Simplify, Simplify

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Disconnected

“The hyperbolic Thoreau told us that he never received much worthy news through the mail, never found anything of interest in the papers. For the person striving to understand the right way to live, ‘all news, as it is called, is gossip.’ Nineteenth-century America had its own version of Twitter in the penny papers of the day, whose allegiance to fear and gossip-mongering was every bit as real as our own.

“But most of my students don’t read newspapers. They rarely watch the news. Their connections, such as they are, are not with the latest dust-up in Burma or tuition hikes in England. They are not particularly engaged in Obama’s fight with the Republicans. In fact, many don’t know we recently had an election.”

—William Major, English professor, University of Hartford,

who asked his students to give up their cellphones for five days and listen to their lives. For many, it was a scary, lonely and unhappy withdrawal. “Thoreau’s Cellphone Experiment,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 16, 2011
(Thanks to alert WORDster Mark Larson)

• Editorial Comment: Attention deficit disor... wha?

• PeezPix: PeezPix prints and notecards for sale.




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