Each fall, at the start of a new college year, Beloit (Wisc.) College puts out a report on incoming freshmen to point out how different their lives are from their forebears. I sometimes wonder if its main purpose is to make anyone much over 30 feel really old. It usually succeeds.

This year's version is no exception. College freshmen, among other things, have never used a library card catalogue and they've always had access to books (and radio and TV) on computer. They've never known a Soviet Union and always known a European Union. They've never known a time when Jack Kevorkian and Mike Tyson weren't convicted felons and they've always seen visible tattoos and (sad to say) condom ads. And so on.

I know, this doesn't mean much to most of you. But I lived this stuff. I grew up with three TV networks (three and a half, counting PBS). I talked on phones attached to walls and walked with nothing attached to my ear. I went to libraries to research term papers about contemporary topics like Soviet foreign policy; then I wrote them by hand or on a typewriter. It was hardly the day of the dinosaur; we're only talking 1960s and 1970s. And it feels so weird knowing that there are grown-up people walking around to whom the world I knew is alien.

Everyone feels this way sooner or later. My parents grew up with no TV or air conditioning, and with little events like the Great Depression and World War II dominating their lives. Their world was at least as alien to me as mine is to most of you. What I know about it, I know because they told me, which got me interested enough to learn more.

It's not clear how many people today are interested in learning about any world besides the here and now. You'd think technology would make our world bigger — making it practical to learn about different times, places, cultures, lifestyles and ideas. And that's how some people use it. But many others use it the opposite way: to make their personal worlds smaller and narrower.

Yes, a zillion TV channels and Web sites give us a zillion chances to broaden our interests. Instead, lots of folk use those chances to become obsessive hobbyists, endlessly indulging their fascination with college basketball recruiting or Michael Jackson or Gossip Girl. They form artificial communities with strangers who share their fixations, and they while away countless hours they could have used in countless better ways.

All those special-interest channels and Web sites also feed the harshness of our politics. When you can spend every day in an ideological echo chamber, where every voice you hear reinforces your biases and spews contempt for your opponents, it breeds both narrow-mindedness and nastiness, Left and Right. (When you can wage anonymous flame wars online, secure in the knowledge you'll never meet face to face, it just gets narrower and nastier.)

You can find yourself dwelling in a cultural ghetto without ever having planned to move in there. You can start out pursuing a casual interest in some topic online, then end up plunging into it far more than you should simply because you can: There's no end to the stuff you can find.

You can start out enjoying a commentator because he says some sensible things you haven't heard enough in other media outlets, then end up deciding you'd like a steady diet of nothing but like-minded lectures (and, maybe, rants). You didn't mean to live in such a small world, but once you're there, you find it's comfortable. It's a slippery slope, and technology — by making suit-yourself worlds just a click away — has greased the skids to get there.

This isn't meant to be a broad indictment of technology. (A Web site would be an odd place to publish such a thing.) It's just a warning against some of the pitfalls we might not see if we're not careful. If we really want to be well-rounded people, we can't get there just by spending time staring at glowing screens. We're going to have to work at it.

A good start is to look backward, paying attention not only to the fast-changing world we think we're building but to the world on whose foundation we're building.

C.S. Lewis nailed it in his introduction to On the Incarnation by Athanasius (with apologies to my colleague Heather Koerner, who quoted the same passage so recently that I feel like I'm ripping her off as much as Lewis):

It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones. Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.

It's all about perspective. No one's saying that the old-timers were invariably wiser than us, only that they saw things in ways we don't and that they often have something to teach us. The "progressive" view of history — the self-congratulatory view that we keep getting more and more advanced in every way, and the past is far less valuable than the present — is, simply, a conceit. Truly advanced people would know better than to accept it.

G.K. Chesterton sounds a similar theme a century ago in his wonderful book Orthodoxy (1908). He urged respect for tradition in general, not because every particular tradition was a good one, but because dead people have at least as much right to be heard as the rest of us. "I have never been able to understand where some people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition," he wrote:

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

For all the primitiveness of their technology, men like Lewis and Chesterton lived in a far bigger world than we who live in the so-called Information Age. They were far less bound by time and place, far more knowledgeable about what had happened in the millennia that produced the world they lived in. I like to read them for the same reason I liked learning about my parents' generation: They open the doors to worlds I'd never known.

And, of course, not all those worlds are found on this earth. As Christians, they also knew that this world is only a speck compared to the world that is to come. When we get there, we'll get the really big picture.