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The unplugged life: Meet the neo-Luddites among us
Feb 12, 2012 (The Kansas City Star - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
Indonesian gongs, 100 pounds each, reside in the living room. A vintage sewing machine sits between bookshelves bearing thick, musty dictionaries.
But look more closely around Jeffrey Ruckman's home: Something's missing here.
Tiny lights aren't glowing.
No cellphone charging. No laptop, desktop terminal, tablet nor MP3 player beckoning.
Wait -- atop a table, one little light flickers.
It is red -- indicating that Ruckman's electric typewriter, a Brother GX-6750, is turned on.
"Actually, I'd rather use a manual typewriter. Manual keys work my fingers better for playing the piano," said the Kansas City composer, 48, who once synthesized musical tracks but now hand-writes his scores.
Techies might tag such people "Luddites." The term dates back to early-19th-century British textile artisans, who ripped up mill looms as a protest against job-killing technology. They took the name of Ned Ludd, known for smashing knitting equipment.
Luddites. Technophobes. Snail-mailers.
Ruckman, for one, takes mild offense. None of the labels, he said, captures the reasons he eschews the high-tech, file-sharing, 24/7 telecom grid.
"There are so many beautiful things out here where the lights don't blink...," he said. "The most common accusation is, you're afraid of progress; don't be afraid. But this has nothing to do with fear.
"This is about human interaction. I'm having a good time."
Please pause your iPod and acquaint yourself with an emerging term: Neo-Luddism.
It is more a philosophy than a hard-and-fast practice. A decision, not a deficiency.
It's bred by the annoyance that builds from emails piling up, unsolicited and undeleted. Or by the anger last month in a New York Philharmonic audience, which erupted in boos when a ringing cellphone interrupted the music.
Neo-Luddism trickles through a stream of recent books: "Overconnected," by former Silicon Valley executive Bill Davidow. "You are Not a Gadget," by scientist Jaron Lanier. Clay Johnson's "The Information Diet." And Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains," a finalist last year for a Pulitzer Prize.
"A backlash against the Net, it seems, is underway," Carr updates us in the paperback version.
The backlash --an odd word given that online use and gizmo ownership are ever rising -- is taking many forms.
Consider some fresh headlines: Financial analysts question the wisdom of investing in Facebook stock. Federal safety authorities propose bans on phoning while driving or operating machinery.
In Idaho, teachers fight to keep administrators from plugging more computers into classrooms. And the U.S. Supreme Court faces a glut of privacy, defamation and copyright cases springing from the Web.
Neo-Luddism may stir strongest, if more quietly, within everyday hearts and minds in what used to be our private lives.
Ana Reinert is no Luddite. She spends her workdays at a computer screen designing, in 3-D, gift ideas for Hallmark.
She toils through the digital age for a living -- she has to. Which is why, when Reinert is relaxing in her Brookside home, "I have no interest in turning on the computer" or staring at any screen.
Rather, she puts pen to paper and writes letters.
Reinert, 41, belongs to the Letter Writers Alliance, 2,200 paying members worldwide. The desk on which she writes is appointed with relics of a bygone time: Pens, notebooks, typewriter, magnetic paper-clip holders.
To belong to the Letter Writers Alliance means anticipating that humble gem that awaits at home -- an actual letter, amid the slick ads, in an actual mailbox.
Remember?
"You sit down, open a letter and spend 15 minutes with the friend who wrote it. Makes my day," Reinert said. "Even the type of paper tells you something."
Neo-Luddites are not a monolithic group. Few altogether shun gadgets of convenience -- but many will, without shame, if convenience morphs into hassle.
"I canceled my Facebook page," said University of Indiana professor Fred Cate, an expert on privacy issues. "And that's not easy to get off of ...
"I wouldn't characterize this as a privacy concern. Anyone could post a picture of me on the Web, and I don't have control over that. To me, it's more a matter of when the technology just becomes an annoyance, or time wasted.
"Take today. I've literally responded to email all day long."
If the last 15 years were marked by a breathless rush to get connected, Cate said, the next five may be spent trying to throttle back and lessen the irritation.
----
The statistics, compiled in 2010 by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project:
--85 percent of U.S. adults own cellphones or smartphones.
--59 percent own a desktop computer; 52 percent opt to carry a laptop.
--Two-thirds of adults under age 35 own a game console.
--IPod or MP3 player owners? About half of us.
Then comes the category "none of these."
