 
|
|||||||||||||
              
|
New Luddites oppose technology (and use their Web site to say so)
Monday, October 18, 1999 By Dennis B. Roddy, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Ask Arleen Adelson and she'll tell you: "I'm an analog woman in a digital world."
"Maybe I'm not hip," she ventures. "I'm just not machine-oriented. I have boxes of letters. I love to read people's handwriting."
For heaven's sakes, her 91-year-old mother-in-law has taken up the computer. Lenore Adelson logs onto her son's Compaq PC, plays solitaire against the machine, and e-mails her grandchildren. "What's the big deal?" she asks. "It's like learning to type."
Not for Arleen Adelson.
It worries her husband, Marvin. He wonders how to explain to the world that the wife of a man whose business centers around computer programming for the pharmaceutical industry would be, well, such a Luddite.
"It's frustrating on one hand and humorous on the other," Marvin Adelson says. "We're living in two worlds and it works. I program the VCR. There's a mysterious button on the remote that's called 'power' that's very elusive to Arleen."
Welcome to the world of a technological odd-couple.
Multiply it by the millions, say social scientists, and throw in the confusion that arises when people are fearful or distrustful or just plain confounded by the growing velocity of changes that are sweeping end-of-the-century America, and Arleen Adelson becomes a sort of trend-setter in reverse.
As the pace of technological change quickens, some people are moving beyond discomfort into a quiet rebellion.
At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, there were the Luddites, English craftsmen who smashed weaving looms and factory equipment in a hopeless attempt to stop the pace of changes that were destroying their livelihoods.
Now, if she wants, Arleen Adelson can join them. The New Luddites, also called the Neo-Luddites, are up and running.
"The New Luddites plan to campaign for a less arrogant science and technology," explains a manifesto by one faction which is posted -- and they acknowledge the irony -- on the organization's World Wide Web page.
"Neo Luddism has the potential to allow people to discriminate between that which genuinely benefits society and that which does not," says the site's operator, a Yorkshire, England, college student who has taken the name of Ned Ludd. He gives as an example, the "necessary technology" of a cardiac defibrillator as opposed to genetically altered foods, which Neo Luddites view as a threatening leap into the unknown.
He delivered his message by e-mail.
Not every rebel joins a campaign, however. Most people, rather than actively resisting technological change, are just quietly opting out.
"They're feeling frustrated, intimidated and annoyed and they're feeling anger at all of the changes and all of the rules," explains Larry Rosen, a California university professor who co-authored several studies on technophobia -- an aversion to new technologies.
Rosen and co-author Michelle Weil studied workplace technology and classified people three ways:
That last group, by far the largest, is peopled by folks such as David Kaufer.
Kaufer teaches writing at Carnegie Mellon University, the very place where researchers are at work on machines that will one day keep us as pets. Kaufer only sits at the computer when it's time to put a thought into written form -- before that he does a lot of walking.
But his biggest blow against his fully wired campus is the "print" button.
He makes his students print out their papers before they proofread them.
"You see the errors much more easily than you do on a computer screen," says Kaufer. "Computer spell checkers and grammar checkers tend to give them the illusion that if the computer says your paper is good then you think it really is. They don't read it."
Kaufer began his hard-copy policy after an array of homonyms showed that his students weren't fully conversant with the difference between "there" and "their" or "to" and "too."
Living, as he does, in the CPU of the Beast, Kaufer knows that papers are also going to be e-mailed to him, that communicants are likely to hit the send button before fully thinking out what they've said, and that computers are "horrible environments to really plan ideas on."
When Rosen and his partner surveyed office work forces over the past four years, they made an unsettling discovery.
"They're much more hesitant than they were four years ago," he said. Originally, the people unhappy with technology hovered at around 50 percent. "Now they're up to 70 percent," he said.
The resistance comes as no surprise to Kirkpatrick Sale, a New York historian whose book, "Rebels Against the Future," told the story of the Luddites.
They were mostly weavers and cloth-makers who worked out of their cottages and who got caught between the hyper-inflation of the Napoleonic Wars and the arrival of factories filled with automated looms that pumped out wool and cloth products for low prices.
They took their name from the apocryphal tale of young Ned Ludd, who, according to legend, broke his loom one day. The movement took root in Northern England, around Nottingham, and followers happily adopted the style of the legendary Robin Hood from six centuries earlier. They would gather in bands, smash down the doors of factories, demolish the machinery, and fire off a message explaining their actions under the name of the fictitious "General Ned Ludd."
Sale subtitled his history, "Lessons for the Computer Age."
No, Sale doesn't expect the New Luddites to travel from village to village smashing ATMs.
"It's not about picking up a hammer and going after these machines, but it's the same fear and doubt and worry not about the individual machine but what the process is doing to our whole society," he says.
Sale won't have a PC in his rural New York state home. He won't e-mail. He writes his books by typewriter. He uses an ATM every once and again but still chafes at the fact that his local library has computerized its catalog, forcing him to use a computer every time he needs to hunt up a book.
What he dislikes, he says, is a technology that changes things "faster and more chaotically than anyone can understand and control."
As Sale sees it, computer technology is being adopted so totally and so quickly that the pace is no longer determined by the needs of humans.
"There are people whose lives are enslaved to computers. They have to sit there and enter numbers all day. It's a sort of manifestation of the factory line," he says.
As for the Neo-Luddites, they were hesitant to take a telephone call.
"If you are able to devise some form of an e-mail alternative, I'll gladly help you in whatever ways I am able regarding the New Luddite movement," wrote back the self-named Ned Ludd.
It wasn't easy. Follow-up questions bounced back to this side of the Atlantic with the following message:
"This user cannot receive any more e-mail messages until they delete some of their old messages."
On the eve of battle against the computer age, General Ned Ludd's electronic mailbox was full.
|
||||||||||||
Resisters, who dislike new technologies, hate the sight of a computer, and feel pushed into unproven new disciplines.