In the overall scope of human history, we are a prosperous people, us Americans living right now. Yes, the rich are getting richer, the economy is looking bleak, and there are sit-ins and protests around the country — the world could always stand a few straightenings — but if you take a moment you realize we have more, and more access to, things than anybody else ever has. With apologies to the diehard pessimists and the political gain they hope their pessimism brings about, Americans have it pretty good.

In fact, American children growing up today — no matter whose health care plan we end up with — will have opportunity, health, and safety at levels unimaginable to children born at any other time.

Yet somehow, vast numbers of these children won’t be happy. They aren’t even happy now. No, I’m sugar coating it: Many of them are going to end up depressed, malaise-ridden, suicidal.

It’s disturbing. I look at the vaccinated, vitamin-rich, bully-shielded children around me and wonder why so many will end up this way.

I once wrote a dissertation. If you are like every person in the world save maybe four, you haven’t read it. In that epic work, I looked at what I described as “subtle technology”: My way of thinking about digital tools and devices. It was over-complicated in that classic dissertation style, but I tried to work out our psychology in response to the fact that commonplace digital technologies and the structures and bureaucracies they enable operate at the micro level: We can’t directly interact or fix them.

Perhaps this example will help: While you may not want to change your oil or even change a tire on your car, you could if that was the difference between getting away or being eaten by rampaging zombies. When something digital goes wrong, it breaks at a subsensory level that is hard to get at with screwdrivers and elbow grease. You often need the interface of the computer to fix the computer itself.

I am no technophobe, especially in my professional sphere, where I am a big advocate of teaching technologies. But like those thinking about “digital depression,” I wonder if our continuing slide into the digital can leave us with a sense of being out-of-control, a daily, simmering frustration about all the things we can’t easily and tangibly handle.

I thought this during a recent unlucky run I had with the digital bureaucracies my life orbits. This may sound familiar to you:

• Like most, I manage my benefits and insurance on the Web. With a keystroke, my dental insurance changed. I never realized that my current dentist was now off my provider list. In fact, I never knew this until after a routine visit, I was sent a bill.
• I paid for parking in Philadelphia with a credit card. The machine spit out a receipt prematurely — but the receipt was measured in end time, not amount paid. I bought another block of time, and I placed both receipts side by side so the parking officer could see I bought two of them. No surprise here, I guess, to those familiar with Philadelphia parking: Ticket. However, bless the PPA’s  heart, I did get the ticket dismissed, but only after writing a careful letter and sending it with copies of the receipts. And waiting — pensively.
• My health care insurer had my primary care physician’s office address wrong so I got hit with an out-of-network fee after a well visit. I called the insurer and spoke with a helpful person who got to the bottom of my problem. But two weeks later, I got another bill.
• At work, I get paid via Direct Deposit. However, in an accounting glitch, I was paid by a real, live check. This paper check sat in a bursar’s office, unknown to me. I wrote a personal check against money that wasn’t in my bank account and of course got hit with a bounced check fee. After one of those menu-heavy phone calls, my bank graciously removed the fee. My next bank statement, though, included a mystery service charge.
• Then I had to call the people I wrote the check to, trying to assure them I wasn’t a scofflaw. I slogged through their voice menu; the real person I ended up talking to (said she) believed me.
• My relatively new computer suddenly decided it needs broadband authentication when I power up. Then it decides I’m okay after all. I don’t know why.

Again, I enjoy many aspects of the digital part of my life (I mean, I’m writing a blog), but this list of troubles in the land of digital bureaucracy took me hours to resolve, and even in my moments of triumph, I felt that creeping helplessness. You know the feeling: You want to yell. But at who? The voice-activated menu? “I’m sorry, but ‘Arghhh’” is not an option.”

Where is the problem? In the little blips of life that are my accounts, my records, my life?

I wonder if our digital natives are running themselves headlong into a world cloaked in the guise of digital user-friendliness, which makes it even more shocking when they discover their lack of control. And I wonder if that looming, intangible pressure sets them up to be collectively more frustrated, withdrawn, and perhaps even depressed.

Millenia ago, when a sabre-toothed tiger came bounding after you, there was no time for self-loathing or poetic neuroses. The brilliant machine in our skulls said, “It’s time to move.” Now, our antagonists float, subtle, ephemeral bytes that can often jump the digital boundary, destabilizing our atoms, that real stuff we’re made of.

