The Internet is entrenched. It's time to understand it – and not as a curiosity or an entry in the annals of technology or business but as an integral part of our humanity, as the latest and most powerful extension and expression of the project of being human.When I was in my early twenties, I met a man (Dave's roommate Stephen) who was a recent recipient of a degree in Philosophy. In my ignorance, I found this puzzling, and I asked him in all seriousness what the value was in a Philosophy degree; what did he intend to do with it? He patiently explained to me that Philosophy is the most important of studies, and while the majority of people could be satisfied with mindlessly doing things, there would always be a need for those who stand apart from the action, evaluating the import of that which is being done. In all the intervening years, I haven't done much to deepen my knowledge of Philosophy – I can no more explain Hegelian Dialectics than I can Hubbardian Dianetics – but that doesn't mean that I don't dip from time to time into the writings of those who have the ability to stand back from our modern world and evaluate the import of what's going on. Virginia Heffernan certainly has this ability, and with Magic and Loss, she employs her uniquely appropriate background – as a very early user of the pre-Internet, and as the recipient of both an undergrad degree in Philosophy and a PhD in English Literature, she has worked as a television critic at Slate and as an Internet columnist at The New York Times – to deconstruct (and celebrate) this revolutionary technology that the majority of us mindlessly use without ever standing back and evaluating its import; defining that which seems magic and that which is, inevitably, lost.
When I recently followed a suggestion and read The Shallows, I was left unconvinced by that author's Doomsday warnings about us all blindly marching off the cultural cliff of Internet use. It was supremely satisfying for me, therefore, when Heffernan called out that book (amongst others) by name, stating that:
Alarmist tracts that warn about how the Web endangers culture or coarsens civilization miss the point that the same was said in turn about theater, lyric poetry, the novel, film, and television.The only idea I found compelling in The Shallows was the evidence from fMRI machines that showed the differences seen in the brain when reading a tablet vs reading a physical book (and the implications this had for deep study and the development of wisdom), and I was shocked to read Heffernan refer to this as pseudoscience; as “false empiricism in the service of ideology”. I'll need to chew on that further. Probably use the Internet to find the consensus on “neurobiology is pseudoscience”. My point is: this is the kind of Negative Nellying that Heffernan continually takes on in this book. People think that the limits of Twitter preclude deep thought? Every Confucianism can be stated in fewer than 140 characters, replies Heffernan. People think that the selfie has degraded and diluted the art of photography? Instagram, and Flickr before it, are powerful tools in the hands of an artist. Network television can't believe that their carefully – professionally – produced efforts are losing eyeballs to the trash on YouTube? There wouldn't be millions of views on “haul” and “fail” videos if that wasn't what people wanted to see. This is the democratisation of art; the Internet is a place where we can all express ourselves. And because this is where I primarily express myself, I'll include the Negative Nellying about the future of reading itself:
Americans read with highlighters. We read for “information”, as though for a future comprehension test. We underline, copy quotations, pull excerpts, produce decks, compose reviews. And if the World Wide Web has shown us anything at all, they also comment like crazy – on literary blogs, on Facebook, and on Goodreads as well as in seamier venues.The National Endowment for the Arts regards this type of “participatory reading” as “impure”; we who mark quotes and write reviews aren't actually reading because the NEA says so. But we all know better – it doesn't take a Philosopher to notice that even those who would never pick up a book are actually reading constantly on their screens and devices, and anyway, there's no such thing as "good" reading or "bad" reading.
To be more general about Magic and Loss: Heffernan divides her message into the five broad categories for which we use the Internet – Design, Text, Images, Video, and Music – and along the way, she enthuses about those advancements that most excite her personally: the Kindle; iPod; “beautiful” game apps like Hundreds; the perfection of VR with Oculus Rift; this is the magic of the title. Heffernan also points out the downsides of moving our lives over to the digital world: the poor design of the Internet in general (because of the rampant dyslexia of early programmers, apparently); the constant tracking of and selling to the users of the Internet; paywalls that divide us into classes; the loss of depth to the music that is compressed into MP3s; no longer experiencing the singular intimacy of listening to the breathing of the person on the other end of a twirly-corded landline; these are the losses; a decent trade-off to me. My only complaint would be that Heffernan seems to be writing broadly on culture – to me there's only a casual relationship between Kindles and iPods and the Internet – but I did find it all interesting, if not quite what the title promised. In the final section of the book, Heffernen goes off-topic completely, going into more depth about her early love of computer programming, her transformation from atheist Philosophy student to agnostic English grad student to converted Jewish wife, mother and columnist to her recently outing herself as a Creationist: and I loved the addition of all this personal information. Again, this might not be quite what was promised by the promotional blurb, but I was interested in all of it.
