Today’s students are the subjects of an international and optimistically biased experiment. Education based companies seem to have no problem putting an educational product on the market without testing it at length for side effects. Healy astutely cites the concerns of Bill McKibben, author of The Age of Missing Information, who laments our separation from nature and the “real-life lessons” of patience, limitations, and real-world failures (i.e. not the kind that let you go back to wherever you last saved) at the hands of “hype”rmedia and new technology.

These observations have led both Healy and myself to promote what I like to call an “Amish” perspective on technology, which is to use technology that genuinely works to help people accomplish tasks more efficiently. But “don’t go crazy,” as the lovely yellow post-it clinging to the side of my desktop computer reminds me each morning as I prep for class. Healy reminds us that effective technology use has been and can still be axes and fire, depending on your task. I argue that there ain’t nothing wrong with a well made buggy. If “the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh,” who needs automated cars?

However, I think Healy is gently nudging at an even larger issue here, which she points at with the question “Why do we so desperately need to believe in computers?” I think Healy lists some excellent possible answers to this question. Library and school budgets ARE being cut across the country. People most certainly have bought into the mantra of “Speed is God, and time is the Devil.” And I can’t help but ask, isn’t it too late? How much of what Healy warns us of is avoidable? Don’t we already live in Metropolis? Aren’t our minds already programmed? To quote Tony Kushner, one of the great playwrights of our time, “The world only spins forward.”

 Healy’s point? Well, I would have said it was that success is possible, but it is no automatic, inexpensive, or attained without a great deal of thought and effort. I would have said that it was Amish. However, upon further reflection on the seemingly unavoidable, almost gravitational pull that the both of us see in society’s high speed chase after the latest technology, I wonder if Healy’s point isn’t that the “Devil” takes the hindmost (the pun is very much intended).