I don't know

Less than twenty-four hours after Robert sat me down in his office and asked me why I haven’t contributed anything to this blog, I bore witness to something worth blogging about.

This morning I tutored adults at St. Charles Presbyterian Church, a few blocks away from Loyola’s campus, for about an hour, much like I always do. I have been tutoring at St. Charles for approximately a year now, and I’ve never experienced anything wildly out of the ordinary. Today, however, was different; today, one of my tutees, Jane, brought in her new e-reader.

I was checking another tutee’s answers to a few division problems on a piece of paper when Jane pulled out a black leather case from which she dislodged a brand new Amazon Kindle. Her actions, not surprisingly, elicited a reaction from the tutee whose answers I was checking: Isabel.

“What’s that?” Isabel asked, curious.

“It’s a Kindle” Jane responded in her heavy Oriental accent.

“What’s a Kindle?”

“It’s like a book. You can download books to it from the internet. Here, let me show you.”

As Jane walked to the other side of the room, I continued checking Isabel’s answers, but I still managed to observe them inconspicuously. I was curious myself, not so much about the Kindle, but about how they would respond to it. Jane proceeded to show off all the flashy features: the built-in dictionary, the note-taking system, etc. I had seen all of this stuff before; it was nothing new to me. So I continued to check the answers with my pen. Jane, not surprisingly, kept blabbering on about how great her Kindle is. She explained to Isabel that English is her third language, that she goes to St. Charles in order to get help learning the language, etc. I wasn’t really listening to her until she stated that her Kindle will help her with her English. This struck me as odd. I wasn’t sure why she said this—as far as I knew, the e-reader doesn’t offer anything educational that a book doesn’t also offer—so I queried Jane as to why her Kindle would help her learn English.

“Because it reads to you.”

“It reads to you?” I asked, astonished, disillusioned.

“Yes, it reads to you. Listen.” Jane walked next to me, pressed a button or two, and a voice issued forth from the Kindle, a voice I cannot describe with my own words. It was “cold and yet full of intimation; utterly without warmth, as if a machine had stamped it there, constructed it by pattern…It poured forth a saturated, sopping heat that made [me] sit rigid in [my] chair, unable to look away” (Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip, Chap. 15). The voice, mechanical as it was, read part of a children’s story.

It was, I confess, one of the creepiest moments I have witnessed in a long, long time, hearing that mechanical, lifeless voice. Perhaps it had an even stronger, more surreal effect on me because of all the science fiction I have read. For example, I own Isaac Asimov’s The Complete Stories: Volume One, and in one of his short stories, Asimov describes a future world in which students learn—not from people—but from machines:



Margie even wrote about it that night in her diary. On the page headed May 17, 2157, she wrote, “Today Tommy found a real book!”

It was a very old book. Margie’s grandfather once said that when he was a little boy his grandfather told him that there was a time when all stories were printed on paper.

They turned the pages, which were yellow and crinkly, and it was awfully funny to read words that stood still instead of moving the way they were supposed to—on a screen, you know. And then, when they turned back to the page before, it had the same words on it that it had had hen they read it the first time.

“Gee,” said Tommy, “what a waste. When you’re through with the book, you just throw it away, I guess. Our television screen must have had a million books on it and it’s good for plenty more. I wouldn’t throw it away.”

“Same with mine,” said Margie. She was eleven and hadn’t seen as many telebooks as Tommy had. He was thirteen. (Asimov, “The Fun They Had”)




This passage, or something like it, quickly resounded in my mind as I listened to that digital, inanimate voice. In the light of e-readers, Asimov’s stories are clearly more prescient than ever before. In “The Fun They Had,” he mentions “telebooks,” books that, according to him, one reads on a television screen. Clearly Asimov’s telebooks are not e-readers, but he certainly wasn’t far off from hitting the nail on the head in his vision. What simultaneously interests and terrifies me about this story is the value that the characters place on a “real book.” It’s in the opening sentence of the story; it’s the centerpiece of the story; in fact, one even gets the sense that it’s what prompted Asimov’s story in the first place.

Jane soon shut off the voice. She then returned to her seat to continue reading quietly, while I nervously questioned my own future. As a student of English literature, history, and philosophy, naturally I consider teaching as a potential (and likely) profession. But how will I teach if a—machine—replaces that career? Or, a better question: how will I learn if a machine replaces my current professors? Not that I think this will happen anytime soon. It’s not like e-readers are going to be in the classroom anytime soon. Wait. I can’t say that, because e-readers will be in the classroom, next semester in fact, as well as the semester after that. They’ll just add to the digital classroom takeover, just as Blogger, Twitter, and YouTube have done. But here I am sounding like a “print conservative.” Really, it’s not that I hate e-readers—I don’t. It’s something else, something I can’t describe. But I’ll stop my musing here lest I forget to mention the rest of my story.

