Adam Gopnik recently wrote a pretty good article in the New Yorker summarizing many of the issues surrounding our transition to digital literacy (Feb. 14 and 21, 2011). Our friends Clay Shirky and Nicholas Carr are both discussed, along with a few others cluttering recently deceased trees with printed words intended to tell us what the future holds.
Gopnik references Kevin Kelly, who apparently compares our "fragmented, multi-part, shimmering" life to "Keats's 'waking dream.'" I read this article right after I'd finished Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," in which Nietzsche describes an Athens where, "as in a dream, anything is possible at each moment, and all of nature swarms around man as if it were nothing but a masquerade of the gods, who were merely amusing themselves by deceiving men in all these shapes" (89).
Part of Gopnik's point is that a sense of fragmentation has been with us at least since Nietzsche, so it's not necessarily significant that both pieces give us the analogy of a dream. And I'm also a little skeptical of Nietzsche's/Herodotus's characterization of the Athenians--were they really so gullible when beholding their returning tyrants?
But I can't help but find Nietzsche's description of the Athenian dream world quite appealing when laid over our fragmented, digital landscape. After all, many of us (I'm thinking of myself in particular) are wildly ignorant when it comes to the technical circuitry behind the letters we write into conveniently designed blog templates. Our programmers and designers seem to have supernatural powers, having invented even the "natural" environment we enter when we interact with the super-brain that is the World Wide Web, a place where "anything [seems] possible at any moment."
But when we've in effect become the gods animating the environment, how many degrees removed are we from the "essence" of reality? It would seem a sophistic attitude is most helpful here: reality is what we make it.
It also occurred to me that if those of us who really understand programming are at an advantage, are we living through a time similar to that described by Havelock? My wife has been learning html via the Internet, and I wonder if in another generation or so, programming languages will be taught as soon as kids grasp the alphabet.
My friends who got their bachelor's degrees in computer science waltzed out of U of I straight into $60K/year jobs. I got an editorial internship at $8/hour, and when they hired me as a full-fledged copy editor, my pay swelled to $10/hour. All right, English degree!
So was I like one of those upper-class-twit Athenians who wouldn't deign to learn to read and write (code) but still wanted to show off their pottery (blog)? Were my values rooted in cultural practices whose relevance was vanishing in the wake of an emerging technology?
Though I suppose radio and television made books irrelevant before I was even born, and I tend to agree with the argument that the Internet prizes a relationship with the text more than those mediums. So does that mean the Web is good news for people with my educational background? Generally speaking, it would appear that the Web is driving down the market value of writing and editing, so on that level, nope.
And I think this connects to another issue, particularly as we are (supposedly) lurching out of a recession: what happens to displaced economic value? When people like Shirky celebrate all that we can now create with our leisure time, they conveniently omit the fact that leisure time is unpaid time. And it looks like it will be a while before the economy figures out how to create more paid time for those whose skills have officially become unnecessary. (This is particularly sobering when budget crises potentially give certain ideological camps the leverage they need to in effect leave those people out in the cold--though it might not be cold to you.)
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