B004R9Q09U EBOK (35 page)

Nelson’s angry dismissal undoubtedly springs in part from personal disappointment at the Web’s ascendance over his own vision for Xanadu, which now seems relegated to the status of a permanent historical footnote. Nonetheless, he correctly identifies many critical limitations of the Web: the evanescence of Web links, the co-opting
of hypertext by corporate interests, and the emergence of a new “priesthood” of programmers and gatekeepers behind the scenes who still exert control over the technological levers powering the commercial Web.

Even the Web’s own inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, has written despondently over its current state. Like Nelson, Berners-Lee originally envisioned a two-way authoring environment, in which browsers would function as both clients for reading documents and tools for writing new ones. However, such a democratic ethos ultimately runs counter to the profit motives of commercial software companies, which have a strong vested interest in treating users as consumers rather than creators.

For all its limitations, however, the Web’s colossal success serves as a ringing vindication of its forefathers’ vision. While it may be far from perfect, the Web has proved to be an enormously important democratizing technology. It is a profoundly humanist medium, open, accessible, and largely populated by nonprogrammers who have found ways to express themselves using a panoply of available technologies. The explosion of blogging, photo sharing, and other forms of personal expression testify to the viability of a computing environment populated not by “priests” of the computer but by ordinary citizens.

The Web’s popularity has proved a mixed blessing for the original hypertext visionaries. While its success has vindicated their vision, it has also effectively limited the research horizons for many otherwise promising paths of inquiry. While the two decades before the Web saw a flurry of innovation and hopeful experimentation in networked information systems, the current dominance of Web standards has created a technological monolith that seems to preclude further experimentation.

As the Web continues to grow, however, its structural weaknesses are coming into stark relief. The sheer fluidity of Web pages makes it all but impossible to create fixed reference points; the lack of archiving functions leaves much of the Web in a state of perpetual amnesia; hyperlinks work in only one direction, making it difficult for the owner of a document to identify incoming links; and Web browsers
are still designed primarily as tools of consumption, not creativity. At a more visceral level, the Web still carries the legacy of print: “pages” remain the dominant metaphor on the Web, a two-dimensional construct that seems woefully inadequate to support the range of possible interactions that networked computers could support. Internet theorist McKenzie Wark has suggested that we need “a new spatial architecture for dealing with text,”
⁵⁶
echoing the sentiments of many earlier hypertext theorists. Perhaps our centuries of reliance on the familiar form of the printed book will make the page metaphor difficult to dislodge, or perhaps some new system will yet emerge to break the conceptual stranglehold of a basic form that has remained essentially unchanged since the age of papyrus.

Twenty years after Johannes Gutenberg invented his printing press, a bare handful of people in Germany and France had ever seen a printed book. Less than 20 years after its invention, the World Wide Web has touched billions.

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,

The element of fire is quite put out;

The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man’s wit

Can well direct him where to look for it.

And freely men confess that this world’s spent,

When in the planets, and the firmament

They seek so many new; they see that this

Is crumbled out again to his atomies

Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;

All just supply, and all relation.

John Donne, “An Anatomy of the World”

Today, we stand at a precipice: between the near-limitless capacity of computer networks and the real physical limits of human comprehension. More than a billion people have now used a Web browser. Soon, millions of children in developing countries will start using $100 laptops to connect with each other online.
¹
In an era when almost anyone can publish—and millions do—digital technology has fueled an unprecedented surge of individual expression. In the legions of bloggers, artists, politicians, journalists, and everyday citizens taking advantage of the Internet’s ease of communication, we are witnessing the rise of vast populist networks threatening the power of old institutional hierarchies. The recent success of pop philosophy books like
The Tipping Point
and
The Wisdom of Crowds
seems to attest further to the appeal of the new populism, suggesting a growing faith in an emergent order guided not by an elite class of philosophers but by the will of the people.

Whether or not the most utopian visions of digital populism ever come to fruition, we are already witnessing social, political, and cultural change on a scale comparable only to the greatest previous axial periods in the history of technology. During the Ice Age information
explosion, the new technologies of symbolism allowed previously loose-knit social groups to form larger tribal organizations; in ancient Sumeria, the advent of writing allowed traders to broaden their circles of trust and pave the way for the first bureaucracies; in medieval Europe, the continent’s great descent into illiteracy and the subsequent renewal of oral culture provided the catalyst for the literary innovations of the medieval scriptoria; centuries later, the violent disruptions of the Gutenberg era brought mass literacy into conflict with the older folk traditions that had predominated outside the cloisters, resulting in a series of transformations that still reverberate today. All of these developments had one thing in common: They all triggered conflict between literacy and orality.

