deeplyshallow // young luddites of america

young luddites of america

In Nottingham, which itself is in Nottinghamshire, England, the year 1811 marked the start of the Luddite movement. The Luddites were comprised of tradespeople who were threatened by the technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution, watching their own skills made obsolete by the invention of machines that could be run, cheaply, by unskilled laborers. We all get the concept, even if we don’t know the origins of it. The Luddites of those days actually went to war over progress, and many ended up jailed or executed for their troubles.

I’m not at risk of becoming obsolete because of any of the things I’m about to talk about, and I’m certainly not about to put my bayonet to someone’s neck over them. Mostly I just want to grumble, and grumbling to yourself is only interesting for so long.

I tried Twitter. Really did. I lasted for about a month, from November 1st of last year until December 10th, and I just never got it. It was like instant messaging over a loudspeaker in a crowded room of people who weren’t listening and didn’t care. I also couldn’t keep up with it. I forgot to check it every day, and when I did, there would be this insane avalance of micromessages from all of the different people I know — mostly coworkers — who were typing things I didn’t understand about the code they were writing.

Maybe I am officially getting too old for social media innovation. I don’t really like admitting this, since what I do for a living hinges on taking advantage of the innovative spirit, but I can’t avoid it. It’s true. I have a hard time faking interest in every new plugin or hack for apps that are already useless to me.

I don’t MySpace. I don’t Facebook. I don’t Twitter. I don’t blog from my phone (except for once when I was bored in a waiting room, but that doesn’t count because I would never do it again, it being one of the most frustrating experiences I have ever had with a mobile phone, which I’m not all that wild about to begin with). I don’t Flickr. I don’t Digg or Reddit. I’m a one-off YouTube user — I posted a video and then I was done. I don’t use Del.icio.us, and not even just because I forget where the dots go. I don’t use StumbleUpon. I have a LinkedIn account but I don’t know why.

It turns out that I’m a very slow adopter of emerging technologies. I only have a BlackBerry because my company gave me one. I bought an Xbox three or four years after they were popular. I don’t download games on Xbox Live. I don’t download movies. I don’t pirate music. I use iTunes, and that’s about the extent of that. I didn’t pay attention to RSS feeds until late last year. Look at the code behind this web site: I still write everything in tables.

A few months ago my employer sent me to SXSW. I left my laptop in my hotel room. Nobody else did. Seemingly every attendee of the conference considered it their personal responsibility to inform the entire world of every single thing that happened at the conference. They blogged, they Twittered, they live-chatted, they YouTubed, they Facebooked, they turned every noun into a verb in the name of disseminating information. In the hallways between events, sitting cross-legged on the floor with laptops perched on their knees, they continued to blog and Twitter and blah blah yeah.

More than anything, this blog is something I write for my own entertainment. It’s a record of sorts, one that I will someday be able to show my children so they’ll understand who I was before they existed. (Even if it makes them cringe.) Barely anybody reads this site, so I don’t find myself blogging for the masses, which keeps me nice and content with my small place here.

The whole Twitter thing failed for me because I could never imagine why anybody would care about what I was doing at any given moment of any given day. If my actions interested me enough to write about, then I would do so, in traditional long format, on this site. The actions that did not warrant a full blog post did not therefore warrant a Twitter update. (I can’t bring myself to call it a Tweet.) Nothing I had to say over the course of that month was worth even the minor effort of reading it. And I would venture to say that, barring any extremely creative uses of the technology, nothing you or anybody else had to say was worth that effort either.

Memes and LOLcats and streaming radio stations are all beyond me. I don’t like listening to the radio at all, unless it’s the AM band and it’s two a.m. and I’m on the road in the middle of Kansas or somewhere. Television is the most egregious waste of a truly innovative technology ever committed to production. All of these things, from television to automobiles to radio to instant messaging, were ostensibly created to make our life better, to make productivity smoother. Maybe for some people they do, but for the rest of us, I postulate that they are only distractions. And if they aren’t for you, then they are for me, so stop asking me to follow your Twittishness.

Loudon Wainwright’s gotten a lot of play over the past couple of years for his involvement with the Judd Apatow crew — he was in “Undeclared”, he soundtracked Knocked Up, etc. — but he put out a terrific album in 2001 entitled Last Man on Earth. I’ve written about this album, and him, once before.) The titular song is a folksy-defiant rant — or maybe an apology — in which he sings about his inability to cope with the march of technology:

Everybody’s got a web site
but that’s all Greek to me
I don’t own a computer
I hate that letter e
I don’t pack a cell phone
or drive an SUV
I’m the last man on Earth
That’s what the matter is with me

I make my living on the web, and I suppose you could consider my Jeep an SUV, and I do reluctantly own a cell phone, one that they even call ’smart’. So my own particular brand of aversion, here, skews pretty much within the boundaries of my generation. Communication is important. I just wonder if there’s a ceiling, a red line, that marks too much communication. I know people who own phones but won’t call people on them, who prefer in any circumstance to write emails, send instant messages, update blogs, post comments, broadcast Twitters, text-message or whatever. I suppose the real problem is that all of this was intended to be supplemental to the great communication method: speech.

Then again, the last batch of speech-based communication that I heard was while playing Halo 3 on Xbox Live, and the conversation, if you could call it that, used taunts and threats as its brick, and insensitivity as its mortar. My arguments don’t hold up against content, I guess.

(And yep, I realize that the last paragraph, in which I reference playing a modern video game in a modern, wireless, collaborative setting probably undermines my whole argument. I’m pretty good at this sort of thing. Shooting myself in the foot, I mean.)