by Tod Davies
Now when Dennis Dunleavy reflects on his experiences on the web, he’s being a little sly. When he says, “Attempting to understand all the changes we are currently experiencing is futile,” he doesn’t really mean it. He can’t. His whole piece is about attempting to understand those changes. He proves by what he thinks about and what he writes that the attempt isