With a hop, Skype and a jump

Let’s face it. A touch screen phone is a magic carpet, a magic lantern, and a magic incantation all wrapped up in one handheld device. Who could possibly resist such a wonder? To mix my myths, the world is raising a generation of Aladdins who can go anywhere or summon up anything with the “Open Sesame” of an index finger — or two thumbs — rubbing a magic piece of plastic that fits in a pocket.

How are we elders ever going to pass on wisdom or even engage in teaching academic subjects to a generation of kids whose brains are wired differently than our own? One book title sums up the problem — “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” And it was published in 2010 by journalist Nicholas G. Carr a mere four years after Twitter was invented in 2006 and only one year after Donald Trump began tweeting in 2009.

By Jan 9, 2021, when he was banned from Twitter “due to the risk of incitement of further violence” after the invasion of the Capitol on Jan. 6, Donald Trump had amassed 88 million followers.

Imagine the brain rewiring going on there.

This very moment a 15-year-old Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg is in a dusty garage constructing a generation of robots to perform those very tasks of dispensing wisdom or teaching academic subjects to the next generation whose brains may be shallower.

Those tasks will be performed by a digital voice on a screen or a fiberglass head and torso with moving arms and legs in a classroom.

Only one thing will be missing from such a digital pet: Warmth.

William Faulkner coined the ominous phrase “the last ding dong of doom” in his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. He ended hopefully by celebrating the writer’s role in human affairs: “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

Our 2022 brains currently being rewired by our Aladdin touch-screen addictions may be the one prop or pillar whose weakness Faulkner hadn’t anticipated. “Endure and prevail” ain’t exactly what a weak pillar produces.

In case you doubt that the internet is rewiring our brains, consider these jaw-dropping statistics from Arianna Huffington: “The top 10 percent of smartphone users touch their phones an average of 5,427 times each day. The rest of us are clocking in at 2,617 times per day, and over 70 percent of Americans sleep next to or with their phones.”

Whew. That lets me off the hook. I’m only in the hundreds not the thousands of daily cellphone touches.

Oops. Correction. Writing this article alone has required poking my keyboard thousands of times. And I confess I do sleep with my cellphone nearby. It’s comforting.

I like to think it will offer me immortality in “the cloud,” a kind of digital heaven as I imagine it.

After all, it brings me anywhere in the world not with an “Open Sesame” but an Open Chrome and a hop, Skype and a jump.

Magic.