There is an activity I like to do in class from time to time in which I force students to turn off their spacephones and laptops and, as a group, accomplish some basic tasks and answer a few questions without the benefit of mobile electronics. I call it "A Trip Back in Time to 1993" (I'm sure the odd laptop could be spotted on campus back then, albeit without wifi). Since we can't leave the classroom and start running around campus, I ask them to formulate a plan to accomplish these tasks. I present them with some very simple if somewhat random questions. What are the last 5 bills that came up for a floor vote in the House? Which president signed the Posse Comitatus Act? Give me directions from campus to Washington DC. What is the weather in Moscow today? Is the Supreme Court hearing oral arguments today, and if so, what case? Stuff like that. Nothing complicated.
The answer in 2010 is simple and identical for every question – whip out the wireless internet device of choice and ask Mr. Google (although as an aside, many of them seem unable to get that far. If I get one more email along the lines of "How do I find sources for…" I am going to adopt a needy child and throw pies at it. But I digress.) Problem solved. Without those devices they are quite helpless. I am a bad person for enjoying it, but I legitimately get a kick out of seeing them try to figure out how we Neanderthals managed to uncover these kinds of secrets just 10 or 15 years ago. We didn't have instantaneous access to everything yet somehow we survived. Roll Call or Congressional Quarterly would bring us lists of bills in the House (lagging a few days, of course, to accommodate publishing things on dead tree). Encyclopedia Britannica revealed who signed which bills into law. Rand McNally gave us directions. All three of those required a trip to the library. The weather and Supreme Court questions required picking up the phone and calling someone to get the information quickly or waiting a few days to get it from secondary sources.
I am 32. My generation is the last one to learn the mystical skills I described above. Of course we do not practice them regularly. When I want information, I get it instantaneously on the interwebs just like the Kids These Days. But people my age or older remember how to do it the old way. It would be inconvenient to lose the crutch that is modern information technology, but we'd live. I remember how to locate the appropriate reference book and look up pieces of information. I can and regularly do find my way around with a paper map.
Last weekend I had some family in town – folks in their 50s – and they located my house at the tail end of a 12-hour drive with a GPS unit. I made some crotchety old man small talk about how The Kids These Days probably can't read a map to save their souls now that new cars practically come standard with GPS and older cars are fitted with portable units by nervous parents who don't want little Billy to get lost on his way to his weed dealer's house. My guests agreed, but noted that the technology made it unnecessary to do so. Which is true. Assuming its availability.
The Global Positioning System is a network of 24 satellites launched and maintained by the US Department of Defense. For 20+ years the entire planet relied on Pentagon satellites for location-finding systems after Ronald Reagan declared the system a public good in 1986 (after the KAL 007 shootdown, if you must know). Other nations, notably China and Russia, are currently scrambling to launch their own GPS systems. They are motivated, of course, by the realization that it is not in their strategic interests to rely on the U.S. military to provide access to an increasingly important resource. Uncle Sam can, and in a conflict certainly would, flip the switch and preclude access to the satellite network.
What happens is there's a global conflict and the Pentagon decides to limit GPS access only to the military and government as was the case before 1986? What if the fragile and indescribably complex network of satellites simply malfunctions or breaks down? What percentage of the American public would be able to find their way around with maps? Certainly we older folks could do it, because we used to do it. We have the muscle memory, so to speak, even if we stopped using the skills when our new car came with a TomTom or Magellan. But what about today's crop of undergraduates, the ones who have literally grown up with "Just google it" or "Take the GPS with you" as the universal solution to the need for information? It's difficult, after all, to fall back on reading maps or using the Reference Room at the library if one never learned how to do so in the first place.
I am not a survivalist and I don't think we should be preparing our young adults for Mad Max scenarios or the collapse of modern industrial society. It does give me pause however to think about the generational gap developing between atrophying skills – the older folks – and skills that were never learned at all. We are so terribly, terribly dependent on complex technology that I don't relish the thought of the world without access to it even briefly as we start ushering into adulthood generations that have never known or even considered a world without it.
Scott says:
While I agree with you in principle, I have two problems with this line of reasoning.