When Steve Jobs died, among the many words of praise and thanks for him on my friends’ Facebook status updates, there were a few people upset at the attention his death was getting in the media. Maybe you saw similar sentiments from a friend or two. One friend dismissively wondered why we were “making a martyr out of the guy who created the iPhone.” At least one other passed judgment on Jobs, on the day of his death, for not giving more money to charity. He was selfish and rich and why were we treating him like some great guy when he hadn’t devoted his life to helping people but kept his money for himself? Certainly there are others out there who feel the same way. I wonder how many of them have done a fraction of what Jobs did to improve the lives of people. Tonight’s 60 Minutes featured ways the iPad is helping people with autism communicate and learn.

Like many people I enjoy the music of Kraftwerk and think that their reputation as musical pioneers is entirely justified. Indeed I would choose to listen to Trans Europe Express or The Man Machine over anything by The Beatles any day. Come to think of it, I’d listen to their 2003 album about riding bicycles over anything by The Beatles any day, but that’s another matter. I enjoy their dry humour, their minimalist, retro-futurist aesthetic, their decades-long dedication to pretending they are robots… and of course, their music.

And yet, there is a problem. And if you know Kraftwerk then you will know its name: Electric Cafe.

Electric Café’s tormented 5 year production is a thing of legend. Following the excellent Computer World, the electronic pioneers had become victims of their own success. Synths were in; Gary Numan had had a hit about driving a car; and the austere, Teutonic fathers of electronic music feared they were about to lose their eminent position to a bunch of pimply upstarts.

Band leader Ralf Hutter’s initial response was to get into cycling. Following that, the other members also bought bikes. Out of this came the highly enjoyable single Tour de France. Then Ralf Hutter fell off his bike. As Herr Hutter was convalescing the world of music continued to evolve, and increasingly Kraftwerk felt they needed to make a big statement to prove that they were still the most futuristic sound around.

Precise details are thin on the ground, but it seems that the band spent several years toiling on an album called Techno Pop and pretty much had it in the can when Ralf Hutter decided it was insufficiently “cutting edge”. So he flew to New York to sit in with dance producer Francois Kevorkian, whose solution appears to have been the judicious application of electronic slap bass and loud, tinny drums- popular sounds in the mid-1980s, as older readers will recall. The album was renamed after a café that was electric and, perhaps unsurprisingly given the weakness of the concept, released to no acclaim and very poor sales. Kraftwerk disappeared from sight, its two junior members quit, and since then new material has been exceedingly scarce to say the least.

Was this critical and commercial rejection justified? Well, for many years, I too struggled with Electric Café, although at times I could appreciate what the band was trying to achieve. The first three tracks- Boing Boom Tschak, Techno Pop and Musique Non-stop constitute an extended suite built out of clicks, beeps, beats, fragments of robotic and human vocal sounds and repeated, largely meaningless, phrases . Quite radical, and yet at the same time somewhat reminiscent of the type of mid 80s 12” remixes Mr. Kervorkian excelled in, as if there were other, original versions of these songs which the band had kept secret. The Telephone Call makes entertaining use of telephone sounds and is OK, I suppose. Electric Café, in spite of the terrible name, has some nice rippling bleeps and bloops in it. But Sex Object, the centrepiece of the more song-oriented side 2 is simply bizarre, as Ralf Hutter sings in flat emotionless tones: I don’t want to be your Sex Object.

Ah yes, Ralf Hutter. That’ll be the German bank manager type wearing red lipstick on the cover of The Man Machine- a sex object indeed.

Is it possible that Ralf Hutter succumbed to a terrible delirium? Did he fear that the computer- having consumed all his energy and creativity- was now also badgering him for sex?

Is this song a joke? I wondered. Or alternatively, some kind of irony free, Germanic feminist statement? A critique of the dehumanizing effects of pornography on women, perhaps? But if so why have a man pretending to be a robot sing it? It made no sense; and the melody was not up to their usual standards. Even the Stephen Hawking voice that “sings” “Yes/No/Maybe/Perhaps” couldn’t make it better. And so this indigestible, humourless, emotionless, juiceless, funkless atrocity of a song just messed up the whole album for me. Every time I could almost appreciate what Kraftwerk were trying to do, Ralf would complain that I was making him his sex object- or at least that somebody was; but who? No, I mean- really?

