Digital Refusnik: Sven Birkerts Believes that Technology is Leeching the Spiritual Out of Human Experience

The opposite of presence to me is virtuality, simulation. I see the polarity as central to our time … We just breathe in technology these days – the whole panoply, everything from phones to answering machines to e-mail to computers to fax. It’s not that these things are necessarily evils. But we don’t have the chance to grow into them, to learn their meaning and their measure and their shortcomings, because they are coming at such a rate and in such multiples.

Deja Vu All Over Again: Many-to-Many Communication. Citizen Control of a Remote Political Process. A New Culture and a New Economy. Sound Familiar? Such was the Hype for a Technological Revolution 75 Years Ago – Radio

Today’s Next Big Something is so wrapped in hype it’s tough to see what’s really going on … Anyone can recite the narrative. It goes like this: … By exchanging information, we grow closer as a community. By exchanging information, we become free. Blah, blah, blah. But what if … the crystal-ball narrative doesn’t turn out as planned? What if, a decade or so from now, we wake up to find that the digisphere has been overrun by swarms of inane mass marketeers… ? It has happened before … Perhaps radio wasn’t the right technology. But the Web and the Net may well be. Our job is to make sure that glorious potential doesn’t get stuffed into yet another tired, old media box.

The Balance of Trade of Ideas

The Net makes it impossible to exercise scientific isolationism, even if governments want such a policy. We have no choice but to exercise the free trade of ideas … For example, newly industrialized nations can no longer pretend they are too poor to reciprocate with basic, bold, and new ideas … Now that ideas are shared almost instantly on the Net, it is even more important that Third World nations not be idea debtors – they should contribute to the scientific pool of human knowledge … To think you have nothing to offer is to reject the coming idea economy. In the new balance of trade of ideas, very small players can contribute very big ideas.

The Balance of Trade of Ideas

In the world of bits, you can be small and global at the same time … Everyone can play in the multimedia and human-interface arena. This means individuals or researchers from developing nations can now contribute directly to the world’s pool of ideas. Being big does not matter. For these reasons, more than ever before, we must trade ideas, not embargo them.

What Does a Nobel Prize for Radio Astronomy Have to Do with Your Telephone? It’s Been a Decade Since the Break-up of AT&T. Has the Spirit Passed Out of its Bell Labs, as Some Charge? Or is it Still the Preeminent Technology Lab in the U.S.?

Never has there been an opportunity for technology to have such an impact around the world. If innovation is being able to get invention to the marketplace, then the golden age is still ahead of us.