First, if we were in a global conflict with Russia or China, I think the least of our worries would be how to get to Ed's house for a visit. It would be difficult for many, but I'm sure that with no other alternative, a college freshman could learn to read a map. (Or they could do what I did before I bought a GPS system: go to mapquest and write down the directions and bring them along.)
Second, the reliance on any sort of technology is going to be scoffed at by the older generations. I can hear it now: "In my day we didn't have computers, we used typewriters." "Vacuum cleaners!? What's wrong with a broom, consarn it." If you want to be stressed about something, worry about the overtaxed electrical grid in this country. If THAT went out, we would all have to rely on skills our grandparents have probably forgotten about.
J. Dryden says:
I do the same thing with my students–I tell them to imagine what would happen if I took away their cell phones for a month. They stare at me in horror, like I've just suggested that I'll be taking away their legs.
The Luddites, like the Vegans, took a sound-enough principle and then made it universally viewed as stupid because they took it too far. Technology enables us by removing us from labor–sometimes that's good–yay for washing machines, drill presses, and robotic bomb defusers– but when the labor is cogitative, being removed from it makes us stupid and helpless.
But in the Cranky Old Man competition, I can go even further back for this one: Calculators. When I was in high school–which, I've begun to realize, was an experience that little resembles the experience my students underwent, and shit does that make me feel old–I was explicitly forbidden the use of calculators in any of my math/hard science classes. (For an extra blast-from-the-past, that meant that many of us were instructed to "take off those damned digital watches for the duration.") Yes, they make math quick and efficient, and Lord knows, I use 'em, but if I were to be without one, I could *do* without. ("But you don't have to!" say the youngsters. "Exactly," I reply. "I don't *have* to–it's a choice made out of convenience, because if, for some reason, there's a glitch, I'll know it!") Yes, my math sucks because I'm out of practice, but when I've had to use it–times few and far between–it's still there, like my neglected knowledge of French and Italian, which I can pick up after a few days of language tapes. ("Oh, yeah–I remember how to conjugate that irregular verb–man did I fucking *hate* having to memorize it!" But memorize it I did, and so too with the math. It's *there*.)
But now? Shit–Spell Check (and the even more wretched Grammar Check) has rendered my students incapable of distinguishing between "their" and "there" and "they're"–because they all sound the same in their underfed little skulls and the program recognizes them all as equally valid. (I frequently yell at Grammar Check "It is *not* a goddamned fragment–*there's* the subject, *there's* the predicate–fuck off you illiterate piece of shit." And then I have to be escorted from the Computer Lab.)
I'm am amazed by what tech can do. But I'm scared at how little I understand it. The nuts-and-bolts may be antiquated, but, like a grasp of Latin, they have benefits that outshine their lack of immediate application ("Because the verb 'to be' takes the nominative as its subjective, that's why!") But it moves so goddamned fast. I understood how records worked–then, with an effort, I understood how cassettes worked. CDs lost me. And I dare anyone to take apart your MP3 player and tell me what part does what and how to fix it.
I love the internet–given the amount time I hang out at G&T, that should be obvious. But when I'm doing research, it's a useful first step *before* I get into the library and do the *real* work of the paper chase. Which invariably gets me better results. And my students cannot do this relatively simple–but to them daunting and *seemingly* unnecessary task.
Techies are the new lawyers of our age–the minority who know The Secret Code to how things work–and the rest of us just nod and pretend what the guy from the Geek Squad is telling us.
Or maybe I'm just sour at being part of the new Lost Generation. "You just don't get it!" No, I probably don't. But neither do *you*–you just know which buttons to press to do your thinking for you…
Andrew says:
But neither do *you*–you just know which buttons to press to do your thinking for you…
Which is only a problem is the underlying tech fails. As in, what use it it to know how to plow your field with a tractor when the engine craps out on you? You were never a farmer, you just knew how to move a machine that did your farming for you…
Hell, what use is it to know how to read and write if you can't get paper and books? You never knew how the story of Gilgamesh, you only knew how to get a book to tell you the story of Gilgamesh…
If the underlying tech doesn't fail, then there's no problem. That's an argument for durable, self-repairing, long-lasting tech to me, not an argument for making sure people everywhere can do without tech.
