But here’s what I’m wondering: does Facebook make self-narration less compelling, less necessary? In a much talked-about essay, Peggy Orenstein has speculated that Facebook denies to young people “an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness”; it makes it harder for them “to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation.” Maybe it also eases — or hides from us — our displacements, and creates a false sense of seamlessness in lives that have actually undergone significant ruptures.

Fantastic. So after a decade-plus of Bowling Alone-style arguments about how technology alienates us from other human beings and dooms us to a life of lonely disengagement, now come the arguments that technology makes solitude impossible and dooms us to a life of hyper-connected group-think.

Of course, the latter notion has also been a long-standing theme in science-fiction (no doubt, it would distress the writer to hear that), but you have to admire the ability of some small-c conservatives (or large-c ones, for that matter) to turn on a dime in their ongoing quest to demonize all things new.

That might be an unfair characterization of this particular writer, but (if you would allow a bit of guilt-by-association) even a quick skim of The New Atlantis suggests it probably isn't. Here's another blurb from today's main page:

Christine Rosen considers what the e-book means for the future of the printed book and of reading itself, and asks: What is lost in the switch from paper to pixel? And is “digital literacy” really literacy at all?

One wonders if the idea of writing that article around the word 'gained' even occurred to her.

It's also a wonder that people feel intimidated by the thought of writing cultural commentary when those actually creating it make the exercise so easy on themselves: an inevitable quote from a skeptical poet or two, a few swipes at 'self-appointed experts' (shamelessly loitering in the halls of credentialed privilege), and then a half-hearted attempt to resuscitate the few scraps of bone and sinew remaining from that long-dead corpse, the '60s-inspired Culture Wars.

The article practically writes itself. Which makes cultural conservatives' animus against technology all the more unfortunate, because surely someone could write a Luddite-Flavored Commentary Generator and free up valuable time for more of those important evenings devoted to bitter denunciations of 'Modern Youth and Their Demon Music' and 'The Horrors of Croly-esque Liberalism' while savoring glasses of pedestrian sherry in oak-veneered sitting rooms.