I recently read a review of The Social Network by Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books. In this same piece she uses, rather than reviews, the thoughts and ideas from Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto to bolster much of her misgivings about becoming, via software engagement, Person 2.0.
Now, you can likely already see where I'm headed with this (of course, that's why I titled the blog post--as a clue!): there is so much to think about in the piece that I have to narrow to one point in particular that I think has serious consequences for us all: Person 2.0 is now speaking an entirely new language and this language is reductionist in the extreme. Due to this Person 2.0 will be unable to think outside of marketable tweets in the very near future. Your "leaders" and CEO's, your Big Brother, will of course continue to use actual words and read actual text and so be able to continue to use their minds for more than blips beeps and tweets about the next great program on gadgets and pawn shops.
Smith points this out specifically in what is only a footnote in the article (#4) about cell phone texting...she still texts with friends in complete sentences. Her development as a thinker and communicator happened prior to texting. However, kids are now growing up using text language as a primary tool of social communication--and the only communicating they're doing is about their social lives. There will be no great thinker to arise out of this milieu...only greater despots.
Orwell was right (about way too many things) about the controlling ability of limiting language. However, instead of what many of us think of Newspeak as black representing white and vice versa (Minipax is really the Ministry of War, etc.) it is rather the winnowing of terms to represent no variations and gradations--to create no connotations--Newspeak is only denotation--a word can only mean one thing one way and emotions and thoughts can be narrowed, or rather "shallowed", to only reflect that simple concept. There is no "bad"--only "ungood". It's not evil, it's "double plus ungood".
Person 2.0 will lol their way to being controlled in this manner.
As evidenced in Digital Nation, another problem is that the intellectual community is catering to these Little Persons 2.0 in an academic setting. Suddenly kids are refusing to read entire 200 page novels (please!) and professors are restructuring their courses to accomodate these shortening attention spans. Kids are fucking themselves over. Parents feed the problem by allowing them to be ruled by technology from such a young and impressionable age.
ReplyDeleteViva la books and crossword puzzles!
I also read something about the world of self-publishing on the Internet. Everyone wants to be a writer, but no one wants to be a reader. You can't be a good writer without reading.
As one who reads too many blogs you can see the truth of this. And talk about a distraction--so many of these blogs are simply posts about other blogs, the way the news media now really only talks about a primary event in terms of "reaction" to it, as if the reaction and those who reacted are more important that the original event.
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