I mean, if that argument held, we'd have to insist our children not just be able to do mathematics with the aid of paper, but also without the aid of paper, in their head alone – because what if the paper-making tech fails? Every generation, from the oral traditionalists on down, have cultivated the skill necessary and lamented when those skills weren't any longer. If we're right about calculators, then I argue they were right about learning oral histories and the horse-and-buggy being superior to the car and whatnot.
Why did we invent these things if not to use them? Yes, we can envision a day when the old ways become necessary – but do you spend any time in your week learning how to use an abacus in case your slide rule goes missing? Did you buy a loom in case clothing stores disappear tomorrow?
So kids can't do long-division on the back of an envelope. Most adults can't, either – and weren't really all that good at it when they were kids themselves, just as kids today aren't all uniformly good at Googling things. By the time Google introduces the neural interface that directly downloads knowledge on-demand into your cranium, the kids of today will be lamenting that the kids of tomorrow can't understand why it's important they they know how to type – what will they do if the iMind chip craps out on them?
Daniel says:
"The weather and Supreme Court questions required picking up the phone and calling someone to get the information quickly or waiting a few days to get it from secondary sources."
Waiting days for information. You have got to be kidding me. I don't own a cell phone with internet capabilities or a personal GPS, but I get irritated if I have to wait seven minutes to find out the score on the bottom of an ESPN ticker. My generation of mid-twenties folks will probably be the last generation to have any idea how to find information without internet or doodad devices, but I can't speak for everyone.
Elder Futhark says:
I certainly don't wish the scenario upon us but one semi-morbid "I told you so" fantasy of mine involves so-called libertarian T-tard assholes who consider themselves rugged individualists and a modern day replay of the 1859 Carrington flare.
You know, the super solar storm? The one that, shold it happen today, would knock the world's electrical power for 2-3 months? Yeah, that fucking Carrington flare. And especially in the next fewe months, when most of us kind of need electricity for one thing or another due to the weather.
And the cool thing would be some dickshit software engineer, hedge fund manager, or marketing maven who listens to Neal Boortz is suddenly no longer one of the "producer class", but a major fucking parasite.
Me, I'd just as soon shoot 'em in the head as waste firewood and vittles on 'em.
(And no, a country boy would not survive. Not in a Chernobyl second).
Irony. The lowest form of humor.
Marc says:
I'll be 50 next month, but I noticed in my 20's that, after a certain age, adults had no idea where they were going while driving, even with directions given to them. They needed to follow someone who knew the way.
displaced Capitalist says:
so true marc. I've encountered that same problem. Even when in the car with someone and I say, "ok, you'll need to turn left ahead so get into the left lane" the person will just stay in the middle lane. Once we get there, they're like "oh, left NOW!?" and I want to scream at them "YES NOW DAMMIT!"
These are the same people who have GPSes and yet still manage to drive onto to disused lumber roads in the middle of winter and get stuck in some wilderness to die.
keith says:
I think students do need to be aware that modern industrial society requires enormous inputs of cheap energy and materials, and the provisioning of these resources in perpetuity is not guaranteed. Societies can and do collapse, as they always have, and it is from this historical perspective that students should have some level of consciousness about our future prospects. While I don't think survivalism is the answer, I do think we would all do well to assess what our vulnerabilities are as individuals and communities and work to improve resiliency in our most crucial support systems.
bb in GA says:
If Carrington II were to occur, Elder, your estimate of 2-3 months to recover the grid is very optimistic. If it happens, I hope your're right. But it doesn't matter for Phase I.
The biggest immediate problem in that scenario is water. When the electricity quits, the standpipes and towers have a very short lifetime.
Commode flushing will be both a waste of precious water and very soon, ineffective because, without electricity, the sewer lift and pumping stations will do neither. Have any of y'all seen a poo fountain?
Within a few weeks it will be awful with people frantically searching for potable water, fighting one another, and dying of thirst. Lake Lanier will have a vast tribe of people "living" on its banks.
It took Terri Shiavo about 14 days to die of thirst. Her only activity was breathing while located in a climate controlled building resting on a bed.
You and I wouldn't last near that long w/ the last few days being ineffective semi-conscious and unconscious existence.
Elder, you're wrong about us Country Boys.