And that group is hardly a crumb -- 9 percent of Americans, 1 in 11, some 20 million adults.
OK, for adults under 35, only 1 in 100 is gadgetless, off the grid.
But if you're between 47 and 65, there's an 8 percent chance that you own "none of these."
Older than 75? A 43 percent chance. Retirees may see less of a need to log on or connect on the go than do the employed, or maybe fixed incomes won't let them.
Overall, 1 in 5 U.S. adults don't use the Internet, Pew found. Half of the non-users cited reasons other than expense, lack of access or technophobia: "Just not interested," was the most common reason.
Online bill-payment sees similar resistance.
More than a decade ago, financial institutions began urging people to bank and receive statements online -- so the banks could save money on postage and paper.
At first, the percentage of customers logging on zoomed by double digits annually, and forecasters expected a nearly complete digital-banking society by 2015.
The trend lines, however, hit a ceiling a few years back -- about half of us wouldn't bite. Online banking continues to inch up, as the American Bankers Association now reports about 60 percent of customers signing up for Web transactions or statements.
The industry isn't quite sure how to swing the others.
"Don't force it," advises the market-consulting firm Forrester Research Inc. in a newsletter. "More than one-quarter of investors say they will never give up paper statements."
Luddites? Maybe not, but we do love paper. Production of paper has climbed every year since the 1980s, due largely to an appetite for computer printouts.
The appetite for cellphones is debatable.
"I keep a cellphone only in the car for emergency purposes. And it stays there," said environmentalist Craig Volland of Kansas City, Kan. "I don't want to be that available to the world."
No cell at all for Rick Mareske, who directs Communiversity programs at the University of Missouri-Kansas City: "I'm cheap. It bothers me, what companies devise to get more money from us."
Ruckman, who composes for the Kansas City Ballet and other groups, is not certain the price he's paid, if any, for his neo-Luddism: Vital calls missed away from home? Time spent licking envelopes? He rather likes chatting with bank tellers.
On rare occasions a digital urge will strike.
"To learn more about the octopus, go to www.pbs.org," he deadpanned. "I might be curious for more of that information."
So he'll head to a coffee shop that provides laptops and check what PBS hadn't already said about the octopus. "Typically, it's just the same stuff," Ruckman said, "or you'll be directed to some other topic they think you're interested in ... and no, you're not."
----
He wasn't always this way.
In the 1980s, Ruckman's compositions were cutting-edge mixes of tape loops, percussion machines and audio clips of speeches. It's how so much music is made today. But Ruckman felt less of an artist than a browser, "like shopping at the mall" for factory-made sounds.
He discovered his skills improved, the music moved through him, when he wrote the notes in pencil, then pen -- in beautiful, suitable-for-framing strokes.
He thought better, for some reason, when working on paper.
Science is just beginning to explore what Ruckman is talking about.
Researchers have found that our eyes tend to skim computer screens. We hop from one site to the next, browsing and skimming.
We're less likely to engage in what Tufts University psychologist Maryanne Wolf calls "deep reading," when the brain's powers of interpretation are firing, Wolf said.
Others argue that the mind might benefit from multitasking, texting rather than talking and tapping data the moment we want it. The brain's circuitry reworks itself throughout life, leading scientists to believe something new is happening up there.
They and software engineers need to unite and figure out how technology can sharpen, not weaken, cognitive skills, said Wolf, author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain."
"This technology is not going away," she said. "Unfortunately, we are a society that lurches into the new without sufficient thought of what we lose in that lurch."
Dinty W. Moore, a cyber-skeptic who directs Ohio University's creative writing program, feels his own brain changing a bit: "I still read books, but I find myself getting impatient if they don't grab me.
"What I would like is to get off Facebook, cancel the email -- I know many people frustrated that way. But you can't, because it's become so much a part of professional life."
An Ipso survey of well-to-do Americans asked how their lives had changed during the first decade of the century. "Infused with technology" was the top answer, just above "more complicated" and "more stressful."
----
This time of year, the unconnected show up at libraries seeking hard copies of federal and state tax forms.
The Kansas City Public Library no longer stacks the forms for the public to carry away. Gone, too, are shelves of telephone directories for other cities.
Search the library's catalog for Nicols Fox's 2002 book about Luddites, "Against the Machine," and you discover it's only available as a downloadable e-book.
"We know there are a lot of people not up to speed," said R. Crosby Kemper III, library executive director. "It's not just older people. Quite a few in their 40s or 50s just don't want to use a computer."
