The Thinking Man's Machine

The Washington Post had an interesting article this week about university professors banning laptops from their classrooms, and it sent me on a ramble about just where the digital age has taken us and where we're taking it.

The piece begins with David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown who started banning computers in class in 2006. Since then plenty of colleagues, both at GU and beyond, have followed suit. His reason was that allowing laptops was "like putting on every student's desk, when you walk into class, five different magazines, several television shows, some shopping opportunities and a phone." It's one great distraction, and there's no denying it, especially with wireless internet access.

As a high school teacher, I completely understand his decision. All of my students have cell phones, and many of them are smart phones. They're on them constantly, despite the rules to the contrary, and if they had free access to the whole internet during the day, nothing would get done. I'd have better luck giving a lecture on a YouTube video at that point.

Since the internet and computers went mainstream, it seems that there have been more distractions than useful applications. I submit for your consideration The Annoying Orange. I mean, what is that? It took all of three seconds to discover, and I find it more than a little frightening, frankly. Not only does time get wasted by the watcher, but there are people out there spending hours of their life making this stuff. Oh, I freely admit to being a consumer and distributor of random web oddness, but does it really do me any good? Are we better off as a society because we can now tell when our cats are trying to kill us? I feel myself hard pressed to make that argument.

It's no wonder ADD is on the rise in this country and bilingualism is on the decline. We allow ourselves to become distracted by meaningless drivel and it turns our brain to mush. We have stopped spending time in hobbies which force our minds to work in different ways. I mean, when was the last time you ran into a kid who built scale models after school? I was never a great one for that, but I did see a handful through, and I can testify to it being far more mentally taxing than making Mario sling shells on a race track. Not to say that there isn't some great creative work out on the web (it would be the height of hypocrisy to rail too hard against technology on a blog, after all), but I just don't think it works the same way. What we do out here in cyberspace seems so transient to me, so insubstantial. I often have a hard time finding the lasting benefit in it all, even when I write here. The web is so full of noise that you've barely let your lone note fly before it's been drowned out by the great cacophony.

Article Author: CB

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