The internet takes a prime place among the influences that can distract us from the things that really matter. Instant digital information and communication have a downside

MANY years ago, before I had been lured away from broadcasting into teaching by the irresistible blandishments of the semi-deponent and the shy sideways glances of the subjunctive, I woke up in a panic. I had just done a recording in a studio in which I had referred to the Scottish roots of Cardinal Glemp, Archbishop of Warsaw. I had called him ?MacGlemp?: at the time, it had seemed to me screamingly witty. Now in the cold light of morning, I was having doubts.

Who had told me he was Scots? Had I dreamt it up? After a troubled journey on the Central Line (which for the benefit of younger Tablet readers I should explain used to be a handy service running along the red line in the London underground map), I pitched up at Broadcasting House. Like the Ancient Mariner delaying a wedding guest so he could tell his tale, I looked for a likely victim. I found one. ?Glemp, Warsaw, Scots?, I said by way of greeting. ?Yup, ?course, sticky-out ears?, said the wedding guest stand-in. I could have kissed her but didn?t.

Later in the day, another cold finger of doubt scampered down my spine. I retraced my steps. Now I changed my question: ?Glemp, Warsaw, why do you think he?s Scots?? ?Must be, heard it last night on air, the speaker didn?t say anything about the ears, though.? So the source of her information, so confidently repeated, was ? me. Through the dull acoustic of the recording channel, I listened to the rhythmic beating of a tartan-clad albatross as it came home to roost somewhere just above my head.

The media feed on each other, and I had fallen victim to their power. They may entertain, they may educate and they may inform, but beyond a shadow of a doubt they distract us from the responsibility of using our own judgement. They can become a disabling web of over-information hobbling our curiosity and choking our confidence.

This regression towards infantilism affects every corner of life. Which one of us has not been run over in the supermarket by a rogue trolley careering round the baked beans in hyperdrive while its owner (invariably male) directs it one-handed with a mobile phone clamped to one ear? Whatever these people do outside the supermarket, whether it is brain surgery, stockbroking or captaining what?s left of industry, when faced with having to make an unaided choice between 4 x 100-sheet kitchen towels or 2 x 90 buy-one-get-one-free-but-it-will-have-to-be-pink, they crumple mentally and have to appeal to a higher authority.

In a school, the internet has a similar instant lobotomising effect. Children who would never dream of copying out of a book or from each other cheerfully hand in their original research emblazoned with search engine or webpage addresses.

?Goodness me, Ferdinanda, I never realised your middle name was ?Google? but I can see why you want to keep quiet about it.?

?Oh, but it?s not my name.?

?Of course it is. Otherwise why would it be on your work? Stop making difficulties and go and sit down by Encarta.?

All of which may seem either far-fetched or trivial, but young Ferdinanda Google is in good company. Examination boards have ingenious software which checks for coursework which has been ?recycled?. What is most alarming is that the internet cheats seem genuinely unaware of their dishonesty.

?Look here, Euphrasia, I have reason to believe that this cracking poem Paradise Lost may not entirely be your own work. Reassure me.?

?It motht thertainly ith mine!?

?You see, given that you are nine and struggling with the finer points of the reproductive cycle of our chum Timmy Tadpole, I found some of the bits about Sin in Book II a little unsettling and not quite what we were expecting from someone in Lower II. How long have you been writing about demonic incest ? and is your mummy happy about it??

?But you don?t underthtand! I didn?t write it. I jutht downloaded it.? ?Ah, so it?s not yours??
?Yeth it is! I downloaded it.?
?Did you read it??
?Motht thertainly not.?

In a dim, distant age, before people were penalised for seeking an education, I was in receipt of that antiquarian oddity, ?a student grant?. In the course of three years, the one message that tutors and lecturers and directors of studies pounded into my head with a degree of success was that ?a good classicist always respects her sources?. The riches of the internet can either be a treasure trove of validation or they can make the whole process a nonsense. Students use material which they neither respect nor understand. I?m not looking for in-depth knowledge, but a nodding acquaintance would be good. The internet can provide the most pernicious form of academic distraction: detail without depth, and accessibility without familiarity.

This may all sound very curmudgeonly, I admit, but the sheer range of the internet makes it a rather blunt weapon which, as is the way with blunt weapons, can inflict pain and damage. It is all a part of a high-dependency culture. When I was Ferdinanda?s age, I spent a large amount of my time being improved by a trio of fearsome aunts. They would mutter to me ? darkly ? about St Th?r?se of Lisieux. She should not have been the saint, they said. The real saint was her elder sister. Falling for it, I asked why. I wished I hadn?t. Apparently, St Th?r?se (who, I believe, deserves every crumb of her sainthood) had an improving elder sister. If Th?r?se said she wanted water, the sister would say, yes, but wait five minutes. (There was also a bit about having to stand on one leg during those five minutes which, I subsequently found out, had no basis in fact but plainly gave my aunts five-minute doses of free entertainment as I wobbled on one leg waiting for my glass of water.) I do not think it is a good idea to make people wait needlessly for water, or any other essential commodity but, equally, I do feel it is possible for people to survive for five minutes, or even up to an hour, without receiving text messages, the latest news headlines or the cricket score.

There may be some readers who are suffering from TTTRSI. This is, I am afraid, not an invention of mine; it is real, and it stands for ?telephone texter?s thumb repetitive strain injury?. Just as God has not designed us to live under water, so we are not made in such a way as to be able to telephone text for any great length of time without our thumbs feeling that they want to slope off and have a digital nervous breakdown. This is further proof of the wisdom of God. It is my firm belief that, in years to come, those who care about language will look back at the phenomenon of texting (which, by then, will no longer be possible because our thumbs will have fallen off) and they will weep. Telephone texting destroys language. Not only does it abbreviate words into incoherence; it brutalises thought. People send text messages on the spur of the moment, expressing hurt and resentment in a way they would never do either face-to-face or on paper.

Dante did not specify in which circle of hell the inventors of telephone texting were to be found. This was, I imagine, only because their punishment was too horrific to be described.

In a different world, when the desert fathers took to their uncompromising life, their only distractions were the rays of the sun and the crack of the shifting sands of the wind-driven dunes. There, meditation meant repetition as they repeated to themselves single lines of Scripture until they became part of their being. The words of Scripture were too precious to be squandered ? they were a source of living water for a dead world. By concentrating solely on God, the desert fathers could see truths too large to be dissected or abbreviated.

Now, though, cascades of words are gobbled up in our communications-mad world. Even the Churches are floating on a sea of paper, adrift in cyberspace. So, in Lent and not-in-Lent, we who are the Church must beware the distraction of triplicate pulp e-mail. We must instead emulate the saintly Gertrude of Nivelles, who was so absorbed in prayer that she never noticed the antics of the mice that danced up and down her crosier.

We think we have made for ourselves a comfortable existence. But our understanding of what is important is being steadily eroded by the distracting pinpricks of a beguiling cyberworld. I would like to go into this in more detail but, unfortunately, I have just reached the last level in stage III of my bid for domination of the ancient Egyptian city of Thinis.

It?s really rather wonderful. I can click on all these little people, and they do exactly what I tell them to! It?s not fantasy. It?s therapy, and I?m not addicted ? I mean, I can take it or leave it. But I really do have to go now?

Frances Gumley-Mason, a former journalist and broadcaster, is headmistress of St Augustine?s Priory, Ealing.

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