The Internet is the great masterpiece of human civilization. As an artifact it challenges the pyramid, the aqueduct, the highway, the novel, the newspaper, the nation-state, the Magna Carta, Easter Island, Stonehenge, agriculture, the feature film, the automobile, the telephone, the telegraph, the television, the Chanel suit, the airplane, the pencil, the book, the printing press, the radio, the realist painting, the abstract painting, the Pill, the washing machine, the skyscraper, the elevator, and cooked meat. As an idea it rivals monotheism.If there's one thing I know for sure, it's that the erudition and enthusiasm of Virginia Heffernan explicates and justifies all those Philosophy degrees; I'm certainly delighted that she's able to step back and evaluate this Internet thing that we all currently take for granted; more delighted that I have found her.
Although I linked to the Why I'm a Creationist article in the body of the review, I'm just going to highlight the ending of it here:
As “Life of Pi” author Yann Martel once put it, summarizing his page-turner novel: “1) Life is a story. 2) You can choose your story. 3) A story with God is the better story.”I have referenced that same notion many times in explaining why I have no problem believing in a Creator God; but that's not necessarily the Biblical God of Adam and Eve. At a recent conference of Physicists and Philosophers, Neil deGrasse Tyson put the odds at fifty-fifty that our reality is a simulation run by alien intelligence: that sounds like a Creator God to me. In the original article I read about that conference, someone commented: But what if that alien intelligence is living in a computer simulation run by an alien intelligence living in a computer simulation? My favourite response to that comment was: Then it's turtles all the way down. That comment gave me the shivers -- just what if that Native American imagery is approximately accurate? -- and in a roundabout way, this all ties into Virginia Heffernan's cheerleading for the Internet, including lurking the comments section on articles, as even this is participating in the great human project.
I also want to grab a couple more excerpts, just because I liked the way they related to me personally. On why Heffernan prefers her Kindle to physical books:
I had become bored with the books on my shelf, the wide tables of deeply discounted and interchangeable books at Barnes & Noble, the indifferent clerks at the major bookstores and the embittered clerks at the indie ones. The tatty galleys I got to review and even the promise of enlightenment in the deep, dark stacks at Widener and Bodleian: all of it had started to conjure atrophy, morgues. Death itself.Happily, I work with enthusiastic clerks at my major bookstore, and we all gladly serve those customers who still delight in a tactile experience of reading (as do I, although I hold no morally superior view of it).
I thought it was funny that Heffernan (more than once) referred to the BlackBerry's keyboard as dirty and disease-harbouring; found it interesting that she concludes the mass migration to iPhone and Android simply represents a shift from people wanting to communicate primarily by text, to primarily by image (and this ties back to Steve Jobs and his dyslexia). On the demise of the poor BlackBerry she writes:
Research in Motion, the Ontario-based company that makes the BlackBerry, has for years been ceding market share, with unnerving Canadian politeness, to Google's Android and Apple's iPhone...The BlackBerry's braille-like keys – you could have written a novel on those high-functioning keys – now seem unhygienic. The keyboard is like a cluster of warts on an aged knee: nothing but traps for skin cells and bacteria and mortality.On the one hand, I've never owned a BlackBerry, and on the other, it is sad to see a formerly world-dominant local product bite the dust.
The last I heard of Stephen the Philosopher, he was the manager of a small live theater company (because, of course, one must do something in order to feed oneself). I wonder if he spends time philosophising though; if he has a blog somewhere to capture and share his thoughts about the modern world. I hope so.