With the rise of the Internet, we may be witnessing a similar phenomenon taking shape today. Many of our familiar digital communication tools like e-mail, instant messaging, and blogs may seem, on the surface, like just another form of writing. But if we look closely at how people use these tools, we can see that many of these new modes of communication bear at least as much resemblance to the spoken word as to traditional forms of writing. The conversational tone of e-mail, the shorthand familiarity of instant messaging, and the loose rhetorical style of many blogs seem to suggest the casual rhythms of speech. Of course, large parts of the Internet still consist of traditional literary artifacts like books, newspapers, essays, dissertations, and so forth. But as more and more people get online, their interactions feel increasingly like a vast, far-flung conversation. Ultimately, the Internet’s popularity may have less to do with a renewed public love of reading and writing than with our deep-seated need to talk.

As Steven Pinker points out, most children learn to write only with great difficulty; but we are born babblers, the “talking ape.”
²
Until recently, most people on earth remained illiterate (and today more than one in five people still cannot read
³
). But almost every one of us is a natural talker. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that our most durable information systems—mythologies, religions, and various forms of practical know-how—have persisted not by dint of libraries, indexes, or taxonomic systems, but largely through word of mouth. Books and other forms of writing come and go, it seems, but
the lineage of the spoken word gives us an unbroken connection to the deep past.

Today, we may be witnessing the latest manifestation of that ancient disposition toward spoken language. Linguist Walter J. Ong coined the term “secondary orality” to describe the parallels between electronic media and earlier oral cultures. While electronic media do not exactly mimic the dynamics of the spoken word, they nonetheless recall many of the same forms. Secondary orality is “post-literal,” as Ong puts it, inasmuch as it is predicated on literacy, allowing for the mediation of spoken culture through the technology of the written word. Unfortunately, our understanding of how oral cultures really operate remains sketchy, thanks to a longstanding disdain for oral tradition among the literate scholarly class. Traditional scholarship—itself a product of literacy—has invariably elevated writing over the “primitive” culture of the spoken word. As a result, the study of oral traditions has until recently received scant attention from serious scholars. “Despite the oral roots of all verbalization, the scientific and literary study of languages and literature has for centuries, until quite recent years, shied away from orality,” writes Ong. “Texts have clamored for attention so peremptorily that oral creations have tended to be regarded generally as variants of written productions or, if not this, as beneath serious scholarly attention.”
⁴
While generations of academic scholars have devoted their careers to the study of the written word, only a handful of researchers have opened serious lines of inquiry into the study of orality. As a result, our understanding of the effects of electronic media on culture remains partial at best, and at worst egregiously biased toward the written word.

Today, we are witnessing the reemergence in electronic form of oral patterns that have been hiding in plain sight for generations. So deeply ingrained is our cultural disposition toward literacy, however, that many of us fail to recognize the oral characteristics of electronic media. Today, writers inevitably tend to describe the Web in terms of “publishing” or, like H. G. Wells, to compare it to a vast library. And while the Web does indeed support new kinds of publishing, it is also a place to “talk.”

Ong suggests that the difference between oral and literate cul
tures boils down to a few core distinctions: Oral traditions are additive rather than subordinative, aggregative rather than analytic, empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced, and situational rather than abstract. The written word also enables individuals to transcend the limits of subjectivity. As Ong puts it, “Abstractly sequential, classificatory, explanatory examination of phenomena or of stated truths is impossible without writing and reading.”
⁵
Writes Ong, “To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials.” This is the paradox of literacy: It enables us to externalize our experiences and share those experiences with utter strangers, while simultaneously fostering deeper and deeper levels of introspection. “Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.” And while technology inevitably relies on artifice, “artificiality is natural to human beings.”
⁶

Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that so many people have taken to the Internet, an artificial technology that lends itself to both “oral” and literate forms of expression. Often both modes coexist with each other. To take a familiar example, many commercial Web sites—like
Amazon.com
—offer independent reviews to accompany their product listings. Typically, these come in two flavors: “expert” reviews, usually licensed from publications, and customer-written reviews contributed by users. Frequently, these reviews appear side by side, yet separately. Customer reviews seem to fit Ong’s criteria of an oral medium; they acquire value additively and aggregatively—that is, we look at the cumulative customer ratings for a product more than an individual review; they are empathetic—usually written in the first-person—and participatory, insofar as they invite conversation. Editorial reviews, by contrast, bear the hallmarks of literate culture: they are subordinative—that is, presuming a voice of authoritative judgment—analytic and objectively distanced, and abstract (usually written in the third person). These two forms—the oral and the written—coexist, yet they never quite meet. Most readers easily make the distinction between the two forms, and they may
award more authority to the individual editorial review over the individual customer review. But the cumulative “oral tradition” of the customer reviews as a whole may often carry more weight than the individual editorial review.