For years the mystery remained unsolved. And then last week I found myself watching a Swedish documentary about Kraftwerk on Youtube in which ex-member Karl Bartos frankly admitted that the band had lost their humanity while working on Electric Café. Yes, he said, (I paraphrase), we were often compared to robots and played with the image- but listen to the earlier Trans Europe Express, listen to how warm it is, how human. On Electric Café the band placed technology ahead of the music, and that was their mistake.

The next day I played Electric Café in my car, and as I drove through the Texas landscape while reflecting upon Bartos’ critique, experienced an epiphany. It came to me during Sex Objekt, (I was playing the German edition). As Ralf intoned Ich bin nicht dein Sex Objekt I realized that he was not talking to a woman, but rather the machine he had fetishized for far too long.

The image was clear in my mind- slumped in a chair in Francis Kevorkian’s NYC studio, the exhausted synth pioneer from Dusseldorf was complaining about the Synclavier II that would not let him rest, moaning at the expensive high end modular synthesizers that wouldn’t permit him to ride his bike, but instead insisted that he coax ever more futuristic sounds from their circuits. Far from home, exhausted, trapped inside his own myth and separated from his beloved bicycle is it possible that Ralf Hutter succumbed to a terrible delirium? Did he fear that the computer- having consumed all his energy and creativity- was now also badgering him for sex?

No sooner had I asked that last question than suddenly Electric Café opened up to me, becoming a magical album about dehumanisation, isolation and a loss of identity, as the broken up robotic speech and skittering beats on the first three tracks express the terror a man feels when he has listened to sound for so long that it has all been reduced to a jumble of sonic particles. Sex Objekt, as I have said, is about the fear of a computer demanding sex from you. Telephone Call- or Der Telefon Anruf in German - is about the technology you once relied upon resisting your increasingly desperate attempts to connect with an actual human body. And Electric Café is about a café which is electric.

In 2009 Kraftwerk re-released Electric Café under its original working title of Techno Pop. But this attempt at re-branding the most unloved release in their catalogue is unnecessary, at least if my new interpretation is on target. For if I am correct then Electric Café is a timeless masterpiece. Its themes are cyber-fear and techno-dread; its music the soundtrack of a man’s descent into madness as his soul and even his flesh is consumed by machines. It was thus highly prescient of the coming age of technological over dependence, and is more relevant than ever, especially now that we all spend far too much time on the Internet.

I must warn you, however- this interpretation only works if you listen to the record in German.

Also posted hither and yon

Sir John Keegan’s modest, mighty book contains five chapters, each describing a separate age of human warfare. The first is a primitive state where monkeys who threw their shite at one another have descended and stood straight(er) to hurl spears and stones. This has its roots in predation and animalistic defense of territory. The Age of Stone begins when a few of these hominids, sick of being attacked or doing the attacking, begin to lay one stone on another and another and another and another proto-man comes and another and also lay stones until there is a wall. Fortification was the great weapon in the Age of Stone. This continued until the Age of Flesh; that would mean horseflesh mostly but also the Age of Flesh involves the invention of something you could call an army. Warriors at the command of a chief would include far more than his cousins. With hordes of this size and mobility the siege became possible, starving out the fortress masters or breaching their walls in massed attacks. Fourthly comes the Age of Iron, not meaning iron weapons although the era is about right. Rather this is the coming of iron discipline; think Greece, the Macedonians and Rome. The modernization of fighting comes naturally with the modernization of life. The art of fortification is mated to iron-willed and stone-hearted defense, counter-attack and long-ranging strategic forces executing sophisticated political solutions to domestic problems, often involving wealth and power being in the wrong hands. The Fifth Age, the one we inhabit now, is the closest they come to being well yclept. The Fifth Age is The Age of Fire.

You notice a good bit of overlap, there. Yes, very early man had fire and many a burning log was swung at many a head over the eons. Natural flammables like naphtha and pitch were used in war as soon as they were discovered, no doubt. But it wasn’t until the power of fire was concentrated down into a form where it could be stored, transported and then suddenly released in a targeted burst that fire took its place at the head and heart of warfare. That was gunpowder. First it was used to demolish forts, gear and men. Grenade charges were thrown at and tucked under the enemy. Then came the gun. The huge brass bombard cast by Mehmet to take down the walls of Constantinople announced the coronation. The gun has been the king of warfare ever since. That twenty-seven foot long cannon was scaled down and down until it could be put on a ship. Then it was trimmed until it could fit on a carriage. Then on a pole. Then it was shrunk until it could be held in two hands; then one hand. It became more reliable in wet conditions. It became more accurate and then able to fire quickly. Only now has the full maturity of Fire-based warfare really arrived in the appearance of the XM 25. That X will drop off once this thing goes into general use.

