When the first Harry Potter
book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search
engine Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger, that charming
grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library and spends hours and hours
working her way through the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or
how to make a love potion. The idea that a wizard in training might
have, instead, a magic pad where she could inscribe a name and in half a
second have an avalanche of news stories, scholarly articles, books,
and images (including images she shouldn’t be looking at) was a
Quidditch broom too far. Now, having been stuck with the library shtick,
she has to go on working the stacks in the Harry Potter movies, while
the kids who have since come of age nudge their parents. “Why is she
doing that?” they whisper. “Why doesn’t she just Google it?”
That
the reality of machines can outpace the imagination of magic, and in so
short a time, does tend to lend weight to the claim that the
technological shifts in communication we’re living with are
unprecedented. It isn’t just that we’ve lived one technological
revolution among many; it’s that our technological revolution is the big
social revolution that we live with. The past twenty years have seen a
revolution less in morals, which have remained mostly static, than in
means: you could already say “fuck” on HBO back in the eighties; the
change has been our ability to tweet or IM or text it. The set subject
of our novelists is information; the set obsession of our dons is what
it does to our intelligence. The scale of the transformation is such that an ever-expanding literature has emerged to censure or celebrate it. A series of books explaining why books no longer matter is a paradox that Chesterton would have found implausible, yet there they are, and they come in the typical flavors: the eulogistic, the alarmed, the sober, and the gleeful. When the electric toaster was invented, there were, no doubt, books that said that the toaster would open up horizons for breakfast undreamed of in the days of burning bread over an open flame; books that told you that the toaster would bring an end to the days of creative breakfast, since our children, growing up with uniformly sliced bread, made to fit a single opening, would never know what a loaf of their own was like; and books that told you that sometimes the toaster would make breakfast better and sometimes it would make breakfast worse, and that the cost for finding this out would be the price of the book you’d just bought.
All three kinds appear among the new books about the Internet: call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. One’s hopes rest with the Never-Betters; one’s head with the Ever-Wasers; and one’s heart? Well, twenty or so books in, one’s heart tends to move toward the Better-Nevers, and then bounce back toward someplace that looks more like home.
Among
the Never-Betters, the N.Y.U. professor Clay Shirky—the author of
“Cognitive Surplus” and many articles and blog posts proclaiming the
coming of the digital millennium—is the breeziest and seemingly most
self-confident. “Seemingly,” because there is an element of overdone
provocation in his stuff (So people aren’t reading Tolstoy? Well,
Tolstoy sucks) that suggests something a little nervous going on
underneath. Shirky believes that we are on the crest of an ever-surging
wave of democratized information: the Gutenberg printing press produced
the Reformation, which produced the Scientific Revolution, which
produced the Enlightenment, which produced the Internet, each move more
liberating than the one before. Though it may take a little time, the
new connective technology, by joining people together in new communities
and in new ways, is bound to make for more freedom. It’s the Wired
version of Whig history: ever better, onward and upward, progress
unstopped. In John Brockman’s anthology “Is the Internet Changing the
Way You Think?,” the evolutionary psychologist John Tooby shares the
excitement—“We see all around us transformations in the making that will
rival or exceed the printing revolution”—and makes the same extended
parallel to Gutenberg: “Printing ignited the previously wasted
intellectual potential of huge segments of the population. . . . Freedom
of thought and speech—where they exist—were unforeseen offspring of the
printing press.”
Shirky’s and Tooby’s version of Never-Betterism
has its excitements, but the history it uses seems to have been taken
from the back of a cereal box. The idea, for instance, that the printing
press rapidly gave birth to a new order of information, democratic and
bottom-up, is a cruel cartoon of the truth. If the printing press did
propel the Reformation, one of the biggest ideas it propelled was
Luther’s newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism. And what followed the
Reformation wasn’t the Enlightenment, a new era of openness and freely
disseminated knowledge. What followed the Reformation was, actually, the
Counter-Reformation, which used the same means—i.e., printed books—to
spread ideas about what jerks the reformers were, and unleashed a
hundred years of religious warfare. In the seventeen-fifties, more than
two centuries later, Voltaire was still writing in a book about the
horrors of those other books that urged burning men alive in auto-da-fé.
Buried in Tooby’s little parenthetical—“where they exist”—are millions
of human bodies. If ideas of democracy and freedom emerged at the end of
the printing-press era, it wasn’t by some technological logic but
because of parallel inventions, like the ideas of limited government and
religious tolerance, very hard won from history.
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