The Digital Habit
16th February 2024
It is a tragic but incontrovertible fact that the vast majority of people in recent decades, are neither living in what they call “real time” (as if time could be anything else) nor experiencing life and the world itself at first hand, but rather at second or third remove; like sitting behind the wheel of a fifth- or sixth- hand automobile with no tires and a seized-up engine purchased from a used-car salesman straight out of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, pumping the accelerator and shouting “Vroom, vroooooom!” To drive home the aptness of this simile, I cite the fact, ascertained some years ago by the sort of pedagogue who devotes his career to such investigations, that young Americans today, many fewer of whom own cars or have even learned to drive them than in the relatively recent past, choose to remain at home with their noses pressed to their computer screens in preference to buying a jalopy and hitting the open road as previous generations of American youth did (though it is difficult to imagine a travel video made by Jack Kerouac being a satisfying substitute for his book).