Word Wars

Charles Paul Freund from the April 1999 issue

Ba href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0253212499/reasonmagazineA/">The Reading Lesson, a valuable study of 19th-century elitist attitudes toward the "threat" posed by mass literacy. As Brantlinger reminds us, the reading of popular Victorian novels was viewed as "vampiric" and "addictive." Too much reading was an impediment to living; books and the fantasies they inspired ill-prepared their readers for real life. Some utopians posited happy, "unbooked" futures where people wouldn't waste their time reading at all.

The most extreme such statement in this century was made by the German Marxist critic Walter Benjamin, who complained in 1936 that mechanical reproduction robbed a work of its singular, quasi-religious "aura" and removed art from tradition. In fact, mechanical reproduction--including publishing's many incarnations--has created whole new "traditions" for art to occupy.

Publishing is technology. It was technology when a scribe pressed cuneiform wedges into prepared clay, and it was perceived (by Plato) as a threat even in antiquity. Indeed, it is a threat, though not to society, creativity, or the individual. It's a threat to the closed class of cultural stewards, who correctly perceive that every publishing advance undermines their power.

"In Usenet," cyberculture writer Howard Rheingold has written, "every member of the audience is also potentially a publisher." Publishing now implies a many-to-many relationship: many reader/publishers addressing many other reader/publishers. For philosopher Manuel De Landa, such technology is serving humanism, because it is obviously a catalyst for community.

Yet last December, a linguistics professor named John L. Locke issued an apocalyptic warning. In his book, Awash in All These Words, Locke claimed that e-mail is making us inarticulate, and worse. "Our social voices are slipping away," he lamented, "leaving people in social isolation." Bad news indeed: The world is ending. Again.