To: skeptic@ubu.edu
In a message dated 95-10-28 20:12:10 EDT, you write:
<<Isn't too much stimulation precisely one of the problems with an on-line society? Doesn't the constant hum, whirr, and buzz of electronically processed information drive us insane?>>
Some of us, maybe. In any case, the fear of too much information undergirds the cybercritiques of Stoll, Birkerts, and Slouka. In fact, even their disdain for technology and computers is, at rock bottom, a dislike of unfettered, decontextualized information. Where many of us welcome an in crease in information as a (potential) increase in knowledge, possibilities, and self-fulfillment, they employ a Tower of Babel model in which static unity transmogrifies into dynamic chaos. Consider:
"Anyone can post messages to the net. Practically everyone does. The resulting cacophony drowns out serious discussion....[T]he valuable gets lost in the dross. There are no pointers to the good stuffyou don't know which messages are worth reading," writes Stoll.
"One of the advantages of the net is that everybody can publish: it's a free medium....You can cut out the middlemanthe publisher and agent and everybody else. But when you open the flood gates entirely, you don't get egalitarianism. You get babble. My shopping list becomes as valuable as Cormac McCarthy's latest book," Slouka told Harper's.
"The explosion of dataalong with general societal secularization
of what
the theorists call the 'master narratives' (Christian, Marxist,
Freudian, humanist...)has all but destroyed the premise of
understandability. Inundated by perspectives, by lateral vistas of
informa tion that stretch endlessly in every direction, we no
longer accept the possibility of assembling a complete picture,"
says Birkerts.
There is no question, of course, that our society, both online and off, is awash in information, good, bad, and ugly. We are up to our necks in the stuff and the tide's still coming in: TV and radio broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, databases, web sites, conversations. But the currents are surpris ingly easy to navigate. Contrary to Stoll and Slouka, there are all sorts of pointers and middlemen who nudge you in one direction or another, who sift through material and send it your way. Some of these are formal servicesNexis, say; others are informalfriends who flag something for you. And no one, it is safe to say, will mistake Slouka's shopping list for a novel. But to the degree they do, that's their choice.
Birkerts rightly characterizes the dilemma as an epistemological one: Without a master narra tive to make us slaves, how do we pick among competing choices? Given the funereal air of The Gutenberg Elegies, it is hardly surprising that he can only lament a proliferation of options: "Our postmodern culture is a vast fabric of competing isms; we are leaderless and subject to the terrors, masked as the freedoms, of an absolute relativism."
But do you know anyone who is an absolute relativist, or even a relative relativist? Yes, ideas of the good life, of the proper life, of the righteous life compete with one anotherat least when they are allowed to. Where is the terror in that, unless you have lost your own faith?
There is a sense, implicit in Birkerts and explicit in Slouka, that individuals ultimately can't be trusted to their own devices. We are too easily duped, too gullible, too dumb: "We live," writes Slouka, "in an increasingly visual age, consumers, not of life, but of representations of life; of movies, videos, and commercials; of media events and reenactments....[T]his, to put it bluntly, makes us vulnerable. With nearly 50 percent of us functionally illiterate, and 90 percent of us listing television as our primary source of news, we're ripe for the picking. Or the manipulating, as the case may be."
So what's the alternative, especially in a semi-free society? Stoll, Birkerts, and Slouka don't travel the road to its end, but the signposts clearly indicate less choice, less information, less indi vidualism. Reading through Silicon Snake Oil , The Gutenberg Elegies, and War of the Worlds , I was reminded of an Eastern European friend of mine from grad school. He came over to study shortly before the Berlin Wall fell and he knew firsthand the terror of living with a master narrative.
Still, it was easier for him to leave central Europe behind than it was to give up certain ele ments of communist thought. We would go out drinking and he would joke with me about the "so -called" free market and how the problem with America was that there was too much of everything: news, books, clothing, schools of thought. "I spend half an hour picking out a brand of toothpaste. How does anyone decide anything?" he would ask me, "How do you know what's important and what's not?" It depends on the individual, I would tell him what they value and what they want. Where's the harm?
Such a "stable framework" is, at best, arguable theology. And the predictable horror it inspires far outstrips the pain of deciding among disparate choices.
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