Near the end of “Minerva’s Owl,” in a rare moment of concision, [Harold Adams Innis] summed up his view: “Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.” With that one startling and seemingly paradoxical sentence, he called into question a foundational assumption of modern media and, indeed, modern society: that an abundance of information brings a wealth of knowledge. Information and knowledge, he saw, could be adversaries. […]
The early, idealistic view of the Internet proved an illusion. The system went out of balance almost immediately, its spatial reach subverting its temporal depth. Far from alleviating our present-mindedness, the net magnified it.
Innis would not have been surprised. Information in digital form is weightless, its immateriality perfectly suited to instantaneous long-distance communication. It makes newsprint seem like concrete. The infrastructure built for its transmission, from massive data centers to fiber-optic cables to cell towers and Wi-Fi routers, is designed to deliver vast quantities of information as “dynamically” as possible, to use a term favored by network engineers and programmers. The object is always to increase the throughput of data. When the flow of information reaches the consumer, it’s translated into another flow: a stream of images formed of illuminated pixels, shifting patterns of light. The screen interface, particularly in its now-dominant touch-sensitive form, beckons us to dismiss the old and summon the new — to click, swipe, and scroll; to update and refresh. If the printed book was a technology of inscription, the screen is a technology of erasure.
(Also, this line from Carr is too good to pass up: “To use Google today is to enter not an archive but a bazaar.”)
Of course, a failure to communicate is nothing foreign to human interaction. If the dominant media belligerently amplify the failure, they certainly didn’t create it. But if the medium is both the message and the metaphor (and it certainly is), it’s a steeper, uphill battle than it ought to be for us these days.
For all his insight and brilliance, Innis was a largely pessimistic man, Carr tells us. But he ends the piece with what is basically a shout-out to the one glimmer of hope he finds in Innis: a reverence for the spoken word. “A spoken word may be as evanescent as a tweet or a snap,” Carr says, “but the acts of talking and listening — together, in one place — remain unmatched as vehicles for critical, creative, and communal thought.”
Linger on that word: unmatched.
The face-to-face interaction is simply that — unmatched.
In all of human history, is there an older or simpler truth than this? Surely this is because there really is no other human kind of interaction. We replicate this, as humans, with our interactions online, and often do so wonderfully; but it is still a replication, a shadow. And — though a shadow is not nothing — information that spends any extended period of time absent the interacting body through which character and love and community emerge is bound to degrade. And it is bound to degrade everything — the character, the love, the community, and the information itself.
The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.—T. S. Eliot
And yet, still unmatched is this:
To have turned away from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything.
—Elizabeth Bowen