Read it and weep with gratitude that this dog is on our side! It is a grenade rifle shooting high-tech rounds that detonate from advanced miniaturized fuzes. The idea is that a wall will not be protection from fire because this will shoot over your little fort and pop above your head. That is a big, big leap and according to Michael Yon, Austin Bay and other writers with muddy boots, the boys who shoot and get shot at for a living think it is the cat’s meow. It fires a variety of ammo that let it do duty as a rifle, shotgun and riot weapon as well earning its name of The Punisher. Of course it uses an advanced computerized sighting system and puts practical fire power equal to a mortar squad into the hands of a single man. And with one variety of ordinance we step a toe over a line that we have been skirting for a long time. Also available for the XM 25 are thermobaric rounds.

Thermobarics. It is a term the spell checker does not recognize and almost certainly neither do you. There was a nasty thermobaric terrorist attack waged on America, did you know that? Probably not. This was the Time Square Bomber whose attempt turned out to be mistaken for a poorly attended home fireworks display. If you didn’t know that jihadis were doing field experiments with next generation munitions you may read about it here. The Daisy Cutter was the most notorious thermobaric weapon in the US arsenal until now. The Massive Ordinance Air Burst bomb got its nickname from the pattern of crushed flora left by its bite. The flattening effect could turn thick jungle into a dewy meadow if you didn’t look too hard. Now this nasty interaction of blast force mechanics and the air you might want to breath or just lounge in is part of everyday military armaments.

It is hard to conceive that the Age of Fire, that is the age of chemical explosives, could deliver any major innovations after this. What will happen is that this particular gadget, now costing many thousands of dollars to put into the field, will become cheaper with mass production and redesign of the ammo. The gun, after all, is a simple thing; little but a tube blocked at one end. A 25mm bore is something like a 10 gauge shotgun. Couldn’t ingenuity get the diameter down a bit? If so then every 12 gauge shotgun on the planet, and that is a lot, could be a dispenser of mayhem like the advanced experimental weapon, if a bit less accurate. But it all amounts to a refinement of the same old thing; fire as a weapon. Whether you are using it to hurl lead or torch a thatched roof the process is about the same, it’s all just oxidation of one speed or another. The thermobaric works as follows:

First there is a small charge that turns a liquid, gelatin or dust into a cloud. The cloud is then detonated. Instead of a single point source for the blast you get the shape of the cloud explosively expanded. With small payloads like these grenades carry you are probably looking at a diameter of 6 or 10 feet. If you are inside it you will be crushed and burned for good measure. If you are outside it there are some truly horrible effects as well. First off the burning will have consumed all the oxygen around. If you’re outside that will rush back in pretty quickly but that’s not so good either. You see when the thermobaric cloud explodes and expands it only does so for an instant. What is left is a near vacuum so you can enjoy the effects of explosive decompression in the safety and convenience of earth’s atmosphere, which then comes rushing in. That rebounding effect can pull your lungs right through your throat, burst your eyes if you are not close enough for that and burst your ears if you are further still. The reasons these weapons, invented in the Viet Nam era, have hardly been fielded are obvious. These things could leave a wake of hideously disfigured walking wounded that would make the marches of blinded doughboys look like a conga line. And it is indiscriminate to say the least. A competently aimed bullet can take down the Bad Guy and leave his good wife to do the cleaning up. Not so here unless she is out back. The effect on structures is awesome as well. Firing a thermo round into a house of stud wall construction would collapse it in on itself as if it were crushed under a twister. This family of weapons has been considered just too powerful for war! Well, up until lately.

Fire has finally come of age which means its age is rapidly coming to an end. That doesn’t mean guns are out. There is still going to be a great struggle between the dumb gun, epitomized by the AK family, and the smart gun. The modern site you see on every rifle in Iraq or Afghanistan represents a hybrid of high tech and medium tech. With night vision and other targeting equipment, our boys are toting not-too-dumb guns. The XM25 is the pretty smart gun and with its integrated computerized fire control it gives us a hint as to what might replace the greying Age of Fire.

