The Freedom To Trivialize
“Time is the thing we have the least of”
William McKeen on the impact of information overload on a new generation:
Novelist and social critic Tom Wolfe is among those who arch eyebrows over the time and labor-saving devices granted us by technology. Such things as iPhones and Twitter “waste more time than anything else in American life,” he says. “The computer and the Internet are the contemporary versions of knitting and badminton in the backyard, except that they have nothing to show for it afterward, the way knitting does, and lead to atrocious sedentary posture and sloth, unlike badminton.”
Wolfe’s social criticism has marked his journalism and his fiction, most notably in his satirical novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. As the man responsible for tagging those who achieved adulthood in the 1970s as “the Me Generation,” Wolfe’s antennae are alert to any new examples of silliness and narcissism. Tweeting one’s most mundane activities is high goofiness indeed.
(Pramod) Khargonekar (outgoing dean of the University of Florida College of Engineering) agrees with Wolfe. What’s most important, he says, is how we use technology. It’s easy to fall in love with each new device and development. “There is euphoria with any new technology,” he says. “Of course, there are excesses that happen, but in time these things will take their place in the scheme of things.”
But critics such as Wolfe worry “these things” that are supposed to make life better could make things worse. He uses Thomas Jefferson as an example. He had at least eight careers in addition to his job of creating American democracy. “Today,” Wolfe laments, “two-thirds of his life would be consumed answering inane e-mails.” If Jefferson had a Twitter account, we might all still be foreigners.