How to Be Alone (20 page)

“The consumer” is a cheerful omnipresence in Negroponte’s book, a most-favored arbiter.

Being Digital
is awash in references to a world of moneyed internationalism—to the luxury hotels the author stays in, to his lunches with prime ministers, to transpacific flights, Burgundian vintners, Swiss boarding schools, Bavarian nannies. The ease with which jobs and capital and digital signals now cross national boundaries is matched by the mobility of the new informational elite, those lucky symbolic analysts who, like many a ruling class before them, are finding that they have more in common with the elect of other countries than with the preterite of their own. It’s a revelation, when you notice it, how free of nationalism
Being Digital
is, how interchangeable the locales. In a brief aside, Negroponte complains that people lecture him about life in the real world—“as if,” he says, “I live in an unreal world.” He’s right to complain. His world is as real as the ganglands that Barry Sanders evokes. But the two worlds are growing ever more unreal to each other.

High above the clouds, the sun always shines. Negroponte paints a tomorrow of talking toasters, smart refrigerators, and flavorized computers (“You will be able to buy a Larry King personality for your newspaper interface”) that is
Jetsons
-like in its retention of today’s suburban values. To find clues to a deeper transformation, you have to read between the lines. Negroponte has a habit, for example, of reducing human functions to machinery: the human eye is “the client for the image,” an ear is a “channel,” faces are “display devices,” and “Disney’s guaranteed audience is refueled at a rate that exceeds 12,500 births each hour.” In the future, “CD-ROMs may be edible, and parallel processors may be applied like sun tan lotion.” The new, digital human being will dine not only on storage devices but on narcissism. “Newspapers will be printed in an edition of one . . . Call it
The Daily Me
” Authors, meanwhile, as they move from text to multimedia, will assume the role of “stage-set or theme-park designer.”

When Barry Sanders looks at young people, he sees lost, affectless faces. Negroponte sees a “mathematically able and more visually literate” generation happily competing in a cyberspace where “the pursuit of intellectual achievement will not be tilted so much in favor of the bookworm.” He espouses a kind of therapeutic corporatism, defending video games as teachers of “strategies” and “planning skills,” and recalling how his son had trouble learning to add and subtract until his teacher put dollar signs in front of the figures. The closest Negroponte comes to recognizing the existence of social dysfunction is in his description of the robots that in the near future will bring us our drinks and dust our empty bookshelves: “For security reasons, a household robot must also be able to bark like a ferocious dog.”

IT’S EASY TO FAULT
Negroponte
’S
resolute ahistoricism; harder, however, to dislike an author who begins his book by confessing, “Being dyslexic, I don’t like to read.” Negroponte is nothing more and nothing less than a man who has profited by speculating on the future and is willing, like a successful stockbroker, to share his secrets. Apart from offering a few misty assurances (“Digital technology can be a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony”), he doesn’t pretend his revolution will solve problems more serious than the annoyance of having to visit Blockbuster in the flesh to rent a movie.

In a culture of false perspective, where Johnny Cochran can appear taller than Boris Yeltsin, it’s difficult to tell if the Internet is legitimately big news. Russell Baker has compared the hyping of the Net to the hyping of atomic energy in the fifties, when industry pitchmen promised that we would soon be paying “pennies” for our monthly utilities. Today’s technology boosters can’t offer ordinary consumers as measurable a benefit as cheap electricity. Instead, the selling points are intangible—conveyed through the language of health and hipness.

Digital technology, the argument goes, is good medicine for an ailing society. TV has given us government by image; interactivity will return power to the people. TV has produced millions of uneducable children; computers will teach them. Top-down programming has isolated us; bottom-up networks will reunite us. As a bonus, being digital is medicine that tastes good. It’s a pop-cultural pleasure we’re invited to indulge. Indeed, some of the best television these days is funded by IBM: nuns in an Italian convent whisper about the Net, Moroccan businessmen sip mint tea and talk interfacing. This is both advertising and luscious postmodern art. Of course, the aim of such art is simply to make the giving of our dollars to IBM seem inevitable. But popularity has become its own justification.

