The "Creepiot"

Our students often offer provocative insights about issues we rarely consider. This happened the other day when my students and I were having one of those obligatory discussions about facebooking and apparently insipid facebookers. Sometimes so witty and easy to laughter, my students mentioned a type of Facebooker many of them have come to despise. After some word play and maybe a little noun wrangling, we decided to call this person a "creepiot." This term combines the word "creeper," a voyeur who visits sites just to eye-grope, and "idiot," someone whose behavior is devoid of self-reflection. My students feel that this person represents the kind of degeneration overuse of  Facebook may cause.

Of course, my students were having fun, developing the term "creepiot" during their heated discussion of Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid" (2008), in which he explores the effects internet technologies are having on our cognitive abilities. In essence, most weren't convinced that these technologies are making us stupid, but they did feel that they are making us lazy, maybe a little boring, and certainly too insular. And, as with many witticisms, something real still stains the tongue after the wine is drunk.

The rosy residue is the encouraging thought that my students see the limits of these social media--that too deep a reliance on these architectures, constructed by those who don't have our best interests in mind, can undermine one's intellect as well as a more organic relationship to one's community. To much facebooking can lead, they feel, to becoming a viewer rather than a reader, a passive consumer of images rather than a developer of ideas, and this loss of one's intellectual and social capacities leads to the incestuous union between the creeper and the idiot, the "creepiot." You might take a moment to check the bend of  your fingers. Now I need to facebook my friends.

• Interview with Nicholas Carr