There’s an incredible shallowness to most on-line communication. I realize that there are good things being said on the net, but by and large the medium seems to encourage quickness over depth, and rapid response over reflection.
I don’t think that Flaubert, for example, could have written the way he did on a screen. In the move to on-line communication, the aspiration to the kind of style that seeks a sort of permanence, symbolized by immobile words on a page, vanishes. Okay, no big deal, except that I also believe that language is our evolutionary wonder. It is our marvel. If we’re going to engage the universe, comprehend it and penetrate it, it will be through ever more refined language. The screen is a linguistic leveling device.
When you read a book, there’s a kind of a silence. And in that silence, in the interstices between the words themselves, your imagination has room to move, to create. On-line communication is filling those spaces. We are substituting a transitional, impermanent, ephemeral communication for a more permanent one.
The word that is incised on a page in a book has to be put there by a large institution. Sitting between the author of that word and the reader of that word is a huge mediating organism made up of organization and capital. And all that mediation has a great effect on that word. But between the word that I type into my computer and e-mail to you and the word that comes out on your end there’s nothing but the digital transformation taking place. It is not mediated. It’s as intimate as it possibly could be without me whispering it into your ear.
Computers are over. All the effects that we can imagine coming from stand-alone computers have already happened. What we’re talking about now is not a computer revolution, it’s a communications revolution. And communication is, of course, the basis of culture itself. The idea that this world we are building is somehow diminishing communication is all wrong. In fact, it’s enhancing communication. It is allowing all kinds of new language.
What I see happening … is our wholesale wiring. And what the wires carry is not the stuff of the soul. I might feel differently if that was what they were transmitting. But it’s not. It is data … When everyone is wired and humming, most of what will be going through those wires is that sort of information. If it were soul-data, that might be a different thing, but soul-data doesn’t travel through the wires.
Information, as it has been applied primarily by broadcast media, and to a great extent by large institutions, has separated human beings from the kind of interaction that we are having here … I finally concluded … that there were so many forces afoot that were in opposition to that way of life that the only way around technology was through it. I took faith in the idea that, on the other side of this info-desert we all seemed to be crossing, technology might restore what it was destroying É If we’re going to get back into an experiential world that has substance and form and meaning, we’re going to have to go through information to get there.
The only choice we have is to resuscitate our failed communities, to bring back Pinedale and Putnam Lake – to align ourselves with physical reality now, before it’s too late. The answer is not in a physical space. The answer is not virtual reality. Yet that is precisely the direction we’re headed.
I think the drive to get on-line is not so much this alleged dissatisfaction. I think it’s 3.5 trillion dollars. It has been estimated that the business coming out of these technologies is going to amount to that sum. That’s a nice pile of cash, and it’s going to generate a need to convince us that we should follow along, that we should buy these things. I think that is one answer. The other answer is that the wired world is a response to certain cultural changes over the last two or three generations – the breakup of the family, the breakdown of the community, the degradation of the physical environment … Every place I’ve loved in this world has been paved over, malled over, disappeared. As we observe this assault on the physical world, we feel ourselves losing control. I think alternative worlds become more appealing to us.
We are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back farther. There has been much written both celebrating and denouncing cyberspace, but to me this seems a development of such magnitude that trying to characterize it as a good thing or a bad thing trivializes it considerably. I also don’t think it’s a matter about which we have much choice. It is coming, whether we like it or not.