Reactions to Digital Nation: Eliza Eddison

I know you told us to stop discussing the piece, but I have one final reaction: The piece felt like you were painting by numbers, and was forced. The classes you chose at MIT to exemplify our addiction to technology were 1. a class where the professor instructed them to bring laptops to class for the day you were filming. (Side-note: that was a humanities class, notoriously disrespected on this campus for MIT's entire existence) and 2. a programming class. A Java class designed to teach you how to use a computer to solve problems. Of course the room was filled with laptop screens -- the class was teaching them how to write code! Also: my peers reacted to it the way I think our parents' generation reacted to their parents' disdain for rock 'n roll: with confused frustration and an eye-roll to indicate that they just didn't understand. Not to mention that it only gave one side of the story and was fairly boring.

My perspective on the future of our digital world is more for what we are losing. My peers don't write letters and don't need to hold books to read them. Take this with a grain of salt that I go to school with people whose vocabularies are not very broad but can integrate by parts in their head, but I have great respect for the physical presence of a book. I mentioned this opinion in one of my interviews that you chose not to use, but I think part of reading a book is holding it in your hands and feeling the weight of the world you are about to enter between your fingers. I love the smell of old books with spines so delicate you have to sit up straight at a desk to read them, and I fear that many of my peers do not share that love.

But at the same time, I can keep in touch with my best friends from high school without ever talking to them, but rather letting my mouse wander to their Facebook page. In different time zones with different schedules, we might never get a hold of each other on the phone, but I can see that they're happy and safe and having the adventures a college student should. I think the pros outweigh the cons -- no, the world will never be the same. But no one's dying to go back to the world before the industrial revolution, which I'm sure was met with great resistance at the time by older generations. (The only time it ever seemed remotely negative was when I read The Grapes of Wrath) Why fight this revolution?