We have a better chance than most others because in the worst case, me and my boys can pull up that black poly pipe with the pump on the end of it down in our well. I can send a simple water torpedo down 40 feet and get clean water just a little at a time and we can survive the initial phase of something horrible like that.
Hope we don't have to ever try.
//bb
Andrew R. says:
I sadly admit that the students of today simply need their e-drip to keep functioning. What truly drives me up the wall, however, are the reps from the textbook companies (now rebranding themselves as educational technology companies) giving talks about how today's kids are tech-savvy digital natives and so we, the educators, need to buy their electronic gewgaws that will make studying like Facebook or some such flatulent bullsh*t. They may need their smart phones to do something as simple as take a dump, but they're sure as hell not tech-savvy, or else I wouldn't get e-mails that say, "Help! The [PDF of] the reading is on its side and I can't read it! What do I do?!?" So I e-mail back to the tech-savvy digital natives that one can either print out the readings or use the Adobe reader's option of rotating the page.
Kids today. Harumph.
ladiesbane says:
My grandmother taught me how to do long multiplication and division in my head (in case there is no paper around) and my mom taught me how to use a slide rule (we couldn't afford a calculator) — the purpose of homework, back then, was actually learning math. Learning to use a calculator is not learning mathematics; it's learning how to operate a calculator. Learning how to use spell-check or grammar-check is not learning language; it's learning how to find a function in a drop-down menu. Literacy may be avoided at the push of a button.
Granted, if you get a flawed result from an Excel function, it's almost always because of a user error — but if you can't spot a problem by eyeballing it, or check it by working it out longhand, that error will go uncorrected, same as with your spell check, which doesn't know "merengue" from "meringue." I like the analogy of GPS drivers shooting off cliffs because they followed the robot rather than the evidence of their lying eyes. Who needs to think about stuff that programs and machines can tell us? THAT GUY.
Bookwormz says:
Hats off to the survivalist/prepper thread that wandered of this post – I have a 17 year old daughter who's been a prepper since she was 12. I have yet to understand how she's going to explain her BOB (bug out box) to her roommate when she gets to college in September.
"Gee, roomie, what's the hazmat suit for?"
Anyway, as a college librarian, who beats Mr. Google about the head and shoulders regularly, and who delights in showing ignorant freshmen all about the freaks and nutjobs who post to Wikipedia, I applaud Ed. In our effort to cope with trying to keep up with teh interwebs and how students use it (or don't), we have forgotten that information comes in many forms. We need to teach students to use information in ALL its forms, and in all the media in which it is transmitted.
BTW, I'm the first to reach for the map when that bitch on the GPS keeps telling my husband to go in what is obviously the wrong direction.
Andy Brown says:
I went home for Thanksgiving without my laptop's powercord (and I only have a cell phone that makes phone calls). I rationed my ever dwindling moments of wi-fi and internet as though it was my Sahara canteen, until it ran out and my mind was left to wither in the information desert. No source of information but the arsenic-laced seep of the television.
Hobbes says:
I am 25 years old. In eighth grade (that's roughly 1998) we were required to write a "research paper" on some random topic – nothing exhaustive or original, just an introduction to the idea that for some big impressive things we'd have to find our own information rather than relying on our teachers to present it in class. This involved learning to use a library – a physical, on-paper card catalogue with all the drawers; microfilm and microfiche readers – and actually getting off our butts and going to the one downtown because the one in our middle school kind of blew.
I'm pretty sure we're the last class that learned about physical card catalogues. The public library went digital the next year. And even so, for the entirety of the time I spent writing up my paper, my mother was there telling me how awesome Kids These Days had it that I could type up my paper in ClarisWorks and not on a typewriter with a bottle of whiteout handy…
Elder Futhark says:
bb,
Yes, yes, yes. All that and more. (Although with the Just In Time food web we have now, I suspect the majority of the food stashes will be sub/urban). No, today's US of A country boy is a bit too pampered and soft. To really survive it helps having lived in filth and squalor your whole life. My money's on 3rd worlders.
Nice to know someone like me, who can whip up modern conveniences with nothing but bamboo and coconuts will suddenly be sexy again. There's that. But, really, it's more about watching these so-called hardasses shit their litttle panties raw. That's the GOTTA be the fun part. (I think there was a Twilight Zone episode about this – faking the end of the world to test the true colors of the characters).
