Connecting the Disconnected

Three pages, of the three dozen or so I read today, stand out thematically. Each points to a slightly different part of the elephant, but all, I think, have something interesting to say about the whole.

(1) "Souls of the New Machine", by Gail Caldwell, 2007
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/03/18/souls_of_the_new_machine/

From the day the first Walkman appeared (remember Walkmans? The iPod's arthritic granddad?), we've been heading into techno-tunnels of separation. The seats on Jet Blue these days have individual TV screens, so that even the communal laughs on in-flight movies (granted, a paltry pleasure) are gone. With our iPods and ear mikes and tiny laptops, we look like the spooky characters in George Tooker's paintings of modern alienation from the 1950s -- lost souls in waiting rooms and subway corridors, looking anywhere but toward one another.

Ah, but what about the blog, says the technophile, where one can relay one's own story ad infinitum, and strangers can reach out and become soulmates? The fact is that our pixel-driven anonymity is correlative to the false sense of intimacy it induces. (There is also an argument to be made that this online exchange has been robbed of everything that enriches dialogue, including but not limited to caring about the teller.) The fragmentation of culture and technology in the past decade has exploded the dialogue of mass culture into a million conversations; the only common thread that exists is the fact that there isn't one.

(2) "The Humanism of Media Ecology," Neil Postman, 2000
http://www.media-ecology.org/publications/proceedings/v1/humanism_of_media_ecology.html

In the 19th century, we clearly suffered from the problem of information scarcity. In the 1830s information could travel only as fast as a human being, which was about 35 miles per hour on a fast train. And so, we addressed the question, How can we get more information, to more people, faster, and in diverse forms? We started to solve this problem with the invention of telegraphy and photography in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Not everyone was enthusiastic about the early attempts to solve that problem. Henry David Thoreau remarked in Walden,

"We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. ...We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."

Nonetheless, the issue of what is significant or useful information was not much discussed, and for 170 years we have been obsessed with machinery that would give access, and give it fast, to a Niagara of information.

Obviously, the Internet does that and we must give all due praise for its efficiency. But it does not help us, neither does television or any other 19th- or 20th-century medium (except perhaps the telephone), to solve the problem of what is significant information. As far as I can tell, the new media have made us into a nation of information junkies; that is to say, our 170-year efforts have turned information into a form of garbage.

(3) Excerpt from Vonnegut's last book, A Man Without a Country, 2005
http://www.wnyc.org/books/52135

We are not born with imagination. It has to be developed by teachers, by parents. There was a time when imagination was very important because it was the major source of entertainment. In 1892 if you were a seven-year-old, you’d read a story—just a very simple one—about a girl whose dog had died. Doesn’t that make you want to cry? Don’t you know how that little girl feels? And you’d read another story about a rich man slipping on a banana peel. Doesn’t that make you want to laugh? And this imagination circuit is being built in your head. If you go to an art gallery, here’s just a square with daubs of paint on it that haven’t moved in hundreds of years. No sound comes out of it.

The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. But it’s no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these circuits. Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music. Now there’s the information highway. We don’t need the circuits any more than we need to know how to ride horses. Those of us who had imagination circuits built can look in someone’s face and see stories there; to everyone else, a face will just be a face.

So What?

What ties these three writings together? All hint at the unintended consequences of an increasingly mediated society: individuation and isolation, quality of available information, and the decline of imagination. And yet I'm left with the "So what?" question.

If these three writers indeed point to different parts of an elephant, what are we to learn from their words? What does it mean that you're reading my electronic text, and that I'm excerpting from others' electronic texts, and that you may add your electronic comment to this electronic page?

And for cryin' out loud, what happens to all this text when the power goes out?

Please share your thoughts.