In an essay in The American Interest, Sven Birkerts offers a thoughtful survey of some recent writings on the internet and culture, including John Palfrey and Urs Gasser’s Born Digital, Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget, my own The Shallows, and a Clay Shirky post celebrating the post-literary mind.
Here’s a maxisnippet:
Modern but Pre-Digital Man was different in untold ways from his counterpart in the Athenian agora. Millennia of history had altered his psychological structure, mentality and even his neural reflexes. What Lanier raises but then ducks is the inevitable question: If change and adaptation have been a constant all along, whence this sudden urgency about a changing “us”? Why not see the digital revolution as just the latest wave of technology, no less a boon than steam power or electricity and hardly an occasion for a top-to-bottom reconsideration of all things human?
If Lanier sidesteps the question, we may at least thank him for raising it. Change may be constant, but the gradations are hugely variable, with degree at some point shading into kind. Consider that the transformations of the human to date have all been dictated by social shifts, inventions and responses to various natural givens: modifications of circumstance, in short. We have adapted over these long millennia to the organization of agriculture, the standardization of time, the growth of cities, the harnessing of electricity, the arrival of the automobile and airplane and mass-scale birth control, to name just a few developments. But the cyber-revolution is bringing about a different magnitude of change, one that marks a massive discontinuity. Indeed, the aforementioned Pre-Digital Man has more in common with his counterpart in the agora than he will with a Digital Native of the year 2050. By this I refer not to cultural or social references but to core phenomenological understandings. I mean perceptions of the most fundamental terms of reality: the natural givens, the pre-virtual presence of fellow humans, the premises of social relationships.
> I mean perceptions of the most fundamental terms of reality: the natural givens, the pre-virtual presence of fellow humans, the premises of social relationships.
Wait a minute – mass literacy, the rise of civilization to the extent of a billion people alive, electricity, modern medicine … all of this pre-Digital, all he considers as not as significant? Y’know, if someone wrote that statement in a “positive” sense (i.e in terms of evangelism), instead of a dreary reactionary technophobia, I suspect you’d be mocking it.
I gently reject this argument that somehow the changes we are experiencing are somehow of a different order, for two reasons.
The first is that it is the natural conceit of any generation to give primacy to what it is undergoing – and I’m not sure any generation can truly be objective about itself in this way.
The second is what I call the ‘Shakespeare Hypothesis’. This is that the human condition about which Shakespeare wrote will be recognisable to those who lived 1,000 years before him, and 1,000 years after. That politics and human relationships operate in much the same way, just in differing media. This is the antithesis of the technological singularity (an even more spectacular conceit in my view), but it shares a property – that it cannot be logically proven.
Sure, the pressures of life change, culture and attitudes change within limits, but I’ve yet to see proof of anything more fundamental that this statement implies.
If the “cyber-revolution is bringing about a different magnitude of change,” I think it’s because said revolution is nested in a much larger movement of decline in the West that Birkerts rightly characterizes as anti-Enlightenment.
In other words, Shirky’s techno-messianism is just a symptom of a larger decadence, as is the belief that we are unable to resist being stupefied by our gadgets.
Also, Seth, I’m not seeing where Birkerts says anything about mass literacy and modern medicine being insignificant.
> “Also, Seth, I’m not seeing where Birkerts says anything about mass literacy and modern medicine being insignificant.”
I didn’t say “insignificant”, I said “not as significant”. He says:
“We have adapted over these long millennia to the organization of agriculture, the standardization of time, the growth of cities, the harnessing of electricity, the arrival of the automobile and airplane and mass-scale birth control, to name just a few developments.”
And then:
“But the cyber-revolution is bringing about a different magnitude of change, one that marks a massive discontinuity.”
Come to think of it, my point that evangelism and fogeyism have the same exceptionalist view is really not so surprising. Both are saying the world is changing now more than ever, just disagreeing over whether it’s positive or negative.
Ubiquitous computing connected to networks of sensors, controls, outputs, and inputs is a very different game from all previous technological advances. We live in an era of exceptional change:
The most directly tangible change is that for the first time we surround ourselves with sensors that observe us and our physical environment, encode it according to how they are programmed, perform programmed computations based on that, and deliver the results of those computations as very strong – often dominant – stimulus — all in real time. If you have heard of the concept of a “Skinner box” — well, look around, we’ve built a highly automated one around “digital man”. In the most basic terms, our nervous systems and brains are up against something with all the attributes of a great predator (effective speed, cunning, ruthlessness, adaptability, antagonistic purposefulness).
