Wendell Berry Against Your GPS

How we became an age of renters

Digital technologies tend to replace the skills they purport to augment. The use of typing has already destroyed most people’s capacity for legible handwriting. The use of email has not augmented the use of letters; letter writing is a lost art, and with it went any concern for craft, care, or punctuation in “long-form” communication. The transition from reading to online reading has not increased our reading capacities — it has turned us into jittery headline junkies without the patience for nuanced arguments.

Nor has the age of information improved our “information skills.” By rendering every person into a passive consumer of a “news feed” — seamlessly integrated with merchants’ advertisements — social media nullifies the human capacity to dredge out truth from a marsh of opinions and downright lies. When breakups, suicide bombings, and guacamole recipes are all presented in and through the same, evenly lit squares of information, information takes on a startling quality of sameness that begets no critical public. A recent study from Stanford University called young people’s “ability to reason about the information on the Internet…bleak.”

It would be foolish to deny that our digital tools help us live. But it is equally foolish not to add that their “help” wears away our “analog…