My Own Mild Luddism

I hate e-readers. Oh, I'm sure they're wonderful and totally convenient and neato little gadgets that reflect the growing marvels of the technological age that we live in. But I hate them. I can't stand them and I'm seriously wallowing in old man-grumpiness and mild luddism when I think of them. Why? Well, to me in comes down to a remarkable simply question: must we make everything into a shiny technological gadget? Technology can be, I acknowledge, a wonderful thing, but it also has the enormous potential to make us lazier and stupider than we already are.

Witness the younger generation and the basic rules of grammar: anyone who's been to a public school in the last 20 years knows that actually being taught grammar is something that happens in elementary school and peters out pretty quickly after that. Subject, verb, predicate DONE- that's how it goes. Were it not for Father Deyo's insistence (the one useful experience I had at Catholic School, I'll freely acknowledge) that proper and real grammar be taught in school, I never would have had any. Instead, I spent 8^th Grade being polite, standing whenever adults came into the room (because Fr. Deyo was old school and that's how he rolled) and learning how to diagram sentences. I learned about direct, indirect objects, subordinate clauses, prepositions, prepositional phrases, the whole nine yards. And it was wonderful. And to this day I still know what the definition of a preposition is: anything a bunny rabbit can do to a hollow log!

Point is, my generation might well be the last to have any of the basics in the structure of the English language. Formulating words, learning how to write words- anything not in text-speak with emoticons attached is becoming increasingly alien to the young folks of today and that I can blame on the rise of ubiquitous technological gadgets that seem to be everywhere these days. But alas, it's not just the young folks who are infected with this- it was shocking how many of my own peers in college no less, had to be told how to write an email to a professor. A 'what's up, dude' complete with emoticons, we were told, was not acceptable. No shit, Sherlock, I thought- it never occurred to me to use anything other than proper grammar and correct salutations. Why wouldn't you? Why would you need to be told this?

But apparently we do. And all these neat little gadgets that people love to collect might be wonderful, they might be totally cool and they might make life a little bit easier, but they're slowly destroying our ability to speak and to write. Things which I happen to value very highly.

So, I hate e-readers. You can't substitute the heft and weight of a book for a plastic toy. You can't substitute the smell and the joy of the having the object itself in your hands- nor should you. Seeing language, seeing how it was written decades ago or how it is written in a different country or the sheer volume of language that was written is important. And e-readers, to me, take that away from us.

(I know there's always, historically speaking a tug of war between technology that affects language directly- I'm sure monks who wrote everything down bitched about the printing press in their own pious way- but we have to do better with how we transmit language to the younger generation. Plus, I just really, really like books.)