Behind enemy lines

Author: Andrey Tolstoy

Every age projects its anxieties onto a perceived conflict between humanity and technology. In Plato's time, it was feared that literacy would destroy the art of oration. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was feared that horse-drawn-carriage-loving London would drown in manure. Ours is the age of Google-phobia.

There has been a flurry of articles in the past year - notably by Nicholas Carr (The Atlantic Monthly) and Andrew Sullivan (The Atlantic Monthly), less notably by David Small (The Middlebury Campus) - decrying the impact of Google, Facebook, instant messaging, online porn, etc. on our ability to socialize, read a book, pay attention, exercise, call our parents, have healthy sex, finish homework, etc.

This happens periodically as our vices, which hitherto had been calcified in some supposedly innocuous form, find new ways of expression, and are therefore perceived as new demons, borne out of a changing society corrupted by its Faustian disregard for the tried and true tenets of the past.

The root of this problem is the fallacious belief in moral progress. Surely, each of us has a way to go as a human being - and many would claim that their lives are devoted to self-perfection - but our concurrent belief in eternal human truths, evidenced by the timelessness of our cultural heritage, suggests that every generation repeats the same cycle, and doesn't advance relative to its predecessors.

What we are afforded by every technological advance is the opportunity to rewrite the same cultural texts in the language of our own time. Those whose hindsight is less than 20/20 regard this as the displacement of forms they come to perceive as traditional and more legitimate. Much to their distress, the dominance of the novel has been supplanted; for the public - by film, for writers - by modernism. Our current predicament is that of postmodernism: redefined authorship, cross-genre and crossmedia. What many see today as rare uses of the Internet for curious but ultimately trivial means will be seen by our successors as the art of our time - and inevitably as better than that of their contemporaries.

When Nicholas Carr writes, "In Google's world, the world we enter when we go online, there's little place for the fuzziness of contemplation," it is nothing but alarmist hogwash. He knows well that online circulation is greater than that of print - and if it leaves little place for contemplation, it is the content, not the medium, that we have to blame. The question implied by Carr et al. is whether we've finally arrived at the medium that will alter its content. Let us entertain the notion by looking at another disciple of the Church of Cultural Apocalypse.

With the self-righteous tone of a man familiar with, and resigned to, his weaknesses, Andrew Sullivan laments the growing list of books he wants to read, but cannot bring himself to: "I think I'll start with Nietzsche at some point. But right now I have a blog to fill." Under the lens of his own criticism, he is an apt illustration of why the Internet is seductive, dangerous, and should be approached with no less than full-body protective gear.

Yet readjust the historical field of view, and it becomes clear that Sullivan's behavior is only symptomatic of the binge that follows any kind of liberation. Imagine the vigor with which our predecessors must have taken up writing when it occurred to them that their thoughts - their thoughts!! - could be graphically reproduced and disseminated. Or look at the first films ever made: they just show people walking and trains moving, like those early days of livejournal, when most entries were about taking naps and eating sandwiches.

Culture is not Andromeda. Get over it.