Lost in the Internet age
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AS WE were packing for our summer in Israel, our 12-year-old declared, "There'd better be Internet in our apartment."
"Why?" I teased. "Can't you survive without it?"
He retorted, "If we don't have Internet, I'll be disconnected!"
What a dreadful fate - to be severed from Gchat, from
As media change, messages change as well. Acronyms abridge conversation, and texting substitutes for phone calls. "Remember calling a girl and asking her to the prom? That was a big deal," mused one of my friends. "What do kids do now? Leave word on Facebook?"
Arguably, kids converse as much as ever. It's the rhythms of conversation that have changed. My children don't know what it's like to wait days, or even minutes, for a letter. For them, correspondence is not a give and take between two people, but a palimpsest of comments from large groups. What's lost? Occasion to compose thoughts in paragraphs. Practice developing an argument without interruption. Time to breathe.
Post and riposte, we live in an interactive age. In the past, we watched the news. Now, we e-mail it to others with comments. In the past, we read reviews. Now we post our own. Everyone's a critic, and a Web-published one at that. Access and anonymity mean we can write freely on any topic. While gossip, lies, and pornography spread virally, so does evidence and information. Oppressive governments struggle and fail to tamp down photographs and first person accounts which slip out electronically. If the world online looks like the Wild West, where mail-order brides and scams await, that world is also radically open, a boon to dissident points of view. The collaborative Wikipedia keeps growing. Amateurs study photos online and classify stars for astronomers at galaxyzoo.com.
At times anarchic and irresponsible, public discourse seems richer than before. It's private discourse that worries me. Indeed, what is private these days? The personal diary becomes a public blog. The letter of complaint becomes an anonymous screed. At the touch of a button, a message intended for a particular recipient becomes a public forum tagged, "reply to all."
I have little nostalgia for old technology per se. I don't care that my son can't remember typewriters. I do care that he learn to write without abbreviations and sign his name. I want to raise a son who takes responsibility for his opinions and discerns the difference between topics of general interest and personal rants. Schools brief parents on Internet safety, but beyond the obvious, other subtle dangers lurk online. I'm thinking of rampant egotism, self-aggrandizement, and vulgarity in the form of confessions and epinions sprayed on the endless virtual wall.
We live in the age of too much information. We are so quick to spill and judge and send each other links. But anonymous posts lack the authority of signed letters. Hypertext will only take you so far, if you can't sift fact from rumor or evaluate sources or gauge context. Multitasking and moment by moment news updates and e-mail alerts subvert concentrated thought. So much of what we say has to do with how we say it. As yet there is no search engine for nuance on the Web, nor do our computers come with irony buttons.
Perhaps what's missing in our instant-access world is hesitation. The pause in conversation or correspondence - and with that pause, a moment to reflect. Missing as well, the stillness of printed words linked only to the reader's mind and to each other. "I miss reading the newspaper in the morning," my son admitted after several weeks in Israel.
"You can get it all online," I reminded him.
"I know," he said, "but it's not the same. I like to turn the pages."
Allegra Goodman, a guest columnist, is the author of "Kaaterskill Falls." Her first book for younger readers, "The Other Side of the Island," will be published in September. 
