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Media Matters

Art by Christine Benjamin

The new electronic revolution threatens to supplant books, just as the printed word took over from the spoken culture--in the process, information is gained, but wisdom may be lost

By J. Douglas Allen Taylor

I grew up in a house full of books, and I even read some of them. That gave me access to more information than my parents, who grew up in houses where people came home and told stories around the supper table. Has that made me a wiser person than my parents? My children are growing up in a house with a computer. They do their homework on it. Will that make them wiser than me?

I was thinking about the relationship of information to knowledge to wisdom, and how one moves from one to the other, and it made me recall one late, hot August night some 20 years ago, in the swamp-bottom community of Longview, South Carolina, when I sat on Rev. James Fladger's front porch and listened to his wife tell stories: ghost stories and Brother Rabbit stories and other old folk tales.

I don't remember the details of most of Lurleen Fladger's stories, now, just that the ones about the ghosts pretty much scared the hell out of me. Dead bodies sitting up in their caskets at their funerals and looking around the congregation in wonder; undertakers in embalming rooms lit by single, flickering kerosene lamps that suddenly blew out; shortcuts through graveyards that proved the long way out; mysterious, blinking lights out across the nighttime fields that led men to go out to investigate, never to come back again.

I don't remember most of the details of Mrs. Fladger's stories, now, but I remember the hushed excitement of her voice, and how it commanded us to be-still and listen-close as we sat on the darkened porch, huddled in from the black and eerie stillness of the front yard and the deep woods beyond, and the shine of her eyes as she looked back and forth among the listeners, and the weaving of her fingers in the air as she pulled us into the web of the story until we were stuck, and could not move, and could not get out until she decided it was time to let us go.

Where did she get all of these stories from? Not out of a book, although Mrs. Fladger was a good enough reader. She'd studied every word of every chapter of the King James Version of the Bible four times and was working on the fifth, she was proud to say, and read the weekly county newspaper, cover to cover, all ads included, each Wednesday after supper. But she wasn't one to just pick up a book off the shelf and start reading, even if she'd had a shelf with books to choose from.

No, Lurleen Fladger once told me she'd gotten most of her ghost stories from a woman named Big Meg, the grandmother who had raised her, a woman who had slaved in the Big House kitchen a hundred years ago on a plantation within walking distance of the Fladgers' front porch.

And where did Big Meg hear those stories? Around nighttime fires in the slave quarters, probably, from people who had carried them in the dank holds of the slave ships across the cold bed of the Atlantic.

And before that? Altered always subtly and sometimes vastly by each new storyteller, passing from village to village and community to community and continent to continent--in one form or another, these stories of hags and haunts and talking creatures had probably come from the earliest days of our time on this earth, echoes from the wall of Creation, passed down year after year, century after century, age after age, by a people who did not write such things down, but carried them like a sacred trust, in the vessel of their heads.

Paradigm Lost

Much of my world view was formed in such a leisurely fashion. Around hot, pot-bellied stoves in the front of country stores. While eating bologna sandwich lunches on the banana boat loading dock. While walking up and down rows of green tobacco stalks or snowy cotton, listening to the old people swap stories. Folk wisdom, it was called, and what I learned in those days I have kept with me all my life.

It is the way much of America used to teach, and learn, and pass on its ways, before the country got too big and too much in a hurry to sit around and listen.

Books helped to defeat that way of life. With books you didn't have to be respectful, or wait till folks got to the point. You just flipped the page and moved on to where you wanted to go.

The irony of that fact came to me while I was reading The Gutenberg Elegies (now out in paperback from Fawcett Columbine), in which essayist Sven Birkerts writes that the coming revolution in electronic/digital communication may be the death of books and newspapers and magazines and other printed things.

"The shift is happening throughout our culture," Birkerts writes, "away from the patterns and habits of the printed page and toward a new world distinguished by its reliance on electronic communications. ... The evidence of the change is all around us, though possibly in the manner of the forest that we cannot see for the trees. The electronic media, while conspicuous in gadgetry, are very nearly invisible in their functioning. They have slipped deeply and irrevocably into our midst, created sluices and circulating through them."

I stop reading, more than a little disturbed. I hold Birkerts' book in front of me, letting it bounce slightly in my hand, so that I can almost feel the accumulated heaviness of all the libraries in all the world in the weight of this one small volume, and I wonder, how can books be on their way out? It seems as if they just got here.

We have lived the majority of our existence on this earth as talkers and listeners, carrying our world memories around in our heads, passing them down from generation to generation by word of mouth.

It has only been recently--since the 15th century, actually (in the West, anyway), when Gutenberg invented moveable type and thus made possible the mass production of the printed book--that "writing-things-down" really began to supplant "remembering-things-and-telling-them" as the preferred means of human record-keeping.

