A Luddite Talks About The Good Old Days and Gets Smacked Down
William McKeen brags about his luddite ways and threatens that the Internet is going to ruin serendipity.
I realized half-way through reading his article that this fellow doesn’t use the Internet. Sure, he has logged on to CNN.com and probably gets his stock quotes online, but other than that, he hasn’t spent much time online.
He has never known the seredipitous joy of reading a weblog and finding a link to something totally weird and useful. He hasn’t even listened to the boring overplaylists that the radio has been cranking out lately. He hasn’t searched for interesting music online or known the joy of finding a good band via Pandora or iTunes. I was about to smack this luddite down until I realized that Steven Berlin Johnson had done it for me.
Every time I see someone waxing poetic about how much better reading a newspaper was, or going to a library was, or listening to the radio was, I KNOW for a fact that said person has not learned how to use the Internet properly. Get past the “I Suck At This†phase before you go reminiscing about how much better the past was.