Something Wiki This Way Comes: The Transom

Last summer in an idle moment, I found myself watching a televised movie about zombies. Or maybe it was about vampires. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. They’re both hard to kill, and they follow you around all the time because you’ve got something they want—that is, brains and blood, a diet of food and drink suggesting that a) vampires have really good immune systems and b) the old adage that you are what you eat does not apply to zombies because, despite what they eat, they remain remarkably stupid.

But I was focused not on the vampire-zombies (or whatever they were) but on the human beings trying to escape from them. Modern pop culture usually specifies that vampire-zombies (or whatever they are) result from some sort of catastrophic event, like a plague virus or global germ warfare or some other apocalyptic happening that leaves people in a terrible bind. Normal folks find other uninfected people, form groups, and wander around looking for some safe haven because civilization is no more.

Well, in the movie I was watching, one such group arrives at one such enclave, just in time for an old-fashioned hoedown with a fiddle and everything. But it’s getting dark, and the vampire-zombies are out there in the woods waiting for supper. So a bumpkin-looking fellow strolls over to a shed and pulls the starter cord on a gas-powered generator, and, voila, there is light from good old incandescent light bulbs—none of your spiral-shaped mercury-filled bulbs designed to create toxic spills in your home if you should happen to break one. No, these people have enough trouble without that.

When the lights went on, I lost interest in the movie. Blame may be placed on that generator in the shed because it started me to thinking (otra vez) about our assorted gizmos and thus about our reliance on electricity.

I thought about the vulnerability of the infrastructure, which, oddly, feeds the gizmos that in turn control it. As victims of Hurricane Sandy were quick to realize, mess with the gizmos and off goes the juice. Such a notion points to cyberwarfare, which had been in the news shortly before my lapse into televised cinema. Various nations were at it for various reasons, and some were enjoying success. What do you do when the grid goes down?

I thought about a recent (at the time) study claiming that certain of our gizmos were at least as addictive to human beings as the hard drugs that assorted constabularies spend so much time trying to keep off the streets and thus unavailable for what is often called ‘recreational’ use when it applies to white-collar types and ‘hard core’ use when it applies to a social underclass.¹ Meanwhile, driving a motor vehicle when under the influence of alcohol or drugs is a crime, but driving a motor vehicle when under the influence of a cell phone is merely not recommended.

And then I thought about my students. I do not advise such an exercise. Many of them will not read anything unless it is on a screen, and usually the smaller the screen the better. Many of them cannot write legibly. Many of them cannot spell, or they spell as if they were texting, which presents problems to the both of us because my exams are exclusively essay form. Thus, emoticons are likely to bring red-ink commentaries concerning the juxtaposition of colons and parentheses, to say nothing of what a sentence reading ‘Grg Wshntrn wz fthr uv hz cntry’ will evoke.

I always tell students that they may bring a dictionary for exams, but few accept the offer. Most believe that ‘dictionary’ is a cell phone application: Some have it and some do not. Those who do possess actual dictionaries are few and far between, and the ones they possess are invariably paperback abridgements. Some students make do with a paperback thesaurus. Last year a student asked if he could bring his Kindle to an exam because the only...