The most politically significant part of this change is that, technologically, we’ve organized it such that the components are networked and the decisions about how to compute outputs from inputs is largely centralized. For example, it was once the case that the main rule-setter for the ordinary exchange of written communication among distant friends in the U.S. was the U.S. postal service, whose restrictions were few and practical. Nowadays, for many, the rules are in many instances set (without much transparency) by (for instance) a few people who help to run Facebook. Or by firms that design and run SMS systems.
“Cybernetic” circuits with that level of power are (1) deeply unprecedented at this scale; (2) known to be immensely and irresistibly powerful; (3) known for sure to cause such profound alterations in the human experience as changes in “the natural givens, the pre-virtual presence of fellow humans, the premises of social relationships.”
The only questions that remain, I think, are the question of resistance and the question of inherent instability:
The question of resistance asks: “Can people just spontaneously decide to revolt and reject this stuff? E.g., will people en mass or at least in effective numbers just reject the digital life because they don’t like what it does to them?”
The question of instability asks: “If people do not spontaneously resist, and the ‘circuits of control’ grow ever stronger — will the material conditions that host ‘digital man’ self destruct? In other words, if we all do get too deeply sucked into the the digital wonderland, will that lead to a catastrophe that destroys the digital wonderland?”
I’m not optimistic about spontaneous revolt against digital man. The problem is that, while the “digital man” infastructure is healthy (enough) — the early adopters often gain material advantage. “Wired” businessmen do better than less wired competitors. “Wired” teens can get more sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Those most dissatisfied by this arrangement
are in no position to effectively revolt against it.
I do guess that instability is the main problem. “Digital Man” culture, I suspect, advances a bit beyond where we are now and then utterly collapses. For example, it would be expected to largely seize control over financial markets and operate them like a mutant — but like any radically mutant strain, is unlikely to reproduce itself for a second generation of the same.
Or Digital Man Culture could eat up the news media like a good predator should — killing off a significant source of cultural orientation — only then to starve itself of the political stability needed to sustain the matrix of its birth.
The stability question could be given a “for instance” like this: “Will median Internet access in the US just get better and better (roughly speaking) or will it (perhaps soon) hit a peak followed by a sharp drop-off?” I won’t be too surprised if the latter case comes to pass.
I don’t see Digital Man going anywhere except with a very BIG BIG *Bang or a very long, drawn out, pathetic, and Idiocratic whimper.
*A smaller one would set the tech-clock back a few years or decades but the laws of competition and human stupidity would take care of history repeating itself back up to the same critical state.
Interesting issue, but it’s irresolvable. One can pretty much pick one from among many historical points of discontinuity. For me, one of the most salient is described in James Beniger’s book The Control Revolution:
“[The] reason why the Control Revolution has been so profound in its impact on human society [is that] it transformed no less than the essential life function itself. Rapid technological expansion of what Darwin called life’s ‘marvelous structure and properties’ and what we now see to include organization, information processing, and communication to effect control constitute a change unprecedented in recorded history. We would have to go back at least to the emergence of the vertebrate brain if not to the first replicating molecule … to find a [comparable] leap in the capability to process information.”
This may sound like hyperbole, but in support, Beniger observes that up to the end of the 19th century, most people (90+%) still lived an agrarian lifestyle, which means they were in intimate, symbiotic relationships with the land and animals. Less than a century later, most of us are living in cities and have become fundamentally estranged from nature. We in the West have gone from living in our bodies to living in our heads, even those of us who aren’t especially intellectual or making a living in the information economy.
I’ve joined to add this thought: Check back with your McLuhan, guys! The impact of digital revolution is analogous to the transformation of society created by the spread of printing (see, The Gutenburg Galaxy). Of course, way speeded up in this case. Did access to printing press technology transform the world? Profoundly. Has any technology affected the cognative powers of humanity more than near-universal literacy? Hardly.
McLuhan also predicted that electronic media would “retribalize” humanity (in Understanding Media). My reading is that he was referring to the return of the human to a reliance on sound and sight, and away from the linear orientation of mind, demanded by print – and the profound transformation this is creating.
Add to this electronic media’s one-to-many and many-to-many capability, and we may well become a new kind of human.