t’s inevitable that the net will continue to grow, to get bigger, to get more complex, to become the dominant force in the culture. That is inevitable. What’s not inevitable is what you choose to do about it … You can be like the Amish. Noble, but marginal.
The culture has shifted to a new medium. But it’s not going to be the only medium there is. The introduction of fire produced great changes in our society. That doesn’t mean that everything is on fire. Digital technologies and the net can have a great effect without meaning that everything has to be the net. I listen to books on tape. I have for many years. I couldn’t live without them. I listen to the radio. I read books. I read magazines. I write letters. All of these things are not going to go away when the net comes. The flourishing of digital communication will enable more options, more possibilities, more diversity, more room, more frontiers.
Maybe it’s because I’m not on-line, but it seems to me, as an adult human being living in 1995, that the signal is getting weaker. I find that more and more I navigate my days within this kind of strange landscape. People have drawn into their houses, and the shades are down. You go into a store and the clerk isn’t looking at you, he’s busy running bar codes. And you multiply that a thousandfold: mediation, mediation, mediation. I want an end to mediation. And I don’t think I can break the membrane by going on-line.
I live in a world that I find to be increasingly attenuated, distracted, fanned-out, disembodied. Growing up in the ’50s, I felt I was living in a very real place. The terms of human interchange were ones I could navigate. I could get an aura buzz from living. I can still get it, but it’s harder to find. More and more of the interchanges that are being forced on me as a member of contemporary society involve me having to deal with other people through various layers of scrim, which leaves me feeling disembodied.
I don’t think that there’s any reason you can’t go on leading exactly the life you lead now, living with the technology you find most comfortable, reading your books – of which there are likely to be more over the period of your lifetime, by the way, rather than less. I see no reason why you can’t personally “refuse it.” But over the long haul, I’d say that society, everything that is human on this planet, is going to be profoundly transformed by this, and in many ways, some of which will probably be scary to those of us with this mind-set, some of which will be glorious and transforming.
What I’m concerned by is this becoming a potentially all-transforming event that’s going to change not only how I live but how my children live. I don’t believe it’s merely going to be auxiliary. I think it’s going to be absolutely central.
[The virtual world is] going to be an auxiliary space. There will be lots of things that will be similar to the physical world, and there will be lots of things that will be different. But it’s going to be a space that’s going to have a lot of the attributes that we like in reality – a richness, a sense of place, a place to be silent, a place to go deep.
My point is not that you can’t find compassion and communitarian values on the net. You can. But you can find them just as well, and better, in a real community. One phenomenon I encountered on the Internet was that people would put words like “grin” or “smile” or “hug” in parentheses in a note. It’s a code meaning cyberhugs, cybersmiles, cyberkisses. But at bottom, that cyberkiss is not the same thing as a real kiss. At bottom, that cyberhug is not going to do the same thing. There’s a big difference.
One of the advantages of the net is that everybody can publish: it’s a free medium. There’s something very appealing and attractive about that. You can cut out the middleman – the publisher and the agent and everybody else. But when you open the floodgates entirely, you don’t get egalitarianism. You get babble. My shopping list becomes as valuable as Cormac McCarthy’s latest book. And then you go back to thinking, “Well, wait a minute, maybe those middlemen had some function, however flawed they were.”
Open your mind to the possibility that in creating cyberspace we’ve made a new space for literature and art, that we have artists working there who are as great as artists in the past. They’re working in a medium that you might dismiss right now as inconsequential, just as the theater, in Shakespeare’s day, was dismissed as outrageous and low-class and not very deep.