But once they got here, books seemed as if they were here to stay. They were so solid, so serious, so much of the ages. Memory was ephemeral, speech was lost in the wind. But books, well, books had heft, could be carried around with you under your arm and shown to your friends, could be collected in great, intelligent armies on hardwood shelves.

Walking through the library stacks at Stanford or Princeton, you could see the whole march of human knowledge in the great sweep from title to title, from section to section, from floor to floor, from building to building. Beside books, the old griots, the village historians, appeared minuscule and, quite frankly, a little silly.

And yet it is the very solidity of books that make them suddenly so vulnerable in this new computer age we are entering now at warp speed, and hold onto your coffee cups as we go, please, so as not to spill anything on the keyboards.

Dragging their thick spines behind them, slithering their slow way along like snails crossing an airport runway, books are under attack from all sides from laughing, darting words that seem to exist nowhere and everywhere, appearing for a moment on our screens and then vanishing again, moving in-and-out, off-and-on at will, nymphlike creatures of the electronic nether world.

A Disneyland of Information

Against the sleekness and sheer speed of computers, books have no defense. And the victim may not just be books themselves, but all of American culture. Birkerts argues, eloquently, that the change in the form of words from print to screen will inevitably change their content, and our relationship to them, for the worse.

"I recently watched a public television special on the history of the computer," Birkerts writes. "One of the many experts and enthusiasts interviewed took up the knowledge question. He explained how the formerly two-dimensional process of book-based learning is rapidly becoming three-dimensional. The day will come, he opined, when interactive and virtual technologies will allow us to more or less dispense with our reliance on the sequence-based print paradigm. ... I was enthralled, but I shuddered, too, for it struck me that when our technologies are all in place--when all databases have been refined and integrated--that will be the day when we stop living in the old hard world and take up residence in some bright new hyperworld, a kind of Disneyland of information."

On the surface, without giving it much thought, doesn't Birkerts seem a bit stodgy and anachronistic? The words of my essay were generated on a computer screen, transmitted in digital form over the Internet to my editor's office, and are now being read in printed form on a page of newspaper. Exactly the same words, in three different forms. The evolution of this very essay itself seems to prove Birkerts' contentions wrong. Form of word does not dictate its content, does it? Just makes it more accessible, easier to manage.

Well, maybe. But there is another truth to be considered. When words become too accessible, for all intents and purposes they become inaccessible.

How the Whales Lost Their Ears

I return to Lurleen Fladger, who never owned a computer and who never used one, but who helped me to understand the world and the people in it. Mrs. Fladger had a story about the proliferation of information. She called it "How the Whales Lost Their Ears," about the fate of these sea mammals in the mechanical age.

In the First Days, she said, the whales were greedy and grabbed up all of the best Creation Pieces. They got the biggest bodies, the prettiest fins and, Lord knows, all the blubber. But they weren't satisfied, and when the biggest ears were put out on the Creation Table, the whales raced back and grabbed those up, too. They were sorry for that, but not at first.

No, at first the whales were happy for their Big Ears, because they could hear everything in the sea.

They could hear all the great oceans sigh, and stir, and turn over in their beds.

They could hear the splash of fat, brown seals slipping into the surf from rocks off the coast of Santa Cruz, and the cooled, green whisper of marine plants in the aqua-black caverns on the ocean's floor.

With their Big Ears, the whales could hear the banshee winds and mile-high spray in the Magellan Straits, the hellish hiss of lava boiling into the Hawaiian surf, the crack of glaciers splitting in two in black Arctic nights.

For years and years, this was the life of the whales, to hear and to comprehend all the sounds coming across the great, vast expanse of all the oceans of the world.

For years and years, they enjoyed their Big Ears, until the day that men made the first mechanical ship, and dropped it in the water, and turned its motor on.

Then came a second ship, and a third, and soon all the seas of all the world were full of them. With the motored ships came the clanking and the banging, the time of the Great Noise, and the whales closed their eyes from the pain of too much to hear, of too much information to take in, and their world collapsed in on them.

They cried out for the Creator to take their Big Ears away and the Creator did, but it was late in the time of Creation so there were no more ears to give. And so, Mrs. Fladger told us, that's why the whales have no ears.

The Great Noise of the Net

To brave the Internet surf these days is to get a small taste of what happened to the whales in the time of the coming of the mechanical ships. First a Great Noise. Then the loss of our ability to hear and comprehend anything at all.

I entered the Internet because I wanted to be more in touch with the world. Accordingly, my Internet server thoughtfully provides me with access to more than 6,000 USENET newsgroups, interest areas where anyone can post a message.

But what am I supposed to do with that? It takes--what?--a minimum of three seconds to read and comprehend a newsgroup name. At that rate, it would take five hours merely to read all the available newsgroup names, just to see what's out there. That says nothing about reading sample postings from any promising group, let alone participating in the discussion.

I try to have a modest reach. Out of the hundred or so Internet mailing lists that seemed interesting or useful, I subscribe to three. On the average morning, there are between 150 and 200 messages in my mailbox.

