The Daily Mail - By ROGER LEWIS
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Luckily, I am very stupid when it comes to anything vaguely scientific or technological. Anything more complicated than an ‘on’ or ‘off’ switch - forget it. I can’t set the video recorder, have never sent or received a text, and I treat a computer as a glorified typewriter.
I am the last person left alive in the entire world to use a fountain pen and Waterman’s brown ink. I’m keeping the Royal Mail going all on my own.
I say ‘luckily’, above, because the rest of you are going mad. I know this because Professor Larry Rosen, Chair of Psychology at California State University, says so in his fascinating and troubling new book. People have now become so dependent on their BlackBerrys, iPads, smartphones, and suchlike gadgets, if they are parted from their apparatus, if they can’t check e-mails every ten seconds or scan the internet’s 30 billion images, they experience ‘chest pain, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, or dizziness’.
Good, is my reaction to that news. Drop dead, you dopey lot. I think my chief objection to the prevalence of Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Flickr [sic], and other ‘social networks’ is how anti-social they are - how rude they have made people become. Whatever happened to manners?
Those were the days: A family mealtime without interruption
Just last week, in the Garrick Club of all hallowed places, I saw a woman ‘checking in with the babysitter’ every few minutes. I wanted to blow my top. What was she anxious about? Burglars? Or was it that my company was so totally boring, she recoursed to the equivalent of getting out a pack of cards and playing Patience on the tabletop?
But you see this all the time – people who don’t talk, they text. Frantically. In the street, on railway station platforms, going up and down escalators, sitting in the dark in cinemas. They get furious if they are interrupted, too. Families sit around pressing their little keypads, like chimps prodding ants with sticks. ‘Regardless of where they are or who they are with’, says Rosen, on trains or in supermarkets, blocking the aisles, you hear complete strangers bellowing into their mobiles about their private affairs, arrogantly oblivious to the fact that they might be bothering the rest of us.
Einstein said, ‘It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity’. He was referring to the atom bomb, but the same goes for a Pay-As-You-Go mobile phone with instant internet access. According to Rosen, people have become so dominated by their gadgets, they are ‘engaging in obsessive compulsive behaviours’.
They ignore others in the vicinity, forget they are in restaurants or church or lectures, and feel ‘anger and hostility’ if disconnected from their electronic lifelines. Marriages are crumbling because even on holiday husbands keep plugged into the office. In America, 448,000 road accidents occurred in 2009 because drivers were busy sending and receiving texts - and the average manic American young person sends and receives 6,359 a month. To use a mobile while driving slows down reaction times to such an extent, the blood stream might as well be full of booze.
Computer technology always was attractive to nerdy sorts who are bad at socialising. The trouble is, lots of other people have discovered that they prefer going out by, in effect, staying in, avoiding ‘real-life friends’, as Rosen calls them, and becoming ‘net bingers’, spending up to 20 hours at a stretch exchanging messages and gossip and drivel.
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As a consequence, there is currently an epidemic of antisocial personality disorders, social phobias, autism and Asperger’s Syndrome. The psychiatric wards are filling up with patients with ‘delusional thoughts and hallucinations, disorganised behaviour and speech’. Children are arriving at school already mad - they cannot interact, they’ve only ever been shoved before a flat-screen television and force-fed turkey twizzlers, and they can’t cope with ‘cues that we use during face-to-face communication, including gestures, facial expressions and voice-tone’.
The manic pace, the flickering of images and information, means there is an entire generation suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Tissue analysis has shown that brain circuitry is altering – chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin are at a level similar to that in addicts ‘involved in substance abuse’.
The new technology brings out the worst in people. People who’d normally be nice find themselves becoming strangely aggressive and malicious, firing off ‘escalating nasty posts’, like the pent-up authors of poison-pen letters in an Agatha Christie story. They can do this because the system is anonymous. The individuals they pillory ‘don’t know you and can’t find you behind your clever-user name’.
The technical word is disinhibition – people expressing opinions ‘in ways they would not do in person’, and in their right minds.
Anonymity appeals to idiots who have a ‘grandiose sense of self-importance’, according to Rosen, people who are haughty, and very sad. Having a huge Twitter following, for example, or scattering opinions on blogs, is ‘a draw that is extremely strong for the narcissist’.
Instant news: Prime Minister David Cameron texting
Adolescents, in particular, relish the power of Facebook, and taunt and bully each other, sometimes resulting in suicide. Rosen and his colleagues do their best to ward against ‘the dangerous impact words can have as people socialise online’, but what can be done? How can you suggest people have a go at day-dreaming instead, or read a book or pick up a newspaper and do things that ‘involves turning off your devices’?
Even in universities, students don’t want rubbishy old-fashioned books made of paper and ink. They want lectures that involve ‘YouTube videos and a multi-user virtual environment such as an interactive, immersive online role-playing game’. I’d give a lot to see my old tutor John Bayley’s reaction to much of that. He thought a Xerox machine was the invention of Satan.
When people wax lyrical about 3-D films, what I suggest is that they try going to see a flesh-and-blood show at the theatre – yes, that really is David Suchet up there, not a hologram! – or go to Zippo’s Circus, where the galloping horses look real because – Jumping Jesus! – they actually are real.
It is hard to believe, except it isn’t, that Rosen himself is having to organise therapy sessions in California to teach patients ‘to put a priority on human contact over electronic contact wherever possible’. One method is to introduce families to the idea of communal meals – ‘Each family member must know that all technology must stop and time is set aside for dinner and talk’. Otherwise it is like we are dead already, floating in solitude and touching each other only as apparitions.
The landlord of The Thorn, in my eccentric hometown of Bromyard, has the best method, more effective than all these clever Californian PhDs put together.
Whip out a mobile in his saloon bar and he’ll grab it and toss it under the lawnmower.
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Some of the forces spurring the development of a typewriter had to do with giving the blind the ability to write. An Italian is said to have built the first working typewriter for a blind Countess in 1808. Soon thereafter, a patent was issued for a machine where each letter was selected with a dial. It was neater, but even more cumbersome than writing. Many early typewriters resembled pin-cushions, with a forest of keys on a metal “typing ball” used to punch letters on a piece of paper hidden from the typist.
The electric typewriter was conceived early in the typewriter development process. The first models appeared around the turn of the century, but they were not successful. It was not until the 1930s, when electricity was more common and IBM took over an early manufacturer, that the electric typewriter began to capture real market share. By the 1960s these machines had become ubiquitous in the corporate office. In a way, they marked a return to the original pin cushion style typewriter. A rotating ball with the keys on it was used to place the ink on paper. These balls were easy to replace. however, the electric typewriter like the manual typewriter was far from silent. The sound of keys hitting ribbon, paper and backing were one of the most memorable by-products of the age of the typewriter, the soundtrack to life in the office.
What has not changed, however, is the situation we face when trying to write something. A nice lamp, a comfortable chair in front of a table or desk are as desirable now as yesterday. Whether typewriter or laptop, the human challenge is the same - putting thoughts into words for someone else to read. Without literacy, there would be no type, real or digital.