Terminator and Matrix fans won’t be too surprised if the replacement is something like The Age of Thought, where orders are given to machines, or things we couldn’t imagine that will act like machines. Or perhaps The Age of the Atom, such a slow starter, actually will rise to its movie-based reputation. Let us hope not. Genetics also offers a route to a new conception of warfare that we could hardly recognize as such. The Age of Viruses could come to full might without anyone knowing about it. An Age of Energy might bring us lasers with a range only limited by the earth’s curvature. Or perhaps we are already in the new age, in our dimly lit and poorly recorded struggle with jihad, and all warfare exists within a permanent Age of the Spirit. It could be that the fundamental process of war is only now re-asserting itself. Could all man’s struggles really go BACK to the ancient, unmediable issues of whose god sits in the sky? It seems this is so no matter what sort of implement or technique of murdering one’s opponents might be employed. If this is, as Bush was wont to say, a decades long struggle, we might be nearly at the middle or we might be barely at the beginning. With thermobarics it seems certain that we are at the limits to what Fire can do. When it is the common weapon of war we will again see wars true, forgotten face which is exploded, still and burnt.

(From wire reports)

RIVERTON, NJ–Annoyed authorities have confirmed that a NJ family, in defiance of modern rules of common sense and maybe some real rules as well, took their three children on a driving vacation of 2,137 miles without an in-car DVD player or TV.

The family name has been withheld, authorities said, to protect them from retribution by media conglomerates, although they have been referred to as the “Ludditeheads.”

Authorities learned about the plan last week, but only after the South Jersey family had departed for the 11-day road trip that went as far as St. Louis. Because the family vehicle was equipped with neither GPS nor a helpful technology like OnStar, efforts to thwart the inane vacation or subsequent plans to at least deliver a small portable TV en route were unsuccessful.

Protestors had formed outside the Ludditehead household, and they appeared to be split between those angry and disgusted with the short-sightedness of the venture and those worried for the welfare of the Ludditehead children. Neither group could imagine what American screenagers would do in a car for more than 30 hours without TV. Several emphasized their feelings by holding maps of the U.S.A. with the Ludditehead travel route, which went through Columbus, Cincinnati, and Evansville, highlighted.

“With all this wonderful reality TV,” said one anguished woman, a neighbor who beat herself about the head and neck with grief, “I feared we’d never see them again or the kids will be all messed up.”

Another man who also said he was a neighbor, with brow wrinkled, said, “The [Ludditehead] parents have bad tempers. The kids are bad natured. Trapped in a car without a TV? It’s a tinderbox for those kids, man, a tinderbox.”

Others took a more direct, harsher view of the Ludditehead parents, criticizing the family’s plan of filling the travel time with reading, puzzle books, travel games, music, and talk. “Damn tomfoolery, I say. The parents should be in big trouble,” remarked one older man who was wearing a shirt with a picture of Redd Foxx and the slogan “You big dummy!”

“I think it’s just mean,” said a young woman who said she was once a friend of the family. “What are the kids going to do for all that time? Read? Talk to each other? Think? I heard they played the alphabet game six times! Idiotic.”

In between chants about the negatives of roadside scenery, many protestors did wax nostalgic about their own childhood car travel memories and the singing, poking, and game invention that took place. Some recalled the old days when children would lie piled in the backs of station wagons or would stand up for hundreds of miles on vinyl seats in dangerous 1970s and 1980s cars. One man recalled he and his siblings sitting on the edge of the back seat for hours while dad lay sprawled out, sleeping behind them after a long turn at the wheel.

Despite the fondness that crept into their voices when remembering these family trips, nearly all were adamant that things are different now. One protestor captured this spirit perfectly in saying, “Things are different now.”

Indeed, vehicular pleasure travel researcher Dr. Virginia Voyager said that the Ludditehead trip must be viewed in the context of 2011 America. “I’m not sure what the aim here was, so I need to know more. But the American spirit is not about getting there, and you must consider this not just metaphorically but literally. The destination, the final end, is what is important to us. People don’t think about ‘enjoying the journey’ any more. Vacation time, for instance, is about building up chits of geographical conquest, not experiencing time with the family or even really experiencing another place.

