The chronicle of higher education
1st November 1996
On the subject of our latest technological revolution, cyberspace, I am a neo-Luddite. Not a true Luddite; my Luddism is qualified, compromised. I revel in the word-processor; I am grateful for computerised library catalogues; I appreciate the convenience of CD-Roms; and I concede the usefulness of the internet for retrieving information and conducting research. But I am disturbed by some aspects of the new technology-not merely by the much-discussed moral problems raised by cybersex, but also by the new technology's impact on learning and scholarship.
Revolutions come fast and furious these days. No sooner do we adapt to one than we are confronted with another. For almost 500 years, we lived with the product of the print revolution-the culture of the book. Then, a 100 years ago, we were introduced to the motion picture; a couple of decades later, to radio and then to television. To a true Luddite, those inventions were the beginning of the rot, the decline of western civilisation as we have known it. To a true revolutionary, such as Marshall McLuhan, they were giant steps toward a brave new world liberated from the stultifying rigidities of an obsolete literacy. To the rest of us, they were frivolities, diversions, often meretricious, but not threatening the life of the mind, the culture associated with books.
For all of its ambiguities, printing celebrated the culture of the book-of bad books, to be sure, but also of good books and great books. Movies, radio and television made the first inroads on the book, not only because they distracted us from reading, but also because they began to train our minds to respond to aural and visual sensations of brief duration rather than to the cadences, nuances and lingering echoes of the written word. The movie critic Michael Medved has said that even more detrimental than the content of television is the way that it habituates children to an attention span measured in seconds rather than minutes. Sound bites and visual effects shape the young mind, incapacitating it for the less febrile tempo of the book.
And now we have the internet to stimulate and quicken our senses still more. We channel-surf on television, but that is as naught compared with cyber-surfing. The obvious advantage of the new medium is that it provides access to an infinite quantity of information on an untold number of and variety of subjects. How does one quarrel with such a plenitude of goods?
But as a learning device, the new electronic technology may be more bad than good. Children who are told that they need not learn how to multiply and divide, spell and write grammatical prose, because the computer can do that for them, are being grossly miseducated. Worse yet, the constant exposure to a myriad of texts, sounds and images that often are only tangentially related to each other is hardly conducive to the cultivation of logical, rational, systematic habits of thought.
At the more advanced level of learning and scholarship, the situation is equally ambiguous. I used to give (in the pre-electronic age) two sequences of courses: one on social history, the other on intellectual history. In a course on social history, a student might find electronic technology useful, for example, in inquiring about the standard of living of the working classes in the early period of industrialisation, assuming that the relevant sources-statistical surveys, archival collections, newspapers-were on line. This kind of history, which is built by marshalling social and economic data, is facilitated, even stimulated, by the new technology. One can make connections among sources of information that would have had no apparent link had they not been so readily called up on screen.
But what about intellectual history? It may be that the whole of Rousseau's Social Contract and Hegel's Philosophy of History are now on line. Can one read such books on the screen as they should be read-slowly, carefully, patiently, dwelling upon a difficult passage, resisting the temptation to scroll down, thwarting the natural speed of the computer? What is important in the history of ideas is not retrieving and recombining material, but understanding it. And that requires a different relation to the text, a different tempo of reading and study.
One can still buy the book, read it, mark it up, and take notes the old-fashioned way. The difficulty is that students habituated to surfing on the internet, to getting their information in quick easy doses, to satisfying their curiosity with a minimum of effort, often do not have that patience to think and study this old-fashioned way.
The intellectual revolution of our time, post-modernism, long antedated the internet. None the less, the internet reinforces post-modernism: it is as subversive of "linear," "logocentric," "essentialist" thinking, as committed to the "aporea," "indeterminacy," "fluidity," "intertextuality" and "contextuality" of discourse, as deconstruction itself. Like post-modernism, the internet does not distinguish between the true and the false, the important and the trivial, the enduring and the ephemeral. The search for a name or phrase or subject will produce a comic strip or advertising slogan as readily as a quotation from the Bible or Shakespeare. Every source appearing on the screen has the same weight and credibility as every other; no authority is "privileged" over any other.
Michael Kinsley, editor of the new cyberspace journal Slate, insists that his magazine will retain the "linear, rational thinking" of print journalism. But to have to make that claim is itself testimony to the non-linear, non-rational tendency of the medium. One need not be a Luddite, even a neo-Luddite, to be alarmed by this most useful, most potent, most seductive, and most equivocal invention.
