ABSTRACT
On the urban campus where I teach, just like on campuses everywhere, students walk along with one iPod earbud dangling free so they can talk on their cell phones while listening to music. When evening classes let out, their ring tones begin to play all at once as the phones flip open, screens glow, and they migrate across the lawns like giant
schools of cyborg jellyfish. Of course, many of these students also have in their backpacks laptops on which they write papers and store huge collections of MP3s, some to be transferred to their iPods, most of them probably downloaded in their dorm rooms using peer-to-peer file-sharing programs over the same network that allows them to register for classes and instant-message their friends. The network also allows me to input their grades, post syllabi, create course Weblogs, or access their transcripts. Every year some of these same students tell me that they think there is too much technology in modern life. Some of them, usually green-activists , ironically refer to themselves as Luddites — but this does not necessarily mean they’re not just as wired, as saturated with technology, as their classmates. They assume, like everyone else, that technology is a fact of life — the air they breathe, the water in which they swim, like it or not.
