Whether all of this sounds dire or merely
"different" will depend upon the reader's own values and priorities.
I find these portents of change depressing, but also exhilarating at least
to speculate about. On the one hand, I have a great feeling of loss and a fear
about what habitations will exist for self and soul in the future. But there is
also a quickening, a sense that important things are on the line. As Heraclitus
once observed, "The mixture that is not shaken soon stagnates." Well,
the mixture is being shaken, no doubt about it. And here are some of the kinds
of developments we might watch for as our "proto-electronic" era
yields to an all-electronic future:
1. Language erosion. There is
no question but that the transition from the culture of the book to the culture
of electronic communication will radically alter the ways in which we use
language on every societal level. The complexity and distinctiveness of spoken
and written expression, which are deeply bound to traditions of print literacy,
will gradually be replaced by a more telegraphic sort of
"plainspeak." Syntactic masonry is already a dying art. Neil Postman
and others have already suggested what losses have been incurred by the advent
of telegraphy and television how the complex discourse patterns of the
nineteenth century were flattened by the requirements of communication over
distances. That tendency runs riot as the layers of mediation thicken. Simple
linguistic prefab is now the norm, while ambiguity, paradox, irony, subtlety,
and wit are fast disappearing. In their place, the simple "vision
thing" and myriad other "things." Verbal intelligence, which has
long been viewed as suspect as the act of reading, will come to seem positively
conspiratorial. The greater part of any articulate person's energy will be
deployed in dumbing-down her discourse.
Language will grow increasingly impoverished
through a series of vicious cycles. For, of course, the usages of literature
and scholarship are connected in fundamental ways to the general speech of the
tribe. We can expect that curricula will be further streamlined, and difficult
texts in the humanities will be pruned and glossed. One need only compare a
college textbook from twenty years ago to its contemporary version. A poem by
Milton, a play by Shakespeare one can hardly find the text among the explanatory
notes nowadays. Fewer and fewer people will be able to contend with the
so-called masterworks of literature or ideas. Joyce, Woolf, Soyinka, not to
mention the masters who preceded them, will go unread, and the civilizing
energies of their prose will circulate aimlessly between closed covers.
2. Flattening of historical perspectives. As the
circuit supplants the printed page, and as more and more of our communications
involve us in network processes which of their nature plant us in a perpetual
present our
perception of history will inevitably alter. Changes in information storage and
access are bound to impinge on our historical memory. The depth of field that
is our sense of the past is not only a linguistic construct, but is in some
essential way represented by the book and the physical accumulation of books in
library spaces. In the contemplation of the single volume, or mass of volumes,
we form a picture of time past as a growing deposit of sediment; we capture a
sense of its depth and dimensionality. Moreover, we meet the past as much in
the presentation of words in books of specific vintage as we do in any isolated
fact or statistic. The database, useful as it is, expunges this context, this
sense of chronology, and admits us to a weightless order in which all
information is equally accessible.
If we take the etymological tack, history (cognate
with "story") is affiliated in complex ways with its texts. Once the
materials of the past are unhoused from their pages, they will surely mean
differently. The printed page is itself a link, at least along the imaginative
continuum, and when that link is broken, the past can only start to recede. At
the same time it will become a body of disjunct data available for retrieval
and, in the hands of our canny dream merchants, a mythology. The more we grow
rooted in the consciousness of the now, the more it will seem utterly
extraordinary that things were ever any different. The idea of a farmer plowing
a field an
historical constant for millennia will be something for a theme park. For,
naturally, the entertainment industry, which reads the collective unconscious
unerringly, will seize the advantage. The past that has slipped away will be
rendered ever more glorious, ever more a fantasy play with heroes, villains,
and quaint settings and props. Small-town American life returns as "Andy
of Mayberry"
at first enjoyed with recognition, later accepted as a faithful portrait
of how things used to be.
3. The waning of the private self. We may
even now be in the first stages of a process of social collectivization that
will over time all but vanquish the ideal of the isolated individual. For some
decades now we have been edging away from the perception of private life as
something opaque, closed off to the world; we increasingly accept the
transparency of a life lived within a set of systems, electronic or otherwise.
Our technologies are not bound by season or light it's always the same time in the
circuit. And so long as time is money and money matters, those circuits will
keep humming. The doors and walls of our habitations matter less and less the world
sweeps through the wires as it needs to, or as we need it to. The monitor light
is always blinking; we are always potentially on-line.
I am not suggesting that we are all about to become mindless, soulless
robots, or that personality will disappear altogether into an oceanic
homogeneity. But certainly the idea of what it means to be a person living a
life will be much changed. The figure-ground model, which has always featured a
solitary self before a background that is the society of other selves, is
romantic in the extreme. It is ever less tenable in the world as it is
becoming. There are no more wildernesses, no more lonely homesteads, and,
outside of cinema, no more emblems of the exalted individual.
