important information about the world. The idea that TV is intrinsically stupid didn't really have popular traction until Newton Minow's "vast wasteland" speech in the 1960s. I agree that the web is more subtle, especially today, when the chrome has yet to wear off. But no medium is free from time-wasting. History is replete with people whose reading and writing was arguably "a waste of time". It's certainly replete with artists, musicians, and writers whose tendency to focus obsessively on their hobby was bad for their finances and their health. Ramanujan arguably worked himself to death with mathematics.
- thwarted 18y ago
  I remember back in the 80s there was this trend to outfit schools with a television in every room, as television was going to be some kind of teaching/learning holy grail. Then it was never used for that, and I remember a lot of the televisions going unused.
- william42 18y ago
  I thought Ramanujan died because he wasn't used to England weather.