The unemployed walk into the central branch, frustrated to learn that companies now expect job applicants to go online. On the library's third floor, the staff of the H&R Block Business and Career Center is happy to assist.
"This is a mouse," some sessions begin.
"To change beds at a hotel, you need computer skills because you apply online," said the center's Pamela Jenkins.
"A lot of people are looking to apply at the Marriott up the street. But you go to Marriott's website and you're looking at hotels worldwide," she said. "You have to navigate around booking a reservation on the other side of the world in order to find a job up the road. Even younger people need help with that."
The library's deputy director, Cheptoo Kositany-Buckner: "Some don't even want to touch the mouse. But now you need to touch the mouse to get a job. You've no choice."
She thought back to her native Kenya, where cellphones are virtually a human appendage. Even great-grandmothers text, pay their bills -- "people there know how to fix their cellphones," she said.
The difference in Kenya's conversion to the digital age, versus ours, is that many Kenyans lacked landlines when cellphones were introduced. There was little in-between, she said; either carry a cell or live isolated.
Older Americans are converting to cellphones, computers and online banking faster than any other age demographic.
Electronic reading tablets help those with vision problems because they can magnify the text. Studies find that a 75-year-old is just as apt to own a Kindle as a 20-year-old.
Marty Hatten, 78, is looking forward to firing up her first computer, purchased by her children as a Christmas gift.
She uses computers in her part-time job at the Waldo library. But to learn the bells and whistles, she enrolled in a course for older residents sponsored by Shepherd's Center of Kansas City.
The course pairs seniors with students at St. Teresa's Academy. Weekly sessions have helped Hatten get to know electronic spreadsheets and strike a warm friendship with her tutor, Chelsea Birchmier, 18.
"I enjoy her a lot as a person," Hatten said of Birchmier.
Early in the training, Hatten expressed a love for the novel "Rebecca," by Daphne du Maurier. When Birchmier gave her the gift of an author-signed first edition, "tears came to my eyes," Hatten said.
Of course, Birchmier found the book online.
--
Raised in Topeka, Eric Brende started out loving science fiction, "Star Wars," techno-wizardry and all.
Then his father got his own computer, and Eric wished he hadn't. Dad spent so much time alone, fixated on the magic.
Brende attended the University of Kansas and went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to study society's relationship with science.
After he graduated, he and wife Mary spent 18 months with the Amish, stripping themselves of all things electronic.
The experiment resulted in a 2004 book called "Better Off." Now in St. Louis, the Brende family still subscribes to the tenets of neo-Luddism.
Three kids. No computer. No video games or DVD player.
No TV.
Brende, 50, last week said in a phone interview (landline) he's compromised on the business needs. He operates a rickshaw around Busch Stadium, and for that, a cellphone helps.
"The need to use some of this technology -- whether we want to or not -- is imposed on us by the society around us," he said.
Theo Schubert is another resister.
As one of the creators of Kansas City's nonprofit Community of Reason, she truly could use an email account. She chooses, instead, to dial up a friend (landline) when needing to blast updates on the group's schedule of weekly lectures.
The friend has email. Schubert, 69, doesn't even have a microwave. Six times, caring acquaintances have given her their old computers; she never plugged in one.
And she's happy: "It's not that technology intimidates me. It's more like, you know, I've got other things to do."
She recalls the man she lived with a generation ago:
Physics and math major. Brilliant. Knew computers up and down and often holed himself off to learn more.
"We'd spend hours and hours talking about it -- the 1s and 0s, all the workings," Schubert said. "And over time, I realized if I really got into this stuff? I'd never be seen or heard from again."
Last Sunday afternoon, Schubert showed up smiling and dressed in pink for a Community of Reason gathering at UMKC.
Featured speakers were local poets Stanley and Janet Banks. They gave readings on Langston Hughes, on relatives and personal grit and life in Vine Street-era Kansas City.
For two hours, an audience of a half-dozen listened, chuckled, took notes on paper, asked things. Applauded.
Nobody checked their watches or phones. They were content to stay in their classroom chairs -- just neo-Luddites, digesting poetry.
The Super Bowl commenced that evening.
Others soon would be commenting on Madonna's halftime show at a rate of 10,245 tweets per second.
To reach Rick Montgomery, call 816-234-4410 or send email to rmontgomery@kcstar.com.
___ (c)2012 The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Mo.) Visit The Kansas City Star
(Kansas City, Mo.) at www.kansascity.com Distributed by MCT Information Services
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