How Long Before Criticizing E-Media Is "Hate Speech"?

When I decided to devote the second semester of freshman composition to a series of papers on “e-literacy”—to the impact, that is, of electronic communication upon the traditionally painstaking art of condensing thoughts into printed words—I wasn’t prepared for an uprising. Much to my amazement, I have found over the past two months that most undergraduate students fiercely, personally resent any insinuation that the high-tech lifestyle is not self-justifying. When the flawlessly deliberate Sven Birkerts advances the view (in Tolstoy’s Dictaphone) that a price is paid in lost individualism for massive networking, typical eighteen-year-olds declare themselves “offended”, as if some stranger had unceremoniously slapped their face. When the mild-mannered Robert Pinsky ponders through the person of his late father-in-law the mystery that technology’s pioneers are almost always social misfits, some are further offended, apparently supposing Pinsky himself to be the voice of the society deriding the “eccentric genius” or “nerd”… while others content themselves with announcing their extreme BOREDOM, as if Pinsky should have canned his nostalgic meditation upon realizing that he had not spiced it to their taste. Indeed, one of the most recurrent themes among my charges is that any writer is a fool who cannot keep his expressions within their range of familiar words and phrases—for what bright person would expect them to have a large vocabulary?

As I observed to these two sections yesterday (a total of about forty students), the responses they resister in their journals to our reading assignments go a long way to validating the case against high-tech communication. Their protests manifest giddy inattention, an imprisoning self-absorption, unreflective lunging and lashing out, thinking within a tight circle of clichés, tribally sorting remarks and authors into “us” and “them” based on a feather or a trace of warpaint… the whole array of character traits that profile a tech-addict accustomed to pushing buttons when he wants something and then vaporizing images when he wants no more. Grist for the same mill was the approbation registered by both classes for an author in Birkerts’s anthology who chronicled her conversion to e-mail: an absurdly pampered young woman educated at Berkeley who originally feared that such chatter might soil her hard drive, but who later discovered that—via e-mail—she could prattle at any hour of the day with high-flying college chums strewn around the planet. This, my students were convinced, was the true moral of the technological tale: only use it, and it will win you over. I restrained myself from remarking that such has always been the sales pitch of the slimy pander. Come on in, come on over—after the first taste, the first puff, the first frolic, you’ll look back at the Puritan that you used to be and laugh. I reminded myself that this is a generation which has typically crossed a great many lines, from drunk driving to fellatious sex to snorting a little coke, before leaving high school, often with the dull innocence of a savage retrieved from a hut of dung and clay. One must not expect its members to parse the tenses and moods of ethical treatises.

Yet the response I find the most vexing in student writing is the blanket reproach invoked by the word “negative”. Dare I say that I am OFFENDED when a young person labels something “negative” (or charges it with “negativity”, as if the sin dwelt in a Platonic abstraction condemned forever as negativitas)? My blood certainly boils, at any rate, when people whom I know to be intelligent and capable of thoughtful exchanges suppose themselves to have righteously put down the opposition because its members did not appear for the pep rally. What exactly does it mean to be negative? To be critical, perhaps? And to be critical means… it means quite literally “to exercise judgment” (from the Greek kritein). Now, very little in this world may be judged perfect. We point out the deficiencies of those we love and the flaws of that which we hope to improve because we wish to nurture success and happiness. In cases where the flaws seem persistent and premeditated, we may indeed not be kindly disposed; for here the criticized object or agent may threaten the very survival of our loved ones. Is our criticism fair? Then act upon it: chide the criticized for having justified it, not the whistle-blower for having forestalled a calamity. Is the criticism unjustified? Then criticize the accuser: charge him with carelessness, or reproach him as a vile slanderer (in which you run the risk, of course, of being labeled “negative”). Do not on any account, however, banish the accuser from your presence because you are not in the mood today to handle truths which obstruct your rosy fantasy of a flawless world. Banish yourself, rather, from the community of sane, thinking adults, and return whenever you recover. Or if you cannot recover—if rosy distortions are a chronic affliction—then betake yourself to an institution specializing in people who are not fit to confront life.

Of course, e-fantasies indulge the rosy-blind. Many of the contributors to Tolstoy’s Dictaphone (an anthology with several flaws, I might add) are aware of the political implications of withdrawal from a vibrant social community into an artificially created and sustained network. A great many of our young people, however, appear to me already beyond the reach of a literate redemption. At some level, I believe President Obama to be acutely sensitive to this. Why else does he stage daily photo-ops that keep him squarely on the universal screen almost around the clock, the lean, austere but serene multi-racial Moses of the Brave New World?