“The potentially tragic Ludditehead ‘experiment’ must be seen in this light.”

Despite the vast outcry, a kind of counterprotest had formed nearby with a few members of the extremist sect IDHATWITPWIMT (pronounced id-ha-TWIT-pwimt), “I Don’t Have a TV–Which I Tell People When I Meet Them.” They pointed out the trip was not a big deal, as it did involve digital technology. A spokesperson said that although only used for a few minutes during the journey, two DS consoles were discovered in the car, and records revealed that the family’s daughter spent time on the trip home texting friends, using her parents’ phones.

“This is hardly the kind of event that qualifies for the support of the anti-screen sect,” said Ethan Nobyte. “So despite the protests and their catchy pseudonym, the Ludditeheads cannot join IDHATWITPWIMT.”

In addition, Nobyte noted with some contempt that the family’s two sons immediately immersed themselves in several hours of Wii playing upon entering their house.

Despite the travel ordeal and subsequent uproar, the Ludditeheads didn’t seem much worse for the wear. The parents were questioned by authorities after the children’s health was checked. While no charges were filed, the parents were reportedly given a stiff warning. Several TV manufacturers publicly offered up rebates for portable media devices.

The family had no comment but through an attorney thanked protestors for tamping down their overgrown lawn.

The amount of knowledge and ability a smartphone offers on the move ranks it as one of the most influential breakthroughs since the internet. But, in a stunted economy, has anyone considered that maybe smartphones are too good, versatile, and convenient? Everyone realizes cell phones have killed the demand for landlines but has anyone stopped to consider the other devices smartphones are devouring? They’re gobbling up media devices like zombies feasting on flesh and, like zombies, they’re multiplying. Here is a rundown of the victims.

MP3 players, radios and voice recorders: A few years ago MP3 players threatened the music industry. Now the players themselves are becoming obsolete. Your days are over Ipod that only plays music!

Cameras and camcorders: Most cell phone cameras aren’t good enough for primary use, but the quality is improving. I now generally leave my bulky camera at home in favor of my phone camera. If I could just figure out how to turn that fake shutter noise off ….

Alarm clocks, watches, calendars, and planners: I wake up using the alarm clock on my phone and only wear a watch for fashion. These timekeepers are now just as unnecessary as paper calendars and day-planners. Why mess with bulky paper when a cell calendar syncs with other devices and can be shared online?

GPS devices, maps, and atlases: It’s all in the phone! Maps have been around for thousands of years while GPS boxes barely lasted a decade. Why buy a GPS for your car when you can dock your phone on the dashboard for the same features? Granted, it did make a cool Father’s Day present in 2008.

Scanners and fax machines: These devices still have a place, but with the appropriate applications, one can scan and fax or email paper documents using a cell phone. Now that I have a smartphone, I’m glad I never got around to buying a fax machine.

Personal gaming devices: A prized possession from my childhood was a used chess computer my dad gave me when he bought a newer model. Now he just uses his Iphone. It makes sense.

E-Readers: I own a Kindle and use it for the free international internet service, but my eBooks are in my phone. Similar to the GPS box, the e-Reader barely had a chance to develop before being chomped on by smartphones and tablets.

Calculators and translators: Electronic devices that do only one thing are now laughable (Ha!). I used to own a drawer of such devices: Language translators, a scientific calculator, a graphing calculator, and a digital organizer. All useless now. Just keep it quiet. I’m still hoping to dump this garbage on Ebay.

ATM machines and wallets: Since I get cash back from store purchases, the only reason I stop by an ATM is to deposit checks. Chase now offers an app that allows you to deposit checks using a cell phone. Taking things a step further, Google recently announced its wallet application that allows a smartphone to replace credit cards. Like the watch, I’ll still carry a wallet for nostalgia, but I may be in the minority.

Cable TV, cable internet, routers, and modems: With most television shows viewable online, I only buy cable service for the internet. Now that cell phones can act as wireless hotspots and channel a signal to my laptop and TV, it’s only a matter of time before I’ll ditch cable altogether.

Flashlights, levels, and vibrators: In addition to being able to use your smartphone as a flashlight and a level, the Apple App Store now offers the personal massager app that controls the vibration function of your phone. Yes, a vibrator. I don’t know anyone who would admit to using it, but an adult novelty store somewhere just lost a sale.

