I haven’t read Lee Siegel’s anti-Internet book Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob yet, but the New York Times has reviewed it and the opening, at least, sounds like the kind of argument I’ve heard against computers and technology ever since I was calling electronic bulletin board systems in high school: computers separate us, turn us inward, make us anti-social. Siegel seems to think his experience at a Starbucks bears this out:
In “Against the Machine,” the swaggeringly abrasive cultural critic Lee Siegel pays a visit to Starbucks. He sits down. He looks around. And he finds himself surrounded by Internet zombies, laptop-addicted creatures who have so grievously lost their capacity for human interaction “that social space has been contracted into isolated points of wanting, all locked into separate phases of inwardness.” How long until they wake up and smell the coffee? [ Spinning Out Into the Pileup on the Information Superhighway, NY Times review ]
If Siegel had walked into a singles bar and seen all the patrons with their noses in iBooks or gone to a nightclub and seen everyone dancing in silence to their own iPods I could concede he has a point. But instead he’s gone to a coffee shop. Coffee shops are where you go to get coffee, to sit and read, to study, or to hop on a convenient wireless access point and work for awhile out of the office. Except for the occasional poetry slam in college towns, coffee shops are supposed to be quiet places. Being disappointed by the silence in a coffee shop is a little like walking into a library and agonizing about how people love books so much they never talk anymore.