Ms. Carol, an elder woman who serves as the administrator for the tutoring program at St. Charles Presbyterian Church, walked into the room shortly after Jane’s demonstration. Jane, sensing another opportunity to flaunt her electronic device, targeted Ms. Carol.

“Ms. Carol, look at my new Kindle.”

“What?” Ms. Carol asked, looking slightly confused.

“It’s a Kindle.”

“What is it?”

“You can read and store books on it. It stores, like, thousands of books. It’s going to help me learn English. All of the GED books are really cheap. $6.99, $7.50…what do you think, Ms. Carol? Pretty cool, huh?”

Ms. Carol, whom I was watching the entire time, didn’t offer a response for a few seconds. I could see the fear in her eyes: the fear of replacement. If the Kindle helps Jane learn English, then Jane won’t need St. Charles Presbyterian Church—she’ll leave. And if all of the other students buy e-readers, then no one will be left—she’ll be out of a job (assuming, of course, that e-readers really will help people like Jane learn proper English). Again, I thought of Asimov (disregard Asimov’s gender-specific language, please; he probably wrote this ca. 1950):



Margie was hurt. “Well, I don’t know what kind of school they had all that time ago.” She read the book over his shoulder for a while, then said, “Anyway, they had a teacher.”

“Sure they had a teacher, but it wasn’t a regular teacher. It was a man.”

“A man? How could a man be a teacher?”

“Well, he just told the boys and girls things and gave them homework and asked them questions.”

“A man isn’t smart enough.”

...

“[Margie] said, “I wouldn’t want a strange man in my house to teach me.”

Tommy screamed with laughter. “You don’t know much, Margie. The teachers didn’t live in the house. They had a special building and all the kids went there.” (Asimov, "The Fun They Had")



In Asimov’s story, the role of the teacher has been flipped: in education humans have become the minority, the strange, the other, whereas robots have become the majority, the norm, the “regular,” as Asimov describes them. Ms. Carol recovered herself, faked a smile and muttered something about the Kindle being “pretty neat,” and left the room.

I was, at this point, legitimately terrified, but I wasn’t quite sure why. Perhaps it was the excitement that Jane showed talking about the reader. Perhaps it was the fear I felt, or perhaps it was the fear that Ms. Carol felt. No, I decided, it wasn’t any of these; it was the way Isabel watched—not Jane—but Jane’s Kindle with glistening, salivating eyes. As Jane demonstrated the Kindle in all its greatness, Isabel just sat there, nodding like a subservient peasant, remarking occasionally on how “cool” Jane’s Kindle was. And you can probably figure out the rest of the story from here: Isabel concluded that she was going to go buy a Kindle…today. Today. It was this urgency, this impatience, that terrified me and still terrified me as I sit here typing this ridiculously long blog, putting off my Metaphysics paper all the while.

Listen: I know that my experience this morning probably shouldn’t have frightened me; in fact, it should have brightened my day: Jane will get better at English, even if she’ll be learning from a machine whose central component is a motherboard, and really this should be the only thing that matters. At this point, I feel obligated to admit that I’m planning on buying the German software from Rosetta Stone this summer to prepare for my first German course next semester. How then, you might ask, can I simultaneously condemn what I witnessed today at St. Charles’s Presbyterian Church and not condemn myself as well? It is, as Robert and I simultaneously concluded, “A Catch-22,” an inescapable byproduct of the digital world that we live in. “Digital”: the word carries so much more today than anyone probably intended for it to carry in the first place. Like “Google,” it’s entered and taken over our language. I can “Google” someone now. Fuck, I don’t even need the quotes: I can Google someone now. In fact, probably not even the caps: I can google someone now. And I think that’s the answer, that’s what ultimately frightened me today—real change is happening here. Real, inescapable change.

Listen: I think you’re all assholes for wanting to take this class. Maybe I think this because I simultaneously think that almost all of you are in it for the e-reader. Someone placed a commodity under your nose, you ate it right up, and now you can’t wait to get your hands on it. And maybe this isn’t even a good reason—maybe I don’t even have a good reason for why I think you’re assholes. Maybe my near-2000 word blog isn’t even a good reason. But that’s okay with me; thankfully, I just don’t feel like it’s my argument to make.