I'm just a semi-Luddite

I stand before you today as a born-again semi-Luddite. I've come back from the future to tell you to put down your smartphone because that name is misleading. Anything that isolates you from personal contact isn't smart.

Yes, I realize that the “old guy rants about technology” meme was tired two days after the Mosaic browser was released in 1993 and one day after “meme” became a substitute for “shtick.”

But this is different. This is not the traditional anti-tech rant, designed to resonate with other nonbelievers. This comes from someone who was an early adopter of nearly every technology of the last 20 years and is now weaning himself from as much of it as possible.

For example, I had that Mosaic browser. And I had racked up 10 years of Internet experience, thanks to CompuServe, by then. A year after that browser was released, I was blogging. This was before anyone even called it blogging.

I was on my third Bluetooth earpiece before most of you knew about them. I had a Palm Pilot that worked as a phone. I have enough accumulated cloud storage space to park a 1972 Buick Centurion with room to spare.

But technology is now altering lives in a bad way. To paraphrase Albert Brooks in the film “Lost In America,” I have seen the future — it's a guy named 'BiffSpliff99,' who updates the world with every meal he eats, every sign he sees and every place he goes.

Individuality? Dead. Imagination? Dead. Manners? Dead and replaced by an FAQ and an end-user license agreement.

Personal space has been poisoned by a desire to tell the world more than it needs to know about individual lives, while at the same time cutting the corners that make life worth living.

At first, I was hopeful that new technology would lead to a new continuum, with citizen journalists giving the world more eyes and ears on the news and people building friendships with online contacts they'd never meet otherwise.

I was wrong.

It didn't happen. In fact, it got worse.

Gossip, porn, gambling and narcissism became the currency of the Web.

For me, technology went south when Michael Jackson died. (To be fair, it wasn't a great day for him, either.)

The King of Pop croaked at a Los Angeles Hospital. TMZ broke the news, and then thousands retweeted the same information, over and over, for the next four hours.

And even though thousands of Angelenos, in or near that hospital, had smartphones, not one of them could snap a picture or uncover any new information.

The citizen journalist had let me down.

A few of them get it right via their blogs or community news sites, but most news produced by the “citizen journalists” of today consists of shaky video of stuff blowing up and grainy video of celebrities or jocks acting up in public.

Then came Facebook, which I have whined about repeatedly in this space. Facebook is great for long-distance friendships, but it upsets the balance of face-to-face conversation. It poisons other relationships because it blurs the lines between what can be said and what should be said.

For me, however, the pixel that finally crashed the server came when I heard about a friend who met a guy she really likes.

Both are in their 20s. One of the things that caught her attention about this guy was that, after being introduced via mutual friend, he called to set up a time to grab coffee and chat. Then he asked for a date.

This, to her, was amazing, since most guys these days use texting or Facebook and go seamlessly to the date.

It's not a unique situation, apparently. Boys don't call my teenage daughters on the house phone or their cell phones. They text each other. Sure it's fast, but it's so colorless.

The boys are unable to hear the lilt in their voice as the girls laugh. The girls can't hear the fear in the boy's voice as he fumbles for the right words and works up his courage.

This is rich, life-altering, stuff, and if I'm getting this correctly, kids are missing out on it.

This isn't good. It's one thing to take pictures of the cake you're about to eat or the view from your hotel room, or even spew political anger in the vacuum of the Internet. And it's OK if busy adults use online dating sites.

But when young people use technology to sterilize the most important (and fun) thing in their lives, it might be time to unplug some gadgets.