James Hare says:
That's why I try to take a few days each year to go to the few places I know of where there is no mobile phone service at all. It's pretty fun to head somewhere with friends and not have the crutch of mobile phones. You end up going a little slower and planning a little deeper for what you're doing just because you have to.
It's also neat to have everyone there in the moment instead of staring at their phones. It's kind of distressing when I sit down at the bar with friends and everyone's staring at their phones the whole time.
Sarah says:
I contest the notion that if the power suddenly went out or we lost access to the satellites, we would simply be able to go back to using skills we picked up in grade school. I recently tried to use my local library to find information on projects concerning, respectively, El Salvador and blogging. I found a very few things on El Salvador which didn't have anything to do with what I needed, and exactly one slim book on blogging. My paranoid side says that this is what the powers that sit on their behinds in Tally are doing as the alternative to simply cutting off funding for public libraries as they tried a couple of years ago: just gradually cut funding so that library directors are unable to maintain their collections to any sort of adequacy, then as library use dwindles because libraries are becoming less useful, justify further cuts because library use is falling. Telephone companies have been given the go ahead to stop printing telephone books en masse. I have no doubt that paper maps will also go the way of the dodo bird in the foreseeable future. If we suddenly lose access to the Internet and the satellites that bring us our information, even we old fogies will be lost because we have lost access to our old technologies for getting by in life.
Susan says:
I can't afford a GPS! What about all of us poor folk? When the GPS system goes down, we're going to take over the worrrrrllllllddddd!!!!!
Jon says:
Learning these skills you speak of takes an afternoon. Next.
JohnR says:
Well, you may have a point; I have several useful maps in the car for places to which I travel occasionally. Helps for the all-too-frequent times I forget to bring the GPS on a trip. Still, back when I was a boy (get off my lawn!), map-reading was a fairly arcane art. Trying to teach neophyte Boy Scouts how to "see" what a map showed was a tedious and frustrating exercise, for the most part, and for the general public? Much worse. Elementary-school trips to the school library were hardly more instructive, and even in college, finding information in the library was far more tedious and undesirable than simply picking your neighbor's brains (especially if your neighbor was nice to look at). I think at least a little of this "muscle-memory" stuff has a tinge of self-congratulatory "hip-deep snow, uphill, both ways!" about it. But hey, as long as it makes you feel good, who am I to criticise.
MissBetsy says:
I think of this when I am on a cruise ship. I asked the first mate if they still taught them to use a sextant and he said yes, but I can't help but wonder what they will do if all their modern gadgets are put out of service? Will they just be lost or will they be able to find their way somewhere?
Don says:
First commenter Scott mentioned using Mapquest when the GPS goes down, which reminds me of the SF guy who died (although his family survived) after missing the right exit to the coast in southern Oregon. Mapquest was initially blamed for steering them wrong, but they were using a paper map. Paper maps contain quite a bit of information, which, if correctly understood and combined with what I continue to call common sense despite evidence of its increasing rarity, could have kept him alive: is it winter? Is it snowing? Are there higher elevations between you and your goal? Then don't drive up the skinny little 2pt. line. Go back and find the 4pt. line. It's not so much an issue of low vs high tech, just being able to use the tools at hand appropriately and evaluate your results. (Like not driving into an abandoned lumberyard, looking up from the GPS, and wondering where Running Brook Lane is. You just tried to use a screwdriver to pound a nail; it didn't work. Don't stare in befuddlemant at the screwdriver. Back up and find a hammer.)
The last time I travelled to the mountains in the winter, I made us take the route we knew, not the shorter route my new iphone and Google Maps suggested. Google Maps can't freeze to death in a snowdrift, so why should I expect it to register that risk for me?
In re card catalogs, the SF Public Library converted theirs into an art project:
"With the move to the new Main Library, items in the card catalog (used to access the collection for more than 100 years) have been supplanted by an online computer system. Obsolete cards embedded in artisans' plaster cover the principal diagonal wall on three levels of the building."
