The Information: How the Internet gets inside us. (2011)

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/14/the-information

by visakanv • 11 years ago

2 2 11 years ago

visakanv2• 11 years ago

This is one of my favorite essays I've ever read, and I'm sharing it with HN in response to "Why can't we read anymore?" I'll edit this comment as I go with all my thoughts, and a sort-of summary.

First some quotes:

CONTEXT: The set subject of our novelists is information; the set obsession of our dons is what it does to our intelligence.
TECHNOLOGY'S IMPACT: When the electric toaster was invented, there were, no doubt, books that said that the toaster would open up horizons for breakfast undreamed of in the days of burning bread over an open flame; books that told you that the toaster would bring an end to the days of creative breakfast, since our children, growing up with uniformly sliced bread, made to fit a single opening, would never know what a loaf of their own was like; and books that told you that sometimes the toaster would make breakfast better and sometimes it would make breakfast worse, and that the cost for finding this out would be the price of the book you’d just bought.
CAUSALITY: Of course, if you stretch out the time scale enough, and are sufficiently casual about causes, you can give the printing press credit for anything you like.
READING AND EMPATHY: But if reading a lot of novels gave you exceptional empathy university English departments should be filled with the most compassionate and generous-minded of souls, and, so far, they are not.
OLD ARGUMENTS: The odd thing is that this complaint, though deeply felt by our contemporary Better-Nevers, is identical to Baudelaire’s perception about modern Paris in 1855, or Walter Benjamin’s about Berlin in 1930, or Marshall McLuhan’s in the face of three-channel television (and Canadian television, at that) in 1965. When department stores had Christmas windows with clockwork puppets, the world was going to pieces; when the city streets were filled with horse-drawn carriages running by bright-colored posters, you could no longer tell the real from the simulated; when people were listening to shellac 78s and looking at color newspaper supplements, the world had become a kaleidoscope of disassociated imagery; and when the broadcast air was filled with droning black-and-white images of men in suits reading news, all of life had become indistinguishable from your fantasies of it. It was Marx, not Steve Jobs, who said that the character of modern life is that everything falls apart.
RESTLESSNESS: Everyone complained about what the new information technologies were doing to our minds. Everyone said that the flood of books produced a restless, fractured attention. Everyone complained that pamphlets and poems were breaking kids’ ability to concentrate, that big good handmade books were ignored, swept aside by printed works that, as Erasmus said, “are foolish, ignorant, malignant, libelous, mad.” The reader consulting a card catalogue in a library was living a revolution as momentous, and as disorienting, as our own.
FAMILY: (“Can you please turn off your damn computer and come watch television with the rest of the family,” the dad now cries to the teen-ager.)
METAPHORS: When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy. Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind.
COLLAPSE: "Oh, they always say that about the barbarians, but every generation has its barbarians, and every generation assimilates them,” one Roman reassured another when the Vandals were at the gates, and next thing you knew there wasn’t a hot bath or a good book for another thousand years.

visakanv2• 11 years ago

Now I'll ramble a bit for why I love this essay so much– it's such a powerful reminder that so many of the bloody conversations we're having all the time about what the Apple Watch is going to do or what AR is going to do, and how our kids are going crazy with texting and lolcats, etc– it's been played out over and over and over throughout the generations, and this time isn't particularly unique.

I guess I often am hopeful to encounter other people who realize that we're in this loop of entertainment, that everything fits within a broader context, and that we don't need to get so worked up over little details about little thing so often. [1]

I wish we could spend more time getting to the end of these conversations quicker, because the end of each conversation is the start of a new one. It feels so tiresome and tedious to have to go through all the details over and over again.

I suppose that's a necessary "evil", or just human nature– we're always going to want to talk about current affairs as though they're somehow Truly Novel And Significant– and I suppose at the opposite end of the spectrum, nothing is, so... what then?

I don't know. The more I read, the less I know. I just feel like there ought to be an alternative between becoming apathetic/nihilistic, and getting caught up in every "new" piece of news. I think this essay sorta-implies it, but stops there.

Would LOVE to hear from anybody who's grappled with this themselves– I'm sure there are some of you!

___

[1]I'm aware of the possibility that something might actually be of dramatic significance– see quote about Romans talking about Barbarians– but I'm thinking "I read 4 books this year, ohnoes" isn't all that crazy/groundbreaking. "I spent a year away from social media"– ugh, seriously? Can't we get past that stuff? What comes after that?

The Information: How the Internet gets inside us. (2011)

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