Some days, out of sheer frustration, I simply go down the list and delete, without reading, every message that is not directed personally to me.

Have I been made wiser by this exercise?

Judging from what I read and see, some people are able to wander around the world along its new web of electronic links at leisure, following hyperpaths to more interesting sites like Dorothy and Toto bouncing down the Yellow Brick Road. Where do they get all of this available time?

For me, the vast information source that is the Internet is mostly a great howling and clattering in the ocean that I can't swim fast enough to catch up to.

I have not been made wiser by this exercise, no, only more frustrated. Am I by myself? Apparently not.

As Birkerts puts it: "In our culture, access is not a problem, but proliferation is. And the reading act is necessarily different than it was in its earliest days. Awed and intimidated by the availability of texts, faced with the all but impossible task of discriminating among them, the reader tends to move across surfaces, skimming, hastening from one site to the next without allowing the words to resonate inwardly.

"The inscription is light but it covers vast territories: quantity is elevated over quality. The possibility of maximum focus is undercut by the awareness of the unread texts that await. The result is that we know countless more 'bits' of information, both important and trivial, than our ancestors. We know them without a stable sense of context, for where the field is that vast all schemes must be seen as provisional."

Information Griots

In at least one way, books and other printed matter were an important, liberating step away from oral communication. In the old village, the old kingdom, the old religious institution, knowledge passed down from generation to generation was the knowledge of orthodoxy.

In the old world, if no one thought like you in your village, your thoughts died with you. Dissent that became popular enough simply passed on to become orthodox legend itself--the tales of William Tell or Robin Hood, for example. The coming of the book broke apart this small-world tyranny of knowledge. Books allowed the reader to pick and choose what knowledge would be obtained. Certainly that knowledge was limited to what was printed in books, but what a leap in available information!

What was once vast, however, has now become unreachable. To have access to all the printed matter in the world, available on your computer screen at home, is to have virtually nothing. How can one manage such a proliferation?

We cannot. But this is America, of course, where one person's disability only serves to increase the corporate bottom line. We cannot manage the explosion of information on our own, and there are companies willing and eager to step up and do the job for us.

We are entering the age of Information System Managers, the modern replacements of the old village elders who kept all knowledge in their heads and allowed no dissent. Soon enough, like an attentive, high-priced hotel, an ISM will provide you with everything: late-breaking factoids, daily newsletter (paper will be an anachronistic term by then), weekly magazine, book of the month.

All will come into your personal computer account for easy downloading into a computer "reader," which you can conveniently carry around with you and peruse at your leisure, if you so choose. Choosing your ISM will determine the slant and nature of the information package you receive: patriotic, secular, Christian conservative, Christian progressive, business professional, feminist, et cetera, ad infinitum.

Some people will have neither the time nor the inclination to be able to figure out what category they fit in, so the big providers (America Online, Time/Warner, ABC/Disney, Microsoft) or the small ones will do it for you. Fill out a survey, and a computer will determine whether you really want a Stephen King or a Toni Morrison-type novel, a digest of the New York Times or the New York Post. All will be interspersed with holographic, real-time commercials, of course, geared specifically to the receiver's age, gender and socio-economic status. Oh brave, new world!

What will be lost in all of this, according to Birkerts, is wisdom.

"Wisdom has nothing to do with the gathering or organizing of facts--this is basic," he writes. "Wisdom is a seeing through facts, a penetration to the underlying laws and patterns. It relates the immediate to something larger--to a context, yes, but also to a big picture that refers to human endeavor sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity.

"To see through data, one must have something to see through to. One must believe in the possibility of a comprehensible whole. ... And this assumption of ends is what we have lost. It is one thing to absorb a fact, to situate it alongside other facts in a configuration, and quite another to contemplate that fact at leisure, allowing it to declare its connection with other facts, its thematic destiny, its resonance."

If Lurleen Fladger were around today, she'd come up with a story about Birkerts locking up the barn with the mule already halfway down the road to town. In other words, he's a bit late, worrying about our loss of wisdom.

Look at the stupidity and inanity that fills our best-seller book lists, watch an afternoon of talk shows, if you dare, and you will see what silliness consumes our collective minds. America is no longer a wise nation, if we ever were one. A clever nation, certainly, good with our hands, good at making stuff.

But to be wise means to listen and be thoughtful, and no serious observer could apply either of those attributes to the America in which we find ourselves in the late 20th century.

I want to paraphrase/echo what Alan Ladd told Jean Arthur in Shane: "Computers are just a tool, no better or worse than the society behind them." The problem is not with the computers replacing books. And the problem was not with books replacing storytelling.

The problem is with us.

Who are we as a nation, and where are we going, and where do we want to go? To know that alone would be the beginning of wisdom.

That's something we might want to stop and think about. And talk about. Before we get swallowed up like so much krill in the whale's mouth of the Computer Age.

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