For someone who is supposed to be the very essence of cool and with-it-ness, President Obama gave a remarkably technophobic if not luddite talk at Hampton University yesterday.

With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. … With so many voices clamoring for attention on blogs, on cable, on talk radio, it can be difficult, at times, to sift through it all; to know what to believe; to figure out who’s telling the truth and who’s not.

As opposed to the old days, I suppose, when you knew that if you heard it on NBC, CBS, ABC, or read it in the New York Times or the Washington Post, it was gospel. “We can’t stop these changes,” Obama said, clearly implying that he wished he could, and urged the students to adapt to them.

More evidence, it seems to me, that liberalism — an artifact of the Industrial Revolution — doesn’t find the post-industrial age of the microprocessor at all congenial. The old gatekeepers of information available to the masses are gone, and the liberal in chief doesn’t like it one bit.

Maybe that’s why liberals are always so angry and humorless: they know they are losing in this new age dawning.