Letters to the Editor
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‘An iBacklash Builds Against iPhone, Spawning a Smash-Up Hit on YouTube’
David Blum says, “Those remaining holdouts who hate progress — the Luddites who disdain blogs, e-mail, and iPods as tools of destruction — need to find a new hopeless cause to embrace,” [Arts & Letters, “An iBacklash Builds Against iPhone, Spawning a Smash-Up Hit on YouTube,” July6, 2007]. Thank you, Aldous Huxley. He warned in “Brave New World” that when a society glibly and unquestioningly accepts technology, bad things could come of it.
Huxley argued that people would come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. He believed there would be no reason to ban books because there would be no one who wanted to read one.
Huxley did not fear those who would deprive us of information. He feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
He worried technology would drown us in a sea of irrelevant data, and that we would become a trivial culture preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the cenrtifugal bumble-puppy.
In my opinion, the equivalent to those things in 2007 are the blogs, e-mail, and iPods.
MARTIN LEVINSON
Forest Hills, N.Y.
‘Risk Worth Taking’
The most crucial part of Mr. Glaeser’s analysis of paying students to do things they are supposed to do for themselves, i.e., attend class regularly, is his conclusion that there is little risk that this approach can “… actually harm the poor by destroying the intrinsic motivation to learn” [Oped, “Risk Worth Taking,”July10,2007].
However, the issue is not about any intrinsic motivation to learn. It is rather about learning what society is going to expect of you.
These pupils need to learn that to succeed in our free market society you have to work at fulfilling the needs of other people. But paying these kids to attend school regularly is just the opposite of post-school reality — i.e., that you can earn money by doing what your suppose to do for yourself.
Unlike Mr. Glaeser I submit that there is a substantial risk that this program will interfere with many teens from underclass environments making a healthy preparation for the demands of adult life.
DAVE O’NEILL
Adjunct Professor
Baruch College, CUNY
New York, N.Y.
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