The Unabomber

Having just finished spring break, I must say that the flight back to Richmond was unbearable. It wasn't the unclean airports, mediocre food, or even the jarring turbulence that annoyed me. Frankly, being cooped up in a small seat for two hours, jostling with my neighbor for control of the arm rest, and all the while refrained from making any comfortable adjustments was enough to drive me mad. I'm sure that most of you would agree. So how does a sensible person cope during the flight? Most choose to sleep or read, or both. So sleep and read I did, slowly working my way through the unjustly assigned homework assignments until I came to "The Unabomber's Manifesto," which, due to length, I saved for last.

As mentioned above, the first thing that caught my eye was the sheer size of the document—roughly 250 paragraphs—which rivals that of most short stories. Yet, buried in the sea of words, "Ted" Kaczynski makes numerous well-thought-out points, primarily focusing on technology's detrimental affects on mankind. For instance, he claims that "drastic changes in technology...inevitably break down traditional values," which in turn lead to "the disintegration of small scale social groups." In my opinion, he is correct in coming to this assertion, because while each new communicative innovation (say texting) brings the capability of carrying on ten times the number of conversations, in the process our individuality that played such an important role in small social groups is lost. This in fact reminds me of Sven Birkert's article "Into the Electronic Millennium," where he similarly argues that through continued technological usage, we will see a "Waning of the private self."

What Birkerts and Kaczynski differ on, however, is the way in which they wish to accomplish and maintain their anti-technological revolutions. While Birkerts believes that stopping cold turkey is the best solution, Kaczynski says that in order to maintain the movement, technology must be used—primarily for communicative purposes—to a small extent. Either way, both believe that their ideas will be influential, and will bring a stop to the widespread usage of technology.

Towards the end of the manifesto, I was intrigued to look at the Unabomber's Wikipedia page. What I found shocked me. Born in '92, I was maybe 2 during the height of the bombings, and up until today, except for the occasional mention of his name, I had no idea who the Unabomber was, what his/her motives were, or how many people he/she had killed. So, looking through the paragraphs, I was shocked to see that he had killed 3 and injured 23 more. What still nags me, however, is what drove him to become a domestic terrorist? Why did he quit his job at Berkley to live in a cabin and make bombs? I suppose I will never know, but after finishing, I was glad to stand up, grab my things, and disembark from the plane.

Pitfalls of an Internet Dependent Society

What do we, or rather I, use the Internet for? I don't know how many times I've answered this question already, but once more shouldn't hurt. Aside from looking up class assignments, I utilize the Internet for just about everything: reading news updates off of MSN, watching videos from YouTube or Hulu, and browsing through Facebook—if you recall from my post "How much Facebook is too Much?," I almost always have a browser tab dedicated to the site. So, it's safe to say that I am an Internet junkie, and as a consequence, my laptop is rarely more than a few feet away. Instead of reanalyzing the symptoms of my Internet addiction as I have done in past posts, however, I think it might be interesting to subject them to the critical ideas of Sven Birkerts.

Birkerts, an essayist widely known for writing The Gutenberg Elegies, is, as Scott Stossel describes in an Atlantic Online conference, a technophobe. He doesn't own or use a computer, and certainly doesn't plan on it during his lifetime. In fact, he scorns the use of electronics altogether, stating "[cell phones, television, and computers threaten] to swamp us in an element of connectedness." While we, the members of the current generation, clearly enjoy the creativity and mobility that the Internet and other technological devices offer, it is obvious that Birkerts doesn't share our enthusiasm. But why? To cite another of Birkert's articles, "Into the Electronic Millennium," there are three ramifications —the erosion of language, the flattening of historical perspectives, and the waning of the private self—that he believes will emerge during the development of the "'proto-electronic' era," all of which seem to hinge on the replacement of written text by online media. Yet only his first idea can be seen as a critical judgment of our Internet dependent lives.

While we will not literally see an end to the spoken English language, Birkerts claims that increased usage of the Internet will encourage users to develop a sort of "'plainspeak.'" In cases such as this, it is suggested that syntactical elements such as wit-fast and ambiguity will be replaced by "simple linguistic pre-fab." This is what he describes as the erosion of language. In any case, it is unfortunately an accurate assault on my Internet addiction, because I often use simple sentences when typing having a conversation online. But, after all, this is because the speed at which you type literally determines whether or not your idea is heard or rather seen by the other person. So, the more easily you can sum up your ideas in a smaller sentence, the easier it will be to rapidly convey them to the other person. On the contrary, this "'plainspeak'" only stays within the boundaries of social networking sites, while in other places (here, for example) I continue to use the traditional English language, still full of imagery and irony.

So, although Sven Birkert's idea of the erosion of language strongly criticizes my use of the Internet, it is clear that I have managed to keep separate the domains in which I use "'plainspeak'" and regular English. I believe that this is the most important way to keep the erosion that Birkerts speaks of to a minimum. Yet, with the continual development of technology, who knows how long this simple precautionary measure will hold? When technological innovation ultimately destroy society?

Works Cited:

• Birkerts, Sven. "Into the Electronic Millennium." Boston Review Oct. 1991. Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum. Boston Review, 1993. Web. 28 Feb. 2011. <http://bostonreview.net/BR16.5/birkerts.html>.
• Stossel, Scott. "Is Cyberspace Destroying Society?" The Atlantic Online. The Atlantic Monthly, 30 May 1995. Web. 28 Feb. 2011. <http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/aandc/trnscrpt/birkerts.htm>.