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/waaw/cohn/artists/Chamberlainstat.html
It's lovely even though I keep wanting to scrape them off the plaster and file them properly. It depresses me that kids would have to have it explained to them, but I also feel like I have Secret Knowledge. At my age anything helps.
displaced Capitalist says:
"I think of this when I am on a cruise ship. I asked the first mate if they still taught them to use a sextant and he said yes, but I can't help but wonder what they will do if all their modern gadgets are put out of service? Will they just be lost or will they be able to find their way somewhere?"
Of course the question is also: a) do they have any sextants on the ship and b) do they have any paper charts to consult if the GPS goes out? Knowing how to use a sextant is useless if you don't even have one.
Nunya says:
I can answer the questions regarding celestial navigation and shipping. I can assure you that any ship that is engaged in commercial work of any kind has paper charts or any area they will be operating in. Any ship that operated more than 20 miles from the coast will also have a sextant, reduction tables, and at least two deck officers that know how to use them.
Pilots and ship captains are a superstitious and prepared bunch. They are probably the most highly trained groups on the planet when it comes to contingency planning.
Captain Trips says:
Someone broke into my house last week and stole my ipod and cd player and all my cd's. but, the left the turtable and all the vinyl – guess they didn't know what the heck those large round plastic discs were. phew.
The Lost Sailer says:
· · · — — — · · ·
Monkey Business says:
I think the real problem isn't so much the erosion of skills like using a compass, reading a map, etc. Those aren't that hard to piece together. The real issue is a degradation of problem solving skills and learning ability.
If you take away all modern technology from a person and put them in an environment where they need to survive, they will either curl up in a ball and wait for death, or they will assess their needs, create tools to fill those needs, and in the process develop skills to support their new situation. It's not whether they already had the skills to find or make potable water, make a spear out of sticks, or start a fire to keep warm. It's whether they had the ability to recognize that those are the things they needed to do, and then do them.
Problem solving is universal. Its when you stop doing it that you get into real trouble.
Armadillo Joe says:
Ever watch the series "Connections" with James Burke? The later "Connections2" & 3 from the 1990's were brief, 1/2-hour installments that only hinted at the depth and complexity of his original BBC series from 1978.
The first episode was called "The Trigger Effect" and it makes for riveting, chilling television, particularly when you consider that it was filmed in the late-1970's and the opening narration was filmed on the grounds of the World Trade Center.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcSxL8GUn-g
Throughout the whole series, but particularly in this first episode, he goes to great lengths to illuminate the very point you make here, but back far enough in our history that we would be lucky and grateful to fall to even that level of technology-dependence.
The most chilling part of the episode is when he describes the likely raid of a rural farmhouse someone fleeing the technology island of a large modern city would need to execute, with an emphasis on the likely violence such a raid would require, and he punctuates it with the question "what, in your comfortable urban existence, has ever prepared you to do something like that."
Great television. You should check out the whole original series, available on Netflix.
Nate says:
Relying only on the latest technology is fine, as long as that technology continues to function properly.
Maintaining the knowledge to use old technology is also fine, but also only if that old technology still exists.
Ten years ago, if you were not at home and needed to make an urgent call, you found the nearest pay phone. Today, you simply pull your cell phone out of your pocket. If our cell phones stopped working, you could not fall back on the Old Way, because pay phones are no more.
As we climb up the ladder of technological advancement, we will continue to kick out the rungs below us. This makes sense if you subscribe to a philosophy of endless optimism and unlimited progress. But if the rung we are standing on should unexpectedly break, then our failure to maintain old technologies will glare in the light of retrospect.
Fifth Dentist says:
Yeah, and when I was a kid we listened to music on eight track tapes, and a compact disc was what caused those painful pinched nerves in grownups' necks and backs.
… Now get off my lawn, you young whipper snappers!
Don says:
Oh, and did somebody say "cruise ship"?
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/nov/08/cruise-ship-adrift-off-san-diego-after-fire/
They may have known where they were, but they sure couldn't hoist the sails to get anywhere else…
jjack says:
Seconding what Nate says. Go to your institution's library sometime and look at the card catalog. I'm sure some of your students remember ye olde cataloge of cards and could remember how to use it. The problem is no one has likely updated it in roughly a decade.
