On Electronic Media

George Packer, writing on his regular New Yorker blog a couple of weeks ago, offered a reasonable (and, in my view, necessary) critique of our culture's obsession with electronic media. At one point, he compared Twitter to crack cocaine. "Who doesn't want to be taken out of the boredom or sameness or pain of the present at any given moment? That's what drugs are for, and that's why people become addicted to them," he wrote. "Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I'm morally superior to it, but because I don't think I could handle it." 

The blogosphere predictably erupted, prompting Packer to protest, in a follow-up post, that "techno-worship is a triumphalist and intolerant cult that doesn't like to be asked questions."

Yowza. Anyway, somewhere along the way I wound up on the blog of a person named Laryssa Wirstiuk, who describes herself, with no apparent irony, as a "24 year-old creative writer and entrepreneur." She had written a snarky, mean-spirited piece of satire that implied Packer was elitist, pretentious, self-aggrandizing, and more. I wrote in the comments section that I didn't feel like she had added anything to the discussion, and that the tone of her piece "exemplified everything I despised about my generation." She wrote me wanting to know why.
I responded that I thought Packer's concerns were legitimate; that these kinds of media are demonstrably addictive, and arguably harmful (here I referred to the review I wrote a few months back of John Freeman's The Tyranny of E-mail); and while I found her piece clever, I finished it feeling sad. "I wondered what you cared about," I wrote, "and whether you thought a society of people sucked into their screens is an ultimately positive or hopeful vision for our future."

She posted a version of that e-mail on her blog, accompanied by a response. In it, she acknowledged the narcoticizing effect of Twitter and e-mail but argues that one has the choice to use or not to use--and that we should each take responsibility for our own actions. Finally, in a burst of sunny patriotism, she asserted, "We are lucky enough to live in a country that...allows individuals to innovate and carve out their own niches."

Leaving aside the latter rhetoric, which was clearly lifted from a GOP speech writer, I wanted to respond. 

I agree that we need to take responsibility for our behavior, that we have the power to choose. And that people have always engaged in risky, abusive behavior. Twitter doesn't make people narcissistic and compulsive, people make people narcissistic and compulsive...or something. A major difference between Twitter and crack cocaine, however, is that crack, for better or for worse (I would think better), is maligned by social stigma. If I were to start smoking crack tomorrow, I would suffer social consequences, in addition to the psychological and physical ones. Burying my head in a screen for eight or twelve hours a day, on the other hand, has become deeply normal (by which I mean socially acceptable). For many people, working professionals especially, there are even social pressures to stay connected.

Without distance, one loses perspective. Which is why I found Packer's piece valuable. I thought it was a minor but important attempt to offer perspective.

I recognize the inherent irony in posting this discussion on a blog. But such is our modern world. The Internet--Facebook, Twitter, et al--are here to stay. The question--a question we should be asking ourselves continually--is how to harness these tools in a beneficial way.