“Mmm-mmm, I love technology.”

Name the 80’s band that closed out a song with that line and win the last Sam Adams in my fridge.

But it pretty much sums up how I feel about high-tech. I’ve always been a true believer in the high-tech mantra, one which says that technology can and will make us all more productive.

Hell, I’m living proof of that; just take a look at the papers I’ve typed on an old IBM Selectric – rare finds indeed – against the ones I’ve done on ClarisWorks. There is simply no comparison. The ClarisWorks versions definitely look better and read better.

Want another example? Just pop into the newsroom here at the Daily. The fully computerized newsroom allows us to turn out a professional-looking product every day with a minimum of staff and a low overall cost.

And the system is easy to learn; anyone with a bit of Mac experience – or even no computer experience at all – can get to work in no time.

Examples such as these are nearly endless. In short, technology, especially computer technology can improve how we work and play. It makes people more productive and more importantly, it allows them to do their jobs better.

And it makes for killer games. Just check out Marathon 2: Durandal sometime for proof.

I certainly don’t see technology as an eventual panacea for all of society’s problems, for there are problems which technology alone cannot solve.

Technology is a tool for us to use, nothing more. Even the most advanced supercomputer can trace its lineage back to the first crude tools fashioned by our earliest ancestors, and in the end, they serve a similar purpose.

But there are those who don’t see it that way. Today there are neo-Luddites see high technology as a threat to humanity, as somehow diluting humanity and the human spirit, not just a threat to jobs as the followers of Ned Lud did two centuries ago.

They say that in the modern technological society, the world moves too fast. Technology overshadows the individual and threatens to turn us all into mindless drones.

Real creativity is stifled and channeled into whatever direction that technology and the society built upon it demands.

This is all utter garbage, a series ideas born of ignorance, fear of progress and a lack of understanding of how technology can and should be used.

What is most perplexing is that two of the most high-profile of these despisers of all things technological are highly educated, intellectual people: Ted Kaczynski, the alleged Unabomber, and Kirkpatrick Sale.

Everyone by now knows about Kaczynski, his 17-year bombing campaign and his 35,000-word manifesto which railed against the technological society.

What really amazes me is that he was able to crank out a full 35,000 words on an old manual typewriter. After that experience, the guy either has forearms like rocks, or he has permanent carpal-tunnel syndrome.

Trust me, Ted, a good word processor would have made the experience much more enjoyable and productive. Rewrites would have been a cinch, man.

Actually, Ted just seems like a garden-variety loner who was pushed a bit too far and found a convenient target for his enormous, pent-up frustrations. But he does despise high-tech, that’s for sure.

Sale is less dangerous than Kaczynski, but he is far more irritating. He lectures across the country on the horrors of modern technology, how it restricts the human spirit and makes us all into slaves.

At the start of each performance, he smashes a personal computer to bits with a sledgehammer.

My first comment is that it had better be a PC and not a Mac. Second, this is a symbol of just how foolish his campaign is. It makes him look like a cranky old clown, railing against something he just doesn’t understand.

Plus, with computers being completely pervasive in society, just how much progress against the machine does he think that he can make by attacking from the outside?

Wouldn’t a much more effective strategy be to assault from within, to point out the weaknesses of computer technology by working within the system rather than rail against it from the fringe?

I’m related to a couple of techno-phobes myself. I’ve tried an tried to get them to get computerized, but to no avail.

My dad has refused to use the old Mac Classic I left at home, saying “There’s nothing I can’t do on paper that I can do on the computer.”

Yeah, dad, but you can do it faster, and Quicken will eliminate the constant errors when you balance the checkbook. Plus, your resumes will look so much better after they’re laser-printed.

Even worse is an uncle who was just plain born in the wrong century. He constantly goes off on the romance of living in the mountains, isolated and free to live a slow, unfettered existence.

Uhh, there may be some property available in Montana that would fill the bill…

Just watch out for any leftover booby traps.

Kevin S. Kirby is a senior in journalism mass communication from Louisville. He has a B.A. in political science from the University of Wyoming.