Instruments of communication

Historically, when any new instrument for communication comes out, the reaction tends to be divided. Some people think it's the best thing since sliced bread; other people fear it as the end of civilization as we know it. So it has been from the time when quills were used for writing to today when politicians “twitter” on their cell phones.

It was Plato who said that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. “[Writing]” he said, “will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have came to know much while for the most part they will know nothing.” He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent and that “writing is not a recipe for memory, but for reminding, that you have discovered. And as for wisdom, you're equipping your pupils with only a semblance of it, not with truth. Thanks to you and your invention, your pupils will be widely read without benefit of a teacher's instruction; in consequence, they'll entertain the delusion that they have wide knowledge, while they are, in fact, for the most part incapable of real judgment. They will also be difficult to get on with since they will have become wise merely in their own conceit, not genuinely so."

We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objected to the telegraph, because even though it speeded things up, he said people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invented the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important was ever going to be done over the telephone because there was no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant -- it disconnected the author from the words while a pen and pencil connected you more directly with the page and the reader. And then with the computer, you had the whole range of "this is going to revolutionize everything" versus "this is going to destroy everything."

In reality what the computer did was to subvert many traditional gate-keeping facilities. We have had, through the history of communications, a tension between giving people the tools to express themselves and regulating that expression: Who should be allowed to publish? Whose manuscript should be allowed to appear as a play in the 17th century? In London, you had to have government approval before you could put on a play. Shakespeare had to get that approval from the authorities. In modern times, a few publishers decided which writer was worth an advance and which book was worth promoting. But now the internet even does away with all these gatekeepers. You do not need an editor or even a publisher. All you need is a Wi-Fi, a laptop and a place to sit and you’re a writer.

And the funny thing is that you could put almost anything out there, and somebody is going to read it. Writers spend their whole lives looking for readers but now with the internet, readers are there. They’re just waiting for people to put stuff online. Does this dilute the quality? Of course. But does it produce nuggets of wisdom from hitherto unknown quarters. That it does. Giving more people the authority to write – and more people seem to find things to say- they are also finding new readers as well. And that’s one criterion for successful writing: having an audience.

Each new instrument, however, brings its own issues. The cell phones spawned the “ twitter” culture where communication was reduced to a mere 114 letters. Many politicians took to this to prove their “hipness” only to find themselves fending off charges of stupidity and worse. Just ask Shashi Tharoor in India or Charles Grassley in the US. So one could communicate but 114 letters does not a classic make.

With the internet, access to books and writing has proliferated and one is inundated with sheer volume of material to be read. There has always been too much to read. But nobody read all the books at the Great Library of Alexandria. Nobody was capable of doing that then. Nobody is reading all that’s online today. What we need, and what we always seem to get, is a way to make this glut of information navigable. We now have search engines and various indexes. Google provides an engine to find any data or the quotation or the author we’re looking for. But we need more. We need intelligent and reliable guides to navigate this flood of information and opinion. Perhaps the recent spurt in the growth of bloggers worldwide will fulfill this need. While it is true that we can't read the whole internet, the web does allow social networks to filter the best content upwards. In this fast-evolving medium, the role of a blogger then becomes as a kind of a traffic cop directing the readers to the better sites and innovative writings. He still writes and edits, but he or she also acts as a kind of disc jockey for the collective mind - sampling the best, re-mixing the funny, keeping the crowd dancing in the public square.

The problem is that now there are too many bloggers!