To be fair, though, all I remember using payphones for was to prank call people and talk to people in prison who were so desperate to contact the outside world that they would make their allotted phone call to a random pay phone in hopes that someone, anyone would pick up.
Jimmer says:
Even though I was born in 1989, I was raised by parents who are/were willful Luddites, and was lucky enough to have a series of teachers/professors who required a measure of hard-source research.
As a result, this general state of things makes me chuckle as well. Although I probably shouldn't have ever made it public knowledge that I know how to read a map…DEMAND.
Nunya says:
I'm behind the comment curve but have to offer up an anecdote: I grew up as the grandson of Grapes of Wrath style Okies. They enstilled in my father a sense of just how shitty things couls get and before he went to college, he knew how to bould a house, fix his cars, weld, plact crops, dig a well, do masonry work, tile, bould furniture, and a host of other shit that he would probably never need to use in his life.
Well, it turns out that having exposure to the hands on world is not only beneficial when the worls turns to shit but it also saves you money. Even if you don't know hoe to do the work, you can at least call bullshit when you someone else makes inaccurate or misleading claims.
I was fortunate enough to receive much of the same life lessons that my father did although modifies to fit the current times. I have no doubt that if the world truly takes a dump, I'll make it through if only that in addition to the practical trades, I have been instructed on the lessons of combat.
In todays world, we either specialize or are condemned to a life of poverty. Unfortunately, once our specialty runs its course, we're going to be poor anyway.
A lot of the old technology isn't dead, it's just hidden under many layers of middleware and UI. Morse code isn't really dead, it's just been replaced with binary code. The same technology that went into celestial nevegaton (trigonometry) has just been refined with GPS.
The ability to Google any piece of information you ever thought of is just an improvement on the Dewey Decimal system and the fact that we've now gone from instant voice communication to anyone in the world to typing with our fucking thumbs doesn't, necessarily, tell of a fully evolved communication system.
Yes, technology is wonderful in many ways but it has also placed the most unreasonable constraints on us as human beings. We're now expected to be reachable pretty much 24/7. We're expected to keep up with emails on vacation, and we're constantly monitored to make sure we toe the line (red light cameras, anyone?)
I have no doubt that the shit will hit the fan in America, I'm just not sure when. The only plus that I can offer is that Americans still cling to some sense of independence and love of working with their hands. This is mostly dead in Europe and Latin America where anyone with $500 dollars to ther name would never deign to fix anything with tools or do a job that might get dirt nder their fingernails.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is th one hope that I hold out for America. After all, someone has to build, plant, and maintain or this society is done. It may just be that that saves us from the oligarchs.
Kulkuri says:
I have no doubt a lot of "country boys" would survive if the lights go out for an extended period of time. A lot would depend on where they were at the time. It would be hard to survive in the city, but easier out in the country if there is access to a well with good water and a stove and firewood for heat. If you have those two basics, then you can spend time looking for food.
When I was in school we did math in our heads, on paper, or with a sliderule. Saw a sliderule a few years back, but don't think I could use one now. An aside, the SR-71 was built using sliderules and even with calculators and computers, it is still the fastest airplane around.
Mayya says:
There's another aspect to this – merely having access to knowledge is not the same thing as having knowledge. Having information in our brains to mix up and knock together and jumble around leads to better thinking, better ideas. It doesn't do any good to be *able* to instantly access the complete works of Verdi, the blueprints for a microbrewery operation, and a map of 1850 Crimea if you don't actually do so.
There's something to be said for slower, more onerous learning processes – even going back to the oral tradition – one probably learns *better* that way. Patience and discipline are valid attributes that must be learned, and which then aid further learning. In the best of both worlds, yes you would learn your mathematics with a pencil and paper; when you've acquired the foundation concepts you can use the calculator to speed up your work.
dan says:
You are correct. My kids won't even know how to forge wagon wheels.
Anonymouse says:
J Dryden, are we the same person? I've screamed at the computer, too, when it insists a simple sentence like "John Doe went home" is incorrect because "went" does not agree with "home".
>>But now? Shit
Warmbowski says:
I think I would do just fine finding my way using my first gen iPhone, which has no GPS and triangulates on cell towers and wifi hotspots. Or I" wait till they bring back LORAN http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LORAN