Politics D18

Page D18

Politics The Town Voice Balanced

Death of Dial Up

By Arlon Staywell RICHMOND — Most of you are probably aware that dial up and floppy drives are fast becoming things of the past. It makes sense that floppy drives do that. If you have large collections of notes and technical data on floppies, as many of us older folks do, you can easily move them to flash drives or memory cards. They're far more compact, easy to access, stable and readable across different machines. If you haven't already started saving things you might need, you should probably get started.
What about Dial Up?
While the passing of floppies is scientific, the passing of dial up is much more political. The notion that dial up is obsolete is actually a misunderstanding. While it is true that very few people use it, it is not true that it has shortage of benefits. They could use it to considerable benefit. They either don't know how to do that or don't care much to read long articles.
Computers aren't entirely to blame. People stopped getting their news from newspapers long before computers came along. Although the text of a 30 minute newscast would only fill half of one page in a newspaper, quite many people were happy with that little. They didn't have time in their busy lives for the greater depth they might find in a newspaper.
I use the internet to read newspapers, quite many actually. When I write many of my articles, including this one, they are over 500 words.
Sometimes there will be a small, low resolution picture. Dial up was and still is perfectly capable of sending and receiving such long articles.
It has been asked, why would you read a book if you can watch the movie instead? If it were possible to put the about seven books most grade and high school students get in a semester into seven movies the semester could be done in a week and a half. That doesn't work because the information in most movies and the information in scholarly texts is different in nature. Movies are typically entertainment. While there do arise documentary movies from time to time, for more credibility where needed, for entertainment sometimes, far more often the scholar is better served when things are put into words. If you've ever played "charades" you know a picture isn't always worth a thousand words.
The Computer as a Toy
What has happened is the computer as a toy has stomped the computer as a scholarly tool into the ground.
At some point teachers began to require certain computer equipment for the classroom. At that point it made sense. Now requiring computer equipment in the classroom is like forcing parents to spend $500 on toys, because that is mostly what the newer computers are. Why not force parents to buy jet skis to better study the ocean?
At first computers were typewriters and adding machines, and you almost needed a degree to operate them. By the year 2000 they were high resolution 3D gaming systems. Since 2000 they haven't changed at all. They have required you to get updates and upgrades lest you be "left behind." Most people simply don't have the intellectual grasp of what is actually going on to see anything wrong with that. The market is driven by the doltish and by young people who grew up with computers changing in a real way quite frequently.
The new electronic book reading equipment has the potential to make text useful, or at least used again. If our schools fail to teach young people how to interact with the world through english text, then they fail altogether.
And the rule was that "english" as a noun is capitalized and as an adjective, unless part of a title, is not. That rule has had to be relaxed because students can't tell the difference between a noun and an adjective. It started with equivocation about what was a "title" and has come to always capitalizing. They also can't tell the difference between the possessive pronoun "your" and the "you're" that is ordinarily part of a dependent clause.
The Devastation
This website is replete with answers that you will have difficulty finding 1 in 200 people who can grasp. The reason is that right answers require you to pay attention through a text article over 500 words voluntarily. Too few would do that, and the text they were required to read hasn't been "updated" at all, though their toys have been.
Although you will find people who oppose Obama's health care, they aren't so for the right reasons. They oppose the health care because they believe in meanness, often dumb meanness. They do not oppose it because it is fraught with bad science. They can't understand science enough to know that. You perhaps saw on television Suzanne Summers and her support of cancer treatments with little support otherwise. Although the cancer treatments that are supported by the "medical community" have better evidence that they are efficacious, it is not really so much more evidence as the general public believes. And much of what they believe is as bizarre as what anyone else believes.
Dr. Snyderman, who hosted the program about Mz. Summers book, had just before done a story on cab drivers in London that I saw as an unsubstantiated support of phrenology. I do not now, nor am I likely to, believe in phrenology. So watching her question the "frauds" was unnerving, like watching the blind lead the blind.
Although you will find people who oppose lax immigration, again they aren't so for the right reasons. Often it's just more of their expectations of meanness. If they could grasp the true purpose of strict immigration they wouldn't take the sides they do on other issues.
Although you will find people who support intelligent design, yet again they do so for the wrong reasons. They, especially Dr. James Kennedy, clearly do not grasp the science. They simply claim to believe in intelligent design out of loyalties to people with an understanding of science from before the Civil War. No wonder they are ineffective.
And you will not find 1 in 200 who grasp the dubiousness of heart transplants or the theory of relativity.
And while you will find many who oppose gay marriage, Virginia has a law against it, and they indeed oppose gay marriage for the right reasons, you will not find 1 in 200 who can articulate well those reasons. Thus we go to the Supreme Court. What will be their decision?
Rather than bring us a world of people better engaged with the reality and the science of it all, the computer as a toy has brought us a world of people lost in childish simplicity and an unqualified awe in what they believe is "science." They think the political process in America is about finding the balance between "mean" and "nice" people. The Republicans always take the mean side and the Democrats always take what superficial, short-sighted inspection seems the "nice" thing to do. Indeed that is exactly what the political process has become lately, but that is not what it is supposed to be, nor what is was for generations. What it is supposed to be requires an understanding of the nature of "right" and "wrong" and the process, sometimes involving articles of 500 or more words, whereby those are established.
The point here is not to oppose picture books, video games or documantaries with stunning photography. The point here is to remind you that issues in religion, science and politics can be complicated. They can require you to exercise your brain as much as a 500 word article might.
I found a wonderful picture book at a used book sale. It's "A World of Movies: 70 years of Film History" by Richard Lawton. On the cover jacket is a picture of Bogart and Bergman. It's a great book really.
What this article opposes is the loss of intellectual, scholarly approaches to the world evidenced in many ways including the premature eviction of dial up.

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