If I were fashioning my own killer argument against the digital revolution, I’d begin with the observation that both Newt Gingrich and Timothy Leary are crazy about it. Somewhere, something isn’t adding up. Douglas Rushkoff, in
Media Virus
!—his book-length exploration of the media counterculture—quotes a skeptical New Age thinker as offering this bright side to the revolution: “There’s no longer a private space. The idea of literate culture is basically a middle-class notion—it’s the gentleman in his book-lined study with the privacy for reflection. That’s a very elitist notion.” Robert Coover, writing in a similar vein in a pair of essays for the
Times Book Review
, promises that hypertext will replace “the predetermined one-way route” of the conventional novel with works that can be read in any number of ways, and thus liberate readers from “domination by the author.” At the same time, Speaker Gingrich’s own clutch of New Age authors advertise the electronic town meeting as the perfect antidote to tired Second Wave liberalism. Where Wall Street sees a profit for investors, visionaries of every political persuasion see empowerment for the masses.

That news of this better future continues to arrive by way of print—in “the entombing, distancing oppression of paper,” as a
Wired
columnist put it—may simply be a paradox of obsolescence, like the necessity of riding your horse to the dealer who sells you your first car. But Negroponte, in explaining his decision to publish an actual book, offers a surprising reason for his choice: interactive multimedia leave too little to the imagination. “By contrast,” he says, “the written word sparks images and evokes metaphors that get much of their meaning from the reader’s imagination and experiences. When you read a novel, much of the color, sound, and motion come from you.”

If Negroponte took the health of the body politic seriously, he would need to explore what this argument implies about the muscle tone of our imaginations in a fully digital age. But you can trust him, and the hard-core corporate interests he advises, not to engage in sentimentality. The truth is simple, if unpretty. The novel is dying because the consumer doesn’t want it anymore.

NOVELS ARE BY NO MEANS
dead, of course—just ask Annie Proulx or Cormac McCarthy. But the Novel, as a seat of cultural authority, is teetering on the brink, and in
The Gutenberg Elegies
, a collection of essays subtitled
The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
, Sven Birkerts registers his surprise and dismay that its decline has not been more widely mourned. Not even professional book critics, who ought to be the front line of the novel’s defenders, have raised the alarm, and Birkerts, who is a critic himself, sounds like a loyal soldier deserted by his regiment. The tone of his elegies is brave but plaintive.

Birkerts begins his defense of the novel by recounting how, while growing up in an immigrant household, he came to understand himself by reading Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, and Hermann Hesse. The authors as well as the alienated, romantic heroes of their books became models for emulation and comparison. Later, on the desolate emotional beach on which the wave of sixties idealism seems to have deposited so many people, Birkerts weathered years of depression by reading, by working in bookstores, and, finally, by becoming a reviewer. “Basically,” he says, “I was rescued by books.”

Books as catalysts of self-realization and books as sanctuary: the notions are paired because Birkerts believes that “inwardness, the more reflective component of self,” requires a “space” where a person can reflect on the meaning of things. Compared with the state of a person watching a movie or clicking through hypertext, he says, absorption in a novel is closer to a state of meditation, and he is at his best when tracing the subtleties of this state. Here is his description of his initial engagement with a novel: “I feel a tug. The chain has settled over the sprockets; there is the feel of meshing, then the forward glide.” And here is his neat reply to hypertext’s promise of liberation from the author: “This ‘domination by the author’ has been, at least until now, the
point
of reading and writing. The author masters the resources of language to create a vision that will engage and in some way overpower the reader; the reader goes to the work to be subjected to the creative will of another.” Birkerts on reading fiction is like M. F. K. Fisher on eating or Norman Maclean on fly-casting. He makes you want to go do it.

