November 19th, 2006
Bill O'Reilly, you're SO right about young people and tech
Because I agree with talk show shouter Bil O'Reilly about five percent of the time, I never thought I would type those letters in the sequence I've just written in this post's title.
However, when I read GamePolitics.com's piece about O'Reilly's outburst on his RadioFactor show this past Friday, I went beyond, "he's got a point."
I went, "Bill, you're right on the mark."
Knocking everything from iPod to PSP3, O'Reilly noted in part:
American society is changing for the worse because of the machines… In the past to flee the real world people usually chose drugs or alcohol… now you don’t have to do that, Now all you have to do is have enough money to buy a machine…
Basically what you have is a large portion of the population, mostly younger people under the age of 45, who don’t deal with reality - ever. So they don’t know what day it is; they don’t know temperature it is; they don’t know what their neighbor looks like. They don’t know anything… because they are constantly diverted by a machine. Now what this does is it takes a person away from reality because they’ve created their own reality…
To that I would add fun diversions such as Second Life. And don't let me forget World of Warcraft. They ain't real. You want real? How many did the car bomb kill today?
Also in terms of taking people away from reality, there's the matter of people looking down into their cellphone and texting while they cross the street. I've seen this four times in the last week. Mash up pedestrians who don't look at traffic when they cross the street with motorists frantically circling to grab a parking spot in front of the Pottery Barn- and need I say more?
Listen, I am a gadget geek. You already know that. Fry's is my church. But at least I have somewhat of an ability to walk through the reality carbon-based world without confusing it with the empowering but illusory silicon-based world. From the crowds paying scalper prices on eBay for PS3 to texting in the middle of the street, from the SecondLife obsessionists to the weirdos who play Dungeons and Dragons, I am not sure all of you are.
O'Reilly, you are right.
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Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
