Month: September 2011

My friend Dan posted this on his blog, This Man’s World, yesterday, writing about a book called Hamlet’s Blackberry by William Powers, which is sitting on my shelf right now and has moved up on the ‘to read’ list.  Dan writes:

The crux of the book is that in all of our attempts to be connected in this world, especially via social networking in combination with smart phones, we’re losing our inner connectedness – that is, our connectedness with ourselves.  Since interactions are so quick and there’s no break between them, we have no time to reflect on how something affects us or how we’re doing internally.  Some would probably call it navel-gazing, but I think that’s harsh.  If you don’t know who you are, how can you expect anyone else to?

One of the parts of my job that I find most interesting is the momentary clause in, say, a conference presentation, when I take a minute to sketch out the rough trajectory of the “ages of human communication.”  Here’s what I say, roughly:

A number of scholars smarter than I have proposed that the rise of cinema and digital networking technology represents a shift in the way human beings communicate, one so significant that it parallels the shift from oral to literate culture.   In oral cultures, knowledge is limited by time, geography, and memory.  Everything that is known must be kept alive and in shared memory, and transmitted through these unreliable and unverifiable media.  Literate culture brings with it not only the ability to transmit knowledge accurately across time and space, but also attendant social structures (like bureaucracy, which depends on the ability to list things).

Additionally, we can trace significant changes in how we think and how we understand the world around us to the rise of literacy.  As a quick example, when members of oral cultures learn knowledge, it is always already internal–they must comprehend it immediately and their memory of it is the only recourse they have to understanding it.  By contrast, learning after literacy can involve the abstraction of ideas because it externalizes knowledge, giving the learner recourse to the original text.  What we lose in our ability to ask questions directly to the author, we gain in the externalization and standardization of knowledge.  By separating knowledge from the individual, it ceases to be situational, and becomes something we can think about.  Some scholars have even suggested that the very experience of the internal dialogue that accompanies abstract thought springs from the patterns of thought afforded by literate culture.  (This part gets difficult to accept in many ways, not least because it sounds paternalistic, perhaps xenophobic, culturally arrogant, and technologically deterministic.    That said, the goal is not to place value judgment on these traits, but just to understand them in the context of societies pre- and post- literacy.

So if cinema and computers represent a quantitative and qualitative shift in the way we create and disseminate knowledge, we ought to see the same kinds of shift in society, sense of self, and our relationship to the world that we saw in the rise of literacy. The new era brings with it challenges to all the old models: we can now copy infinitely, publish in two directions, distribute expansively, and capture visuals and audio with high fidelity.  Each of these challenges old constructs and old circuits.  Each of these is rebuilding the world around us as we speak/write/tweet.

We’re entering a third age of human communication.  Electracy (to use Greg Ulmer’s term) is upon us, and the best we can do is to look at how things changed last time so we can anticipate, a bit, how things will change again.

So to return to Dan’s point, I can’t help but recognize in his description of Powers’ argument a lament for the literate mindset.  This is not to say it’s without merit–the rise of the new often overshadows pieces of the old that were valuable and helpful.  For instance, from the value judgment perspective, the individualized mind-state that some scholars attribute to the rise of literacy reminds me of the line drawn in the strange, ethereal, poetic book about a philosopher gorilla, Ishmael.  Ishmael argues that human society has had two perspectives, leavers and takers, and traces that division to agriculture.  The leavers tend to recognize their place in the larger world and see it as something they need to respect and sustain, whereas the takers see the world as a divisible resource, ripe for the plucking and over which they must fight.  I would argue that division arises from literacy.   To oversimplify: when all knowledge is situational, your own experience of the world is necessarily connected to the world around you; when knowledge becomes abstracted, your experience of the world becomes similarly abstracted and your sense of the relationship between you and the world around changes.

But the rise of electracy is changing us, and is shaping the minds of those growing up in it in fundamentally different ways.  We’re all facing these questions, considering how the new social structures shape our real social lives, considering how the quality of our lives is shifting under the pressures of the technological infrastructure under which we live.  I look forward to Dan’s experiment in self-control:

So anyway, I am going to make more of a concerted effort to only do the things on the internet that I enjoy.  I’ll still blog, because, comments or not, this kind of thing gives back to me, if only to allow me to articulate thoughts and feelings.  And I could really not give up on e-mail.  But I may have to severely curtail Facebook and Twitter.  We’ll see.

I hope he writes again, later, to say how it went.