Those of you who have been around Irreal for a while know that one of my favorite hobby horses is the new luddites. These are mostly humorless folks who imagine that the rest of us share their psychoses and who, therefore, think it their duty to instruct us on the proper way of doing things. One of their most recent obsessions is with “tech addiction” and why we should all throw out our smartphones.
It’s easy to think of these people as some sort of Amish-like sect but that would be a calumny on the Amish. In truth, the new luddites can be found in almost any demographic. Even ours. In an interesting article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Morgan G. Ames tells us how many of the “technical elite” refuse to let their children use electronic devices such as phones, tablets, or computers and how they send them to schools that proclaim themselves to be traditional and tech-free.
As Ames points out, many of these technical people consider themselves to be the smartest people in the room and while that may be true regarding technology, they don’t know anymore than the rest of us about child development or the wider social implications of technology. They are, in fact, subject to the same fashions and misinformation as everyone else.
If that claim seems a little overwrought, consider this shocking fact: at the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, “[a] techie-dominated, tech-shunning school,” only 35% of kindergarteners had been fully vaccinated before California made such vaccinations mandatory. If even the anti-vaxxers have established a beachhead among the technical elite, we must certainly abandon any claim to being immune to new luddism.
Ames is a former CS graduate who gave up the field to pursue a PhD in Communications and the article sometimes seems as if she’s trying a bit too hard to disparage her former brethren but she makes many good points and the article is worth reading.