Counterposed to his idyll of the book-lined study, however, is a raging alarmism. In the decline of the novel, Birkerts sees more than a shift in our habits of entertainment. He sees a transformation of the very nature of humanity. His nightmare, to be sure, “is not one of neotroglodytes grunting and wielding clubs, but of efficient and prosperous information managers living in the shallows of what it means to be human and not knowing the difference.” He grants that technology has made our perspectives more global and tolerant, our access to information easier, our self-definitions less confining. But, as he repeatedly stresses, “the more complex and sophisticated our systems of lateral access, the more we sacrifice in the way of depth.” Instead of Augie March, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Instead of Manassas battlefield, a historical theme park. Instead of organizing narratives, a map of the world as complex as the world itself. Instead of a soul, membership in a crowd. Instead of wisdom, data.

In a coda to
The Gutenberg Elegies
, Birkerts conjures up, out of the pages of
Wired
magazine, the Devil himself, “sleek and confident,” a “sorcerer of the binary order” who offers to replace the struggle of earthly existence with “a vivid, pleasant dream.” All he wants in return is mankind’s soul. Birkerts confesses to an envy for the Devil: “I wonder, as I did in high school when confronted with the smooth and athletic ones, the team captains and class presidents, whether I would not, deep down, trade in all this doubting and wondering and just be him.” Yet, tempted as he is by the sexiness of the Devil’s technology, a voice in his heart says, “Refuse it.”

Technology as the Devil incarnate, being digital as perdition: considering that contemporary authors like Toni Morrison have vastly larger audiences than Jane Austen had in her day, something other than sober analysis would seem to be motivating Birkerts’s hyperbole. The clue, I think, is in the glimpses he gives of his own life beneath the shallows of what it means to be human. He refers to his smoking, his quarts of beer, his morbid premonitions of disaster, his insomnia, his brooding. He names as the primary audience for his book his many friends who refuse to grant him the darkness of our cultural moment, who shrug off electronic developments as enhancements of the written word. “I sometimes wonder if my thoughtful friends and I are living in the same world . . . Naturally I prefer to think that the problem lies with them.”

These lines are redolent with depression and the sense of estrangement from humanity that depression fosters. Nothing aggravates this estrangement more than a juggernaut of hipness such as television has created and the digital revolution’s marketers are exploiting. It’s no accident that Birkerts locates apocalypse in the arch-hip pages of
Wired
. He’s still the high-school loner, excluded from the in crowd and driven, therefore, to the alternative and more “genuine” satisfactions of reading. But what, we might ask him, is so wrong with being an efficient and prosperous information manager? Do the team captains and class presidents really not have souls?

Elitism is the Achilles’ heel of every serious defense of art, an invitation to the poisoned arrows of populist rhetoric. The elitism of modern literature is, undeniably, a peculiar one—an aristocracy of alienation, a fraternity of the doubting and wondering. Still, after voicing a suspicion that nonreaders view reading “as a kind of value judgment upon themselves, as an elitist and exclusionary act,” Birkerts is brave enough to confirm their worst fears: “Reading
is
a judgment. It brands as insufficient the understandings and priorities that govern ordinary life.” If he had stopped here, with the hard fact of literature’s selective appeal,
The Gutenberg Elegies
would be an unassailable, if unheeded, paean. But because books saved his life and he can’t abide the thought of a world without them, he falls under the spell of another, more popular defense of art. This is the grant-proposal defense, the defense that avoids elitism. Crudely put, it’s that while technology is merely palliative, art is therapeutic.

I admit to being swayable by this argument. It’s why I banished my Trinitron and gave myself back to books. But I try to keep this to myself. Unhappy families may be aesthetically superior to happy families, whose happiness is all alike, but “dysfunctional” families are not. It was easy to defend a novel about unhappiness; everybody knows unhappiness; it’s part of the human condition. A novel about emotional dysfunction, however, is reduced to a Manichaeanism of utility. Either it’s a sinister enabler, obstructing health by celebrating pathology, or it’s an object lesson, helping readers to understand and overcome their own dysfunction. Obsession with social health produces a similar vulgarity: if a novel isn’t part of a political solution, it must be part of the problem. The doctoral candidate who “exposes” Joseph Conrad as a colonialist is akin to the school board that exiles Holden Caulfield as a poor role model—akin as well, unfortunately, to Birkerts, whose urgency in defending reading devolves from the assumption that books must somehow “serve” us.