Technology

What a pedantic (and incorrect) take. Luddite can absolutely mean a person who purposefully avoids technology.

I’m sure I’ll get downvoted, but words can have multiple meanings and take on new meanings over time. Luddite is one of them. This article used it properly.

And anyone who disagrees with me can kiss my linguistics-degree-holding ass.

What does it mean then?

All assignments are submitted electronically now, and if he's in philosophy, he will also have to follow formatting requirements like font, font size, margins, and spacing. Practically, he's doing as much as he is allowed off-computer.

Yeah, the way he does it is basically how everyone did it even 10 years ago. The tools were mostly the same then as they are now, with the exception of AI and the fact that handwriting wasn't as big a thing anymore when today's undergrads were in school. If you have a fluid and moderately quick handwriting, paper notes will typically be easier to take and more useful for revising the material later on.

Studies have also shown that taking notes by writing causes better learning outcomes compared to typing.

Maybe he's lugging a massive typewriter around.

For me I always wrote as i listened, still do often. I rarely read the notes back.

'Revision' was just writing a whole new set of notes either from memory or from sources. Then, never reading that set of notes.

Massive waste of paper and ink, but it's part of how i pay attention. Most of my lecturers did provide printouts of all the slides, but I'd scribble all over them anyway.

Typing doesn't do the same thing at all for me.

I realized that when i tried to cheat on a test in school, that when i prepared a cheat sheet, i didn't actually need it afterwards - that only applies when writing the sheet by hand.

Was gonna bring up the same point about Luddites. They were absolutely pro-automation.

They saw greedy corporations using automation, and getting ready to fuck their society into the dirt, so they started petitioning their local governments, tried to negotiate and drew up the plans for a social security program ~150 years before one was actually implemented, smashed a bunch of expensive corporate equipment when the government wouldn't respond, then the government sided with corporate, used the military to drag all the men, women, and children into public squares and executed every last one of them. Even relatives and companions that weren't in the group and didn't participate. So thoroughly annihilated that it left an informational pinhole in the history books, and the name was co-opted into an insult. Now we're really not sure if John Ludd even existed, maybe the name was just a mythical legend already, and was used as a rally point to boost morale.

And here we are, barely 200 years in the future, about to repeat the fuzzy spots again and rediscover why we brought citrus fruits with us on the ships, with the general population completely oblivious to the brutality the owner class is ready and able to deploy.

What happens if the tech bros are right, and the machine doesn't need 9/10ths of the human population any more?

Indeed. The Luddites the high-skilled technology workers of their time! And were the first bloody chapter of the labour movement, nearly erased from that history by their oppressors. "Blood in the machine" by Brian Merchant is a great history of this.

Just remember to back that shit up.

Nothing like forgetting your brain on public transport and getting instant amnesia for the past five years.

eh. i prefer desktops. i see the use of laptops, but i prefer to use as little disposable tech as possible.

As someone who studied without laptop through an entire bachelor's degree - it is a valid option, and I still often make handwritten notes of study materials.

When you write things down by hand, you process information for longer and use more parts of your brain to do so, which genuinely helps to memorize study materials.

It also allows for more focus. Personally, I found that when I moved, eventually, to using laptop in my studies, it has reduced my attention span and added unnecessary distractions. When all you have at your fingertips is paper and a pen, there is nowhere to get astray.

Not just what you think. Hand writing is scientifically better for memory retention and more https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11943480/

It does. I vastly prefer writing notes by hand than typing em. But my handwriting sucks when I have to write quickly, and I also don’t like lugging around giant stacks of paper. And so I settled on a digital writing pad, and just do the work to type my notes later. Acts as revision too.

Engagement. I'm a teacher and using all of your senses to look for information makes you remember that said piece of information more.

It's funny, most studying comes down to that... And motivation, which is also something you have if you prefer books over laptop.

Your book does one single thing, you cannot be distracted by other functions.

I think it's the mental work of "I don't have to do anything, it will find it for me" and "I have to find it myself" and I think it puts you in a state mentally and keeps you there. You don't have to disengage because there's something else doing the work.

I can kind of see this right now. I'm in a first year course and almost everyone has a laptop in front of them. I'm in a fourth year course and most people use paper notes. It could be survivorship or a result of differences in the desks, or it could be generational.

This is just avoiding the issue of having a short attention span.

I used to be easily distracted during online lectures yet had little difficulty following live lectures. It's a fundamentally different experience, for whatever reason.

Also, the attention span has to be trained. And training it by working without a distracting computer sounds like a good idea.

Attention span is cultivated, so is discipline. Reading about it is theory. Forcing oneself to do it, in increasingly sizable chunks, is praxis. I'm talking to myself here, too.

This is just avoiding the issue of having a short attention span.

And how do you improve your attention span? By not having distractions available to you.

I got myself a remarkable after seeing a colleague use one and thinking they were cool. An astonishing price for what is essentially a kindle that you can write on, but that is essentially the entirety of its functionality right there. No web browser, no ebook integration, no keyboard, just a thing for scribbling notes with a big battery life. No distractions.

As such, it's completely ideal for my work diary, meeting notes, D'n'D notes, maps for games that I've been playing, random scribbles, all sorts. Quite a lot lighter than the thousands of sheets of paper that would be required otherwise. Also not as rude as popping open a laptop when you're meeting someone - they can see you're just making notes and writing to-dos.