From this morning's Inside Higher Ed

A rare post wherein I agree with the Pope--sort of.

From the news in brief on this morning's INSIDE HIGHER ED newsletter:
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Pope Benedict XVI used a speech at the University of Parma Monday to warn students about the dangers of technology. According to Vatican Radio, “Pope Benedict said today’s younger generations are exposed to a double risk, largely due to the widespread use of new technologies: On one hand, noted Pope Benedict there is a danger that the students’ capacity for concentration and mental application on a personal level are reduced; on the other hand there is a danger that the students isolate themselves in an increasingly virtual reality.” The comments came in a speech on the reform of universities in Italy. The pope said that those efforts would succeed only if individuals involved first focus on “reforming ourselves, correcting that which could damage or obstruct the common good.”
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Benedict is certainly correct about a reduction in students' capacity to concentrate, especially the fortitude to tackle lengthy, discursive prose text. While Benedict would prefer students devote such concentration on, say, Thomas Aquinas, and I would recommend some Karl Marx, Baron d'Holbach, or the speeches of Robert Green Ingersoll, I think we would both agree that book learning remains a key element in maintaining learned civilization, whatever shape it takes.

As a Freethinker and Atheist, I couldn't help but note this little irony:
"on the other hand there is a danger that the students isolate themselves in an increasingly virtual reality"

Yes, including the "virtual reality" known as Religion. The "World according to Religion" or the Christian Bible, or the Koran, or the Torah, is the oldest "virtual reality" simulation known. The Enlightenment was a rejection of that and a return to the direct observation of the natural world propounded by the best of the early Greek philosophers. What's interesting about the Greeks are the structure of some of their arguments. The literal prognostications of, say, Democritus, are, as we now now, a little off; but the structure of their argumentation is remarkable in its close approximation of modern scientific understanding.

In one of my Introduction to Philosophy texts from long ago, I remember one of the pre-Socratic Greeks theorized that people came to be when their body parts, originally separate...eyes, ears, arms, legs, all started to work together cooperatively then eventually fused into one organism. This account seems laughably absurd on its face, but beneath the surface, it is not that far, structurally, from describing how current biological scientists today theorize the first single-cell organisms with their various internal structures working in concert came to be, and then eventually cells clustering together into colonies giving rise to multicellular organisms. The Greeks may have believed that the heavens were a dark curtain and the stars were holes in that curtain through which light shone through at night, but they were able to very accurately predict the circumference of the earth using direct observation of nature. Direct observation of nature tells us there's no way this planet was created in a mere 6 days.

Greeks like Epicurus, and later Romans like Lucretius, were, I think, beginning to lay the groundwork for a rational, scientific world view. Sadly, it was a project that would be put on hold for nearly two thousand years because of the distraction of the "virtual reality" of organized religion, which plunged humanity back into superstition and darkness, until the stirrings of the Renaissance, the emergent Scientific Revolutions of Western Europe leading up to the Enlightenment and the world-shaking political revolutions in America and in France in the 18th century, none of which would've been possible without the development of movable type and continued lowering of cost of production of printed materials. Sadly, the world has reached a point of diminishing returns in this respect. Whereas a political tract or pamphlet could help spawn a revolution in the 18th century, such an exercise today is lost amid the chatter. It's just such a busier, more bustling, more highly distracted world. And it wasn't the tracts themselves that stormed the Bastille, or stood up to the Redcoats at Lexington and Concorde, or stormed the Winter Palace, but flesh-and-blood human beings moved to action both by printed words and gifted oratory; usually oratory inspired first by wise and moving words in print.

One of my textbooks in library school opened with the following joke: "It used to be said that a thousand monkeys, typing on a thousand keyboards, could, given enough time, reproduce the works of Shakespeare; The Internet has proven this simply isn't true."

LOL, but the joke is on us.