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iPhones and the Spiritual Holocaust

Liel Leibovitz on the ultra-Orthodox campaign against smartphones

by
Unknown Author
October 31, 2012

Today on Today, our peerless senior writer Liel Leibovitz finds himself agreeing with some of what the rabbis who oppose technology like smartphones have to say.

You needn’t stray further than a restaurant or a park to realize the merit of Rabbi Bloy’s claim; chances are you’ll see a good number of people sitting and staring into small screens, unaware of their surroundings and inattentive to their companions. With smart phones offering us the opportunity of communicating with an endless parade of absent friends and strangers—plus a windfall of distractions—we are rarely ever in the here and now: Some other place and time always beckons. Our technologies, as MIT professor Sherry Turkle suggested in her brilliant book Alone Together, determine the architecture of our intimacies; give us the capacity to replace the fear and wonder involved in unmediated human contact with controlled bursts of information, and we won’t be able to resist.

As always, it’s a good read. Check it out here.

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