Smartphones and the Collapse of Western Civilization
October 20, 2011, By Michael O. Varhola 4 comments
One of the disadvantages of getting older is that I spend an increasing amount of time around other older people, a disproportionate number of whom seem to think the world is going to hell in a handbasket. And one of the refrains I increasingly hear from my contemporaries, not to mention those a decade or two older than me, is how "smartphones are destroying society.”
This sort of lament is by no means a new thing, and I distinctly remember the first time I took note of it, back in the late ’80s when I was cutting my teeth as a writer and studying at the American University of Paris. Dr. Michael Beausang, an old-school intellectual who introduced me to European literature in general and James Joyce in particular, brought in a poet friend of his from Ireland to talk to some of us about his craft. Toward the end of the evening, while we were chatting over a drink at a neighborhood café, I naively made a comment about how exhilarating it was for me to sit down at the keyboard of my word processor and begin writing.
You would have thought I said I was organizing a book burning. He was aghast and made it clear that the only legitimate way to write was with a pen and a piece of paper. Anything else was tantamount to the destruction of literature. Over the somewhat more than two decades since then, I have heard the same sort of condemnation directed at every new technological development. One will note, however, the doomsayers notwithstanding, that not once has society collapsed as a result. Remember how Y2K was going to end it all?
The person who drove home to me the fallacy in this sort of thinking was none other than Marcel Proust, author of the classic novel "In Search of Lost Time" (aka, "Remembrance of Things Past") and debatably the greatest author of the 20th century (I say “debatably” for the benefit of those not familiar with his work; those who are familiar with it know there is no debate). Proust used to take an extreme approach to editing his own work, not just making corrections but also inserting, deleting, and moving around large blocks of text, doing so even when manuscripts were being typeset for print. What struck me when I read his method is that what Proust needed was a word processor, and that he would not have hesitated to use one!
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