Sure, the smartphone’s size prevents it from replacing some electronics such as the TV or laptop, but they’re working on it. Before long we’ll all be driving smartphones to work, living in smartphones, and eating smartphones for breakfast– and I can’t wait.

I don’t know how you even count such things, but one prediction states that in 2011 the world will send seven trillion—nope, I have to write it out: 7,000,000,000,000—text messages. Ah, the world communicated in text. I remember when I was working as a medical/technical journalist in the 90s and my field shifted to written communications. I spent a lot of time interviewing physicians and scientists by phone. I would record these conversations and then write a transcript. But at some abrupt point, I started using this tool called email. I would type up questions and the interviewee, sometimes a  prominent person in that medical field, would peck out responses.

I liked that. I enjoy writing. I type fast. This not only improved my efficiency as a journalist, but I felt empowered by these textual dealings. The business of my life had been converted to a textual environment, where I was good.

Nowadays lots of people are fast-typing users of the written word. Texting. IM messages. Twitter. Facebook chats. We’re typing away, for work and play.

These scribes are increasingly younger, and, in addition, youngsters’ use of texts is by most measures growing. Children keep in touch with their parents via ephemeral textual strands. It can be a handy, convenient, sometimes sweet way to stay linked. But the increased peer-to-peer textual interaction among kids  is often altogether different, and “sweet” is seldom the word to describe it.

Sure, it’s not just kids who are naughty. Plenty of adults are harassing (cyber) and stalking (cyber) and engaging in all kinds of other bad e-behaviors. But what kids do via e-texts often amazes me. They bash. They bully. They gang up. Even when they are not being mean, the messages are astonishingly vapid. “Heeeyyy” is a typical communication. That’s it: “Heeeyyy.” This is lower on the value scale than even small talk about the weather. Nothing productive is going on in some big chunk of that 7 trillion messages for the younger crowd.

Yeah, there have always been bullies and meanies. (One day, I’ll tell you of my dealings with a bully I’ll call Mack.) But digital tech changes the game. Lots of virtual ink has been spilt about the peculiar dynamics of electronic communications. What is it about e-messages that enables such odd behavior? For instance, why is it that kids who were getting along just fine in person at 3:00 pm can hop on the InterWeb and start insulting each other textually two hours later?

Writing has always changed the role of communicator and audience — thus leading Plato to cast a wary eye on writing long ago. But the blip of e-text disrupts the sender-receiver roles in ways that render that relationship strikingly more unequal, and some feel make it more impersonal, than we’ve perhaps ever been accustomed to.

Part of the problem is that the receiver role may remain static. Receiving a negative text can elicit similar responses as receiving a negative face-to-face comment. It can hurt your feelings or make you mad. It can make you worried or scared. It can give you nightmares.

But the sending role is now much different. Writing, and, often, just as importantly, delivering the e-text are completely different experiences from many other kinds of communication, certainly oral but even written. Sending e-texts is nothing — a transient experience. Send it to the stark characters of an addressee: “Warnock, Scott.” Off it goes. No stamp. No eye contact. Nothing but a few clicks.You can toss off a mean comment or a threat or any old thing.

Add the permanence of e-communications, that after a message is launched it floats in the ether to finally drift onto a server where it embeds, like, forever.

This easy-to-send/just-as-hard-to-receive/stay-around-forever environment is difficult for big people. How can kids possibly manage it? When I frame it this way, it seems obvious that most kids are not ready for this world. They have a new way to say but without  equivalent scaffolding to managing these new utterance modes. They’re kids. They have still-developing frontal lobes, which thus limits their understanding of consequences and inhibits, well, inhibition. (It’s why we don’t try them as adults for crimes.)

So that Edward Bulwer-Lytton knew what he was talking about with the pen being mightier than the sword — because the worst havoc we can wreak is often that for which we are not accountable. You can see the effect of your sword, however bloody its swings. But we could always dodge the consequences of our messages, and now with digital tech tools, we can spread our communication with complete personal disconnect. Kids, still developing the real sense that there are other people out there, can spread some anger or hate, and then walk away and have a Nutter Butter.

Forget the sword for a moment. The use of these texts is often is like shooting an arrow blindly around a corner. For the shooter, there may not even be intent to hurt. But tell that to the kid with the arrow in her chest.