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OFTEN these days, we hear that the shift from the analog world of print to the online and digital world resembles what happened when Gutenberg’s printing press reshaped Renaissance Europe, crushing Catholicism, spreading literacy and perhaps democracy, and overturning old ways. People who frame our current transition this way often do it as a way of arguing for the “liberating” powers of the Web.
I want to go back to Michael Harris’s The End of Absence, which I’m reading now. Harris refers to the Victor Hugo novel Notre-Dame de Paris, in which a 15th century archdeacon picks up a printed book for the first time, looks from it to Notre Dame and says, “Cecil tuera cela” — this (book) will kill that (cathedral). Of course, the printing press helped marginalize Catholicism in northern Europe, and had an enormous impact everywhere print traveled.
But the pace of change is very different. Here’s another bit from Sara Scribner’s Salon Q+A with Harris.
You talk a lot about this being our Gutenberg moment, and that we’ve had big, sweeping technological changes before when the printing press came in, and this is just one of them. And people say, “Don’t panic.” This is just another transition period. But how is this rapid technological transformation different than others?
It’s different, because this is a moment and not a slowly booming era. In Gutenberg’s day, in 1450, the printing press comes out, but most people aren’t actually literate until the 19th century. So you actually have hundreds of years of slow change. It takes centuries before the printing press’s real power is unveiled. Whereas the amount of massive change happening to
day takes place in a single generation. So instead of a Gutenberg era or a Gutenberg shift, we have this Gutenberg moment, is what I called it in the book. And in a way, that’s frightening, but in another way, it’s actually hopeful, because it means you actually have people living on both sides of the moment at the same time. So I think anybody born before 1985 can remember being an adult in a pre-Internet world. So we have this great chance to actually talk with people who are younger about the world that was before. It doesn’t mean that that world was better than their world. In a lot of ways, digital natives may have an exciting, fantastic new experience that we can’t, that older people can’t comprehend. But the exciting thing for me is the fact that we could actually have a conversation between those two generations and that we had such massively different experiences.
Others, such as Neil Postman and Sven Birkerts have written well on the subject, and Harris stands proudly in their tradition of humanistic skepticism.
We see many of the more immediate changes created by the Internet, and the fast pace of change, but the more difficult question is about the long-term effects. In Orwell’s 1984, common people were forbidden to own paper, and something like the video screens of Big Brother were everywhere. The main character, Winston Smith, reveled in holding paper in his hands, and dreamed of the days when paper was common. He also dreamed of the deeply satisfying rebellion that writing on paper might bring.
Orwell didn’t see a world where everyone could write on the screen, and not just Big Brother, but does that mean anything? To what extent do we live in the delusion that our writing on the screen has any effect? Is our writing on the screen mostly impotent while at the same time allowing Big Brother to listen to our thoughts? Do we fool ourselves into thinking the Internet a tool of individuality, when in reality it is more a tool of social engineering?
In the digital world our thought can be located and disappeared in an instant. Subversives can be instantly eliminated. With a push of a button those in power can commit a kind of digital, intellectual assassination – like with the destruction of various wiki leaks sites. And as with Julian Assange, they can stop the digital flow of money, which is a big problem since paper money is going the way of paper books. And if intellectual assassination and stopping the flow of money isn’t enough, drones functioning as cybernetic death squads can do the rest. We will never again be alone.
So maybe books were far more subversive because they were widely scattered and required a great deal of expense and time to locate and burn all copies. The 800 year-old epoch of subversion created by print on paper is coming to an end.
McLuhan also presciently said that terror would be the normal state in the digital world because it is so interconnected that everything affects everything. Another reason to long for the bygone age of print and the privacy of the pre-digital world. All the same, we can’t turn back. There is no way but forward. But what will that world be in the long-term? We already live in a world where virtually all thought can be monitored. Will it move to a world where a state of emergency can be declared and cybernetic death squads legally ordered to kill our thoughts with bots and our bodies with drones? Winston Smith was maybe right about the more resilient subversive power of paper. Or am I just too negative?
The wind of socio-political change always carries with it a whiff of perspirationーnot
always registered on the weathervane of time.
It’s Achilles heel is its utter dependence on reliable electrical power.