Sir, - I wonder if the people of Ennis realise the full implications for the town following its recent award from Telecom Eireann. To saturate a town, almost overnight, with such technology may well be of interest to the R&D department of Telecom (which will treat the people of Ennis as a laboratory experiment); but has anybody considered the effects that having a PC in every home will have on the dynamics of individual families? How easy now for alienated teenagers to disappear into their bedrooms and get lost in a private world of games, design, virtual conversations, shopping catalogues. They will not have to go outside their room to view the world or meet other people or play games. They will not develop fully their social skills or their association with the natural world.
Modern urban society is partly characterised by its fragmentation into a collection of disparate homes with an increasing reliance on old folks' homes, baby-minders, social workers, etc., to help deal with problems that in other times were diffused across the larger family group. Already we have seen how television can erode family communication and feed the individual's desire to escape reality. Planting PCs in everybody's home will exacerbate this process. In 20 years' time they will be writing academic papers about these crude exercises and the terrible effects they had on the innocents who participated. Remember Ballymun? - Yours, etc.,
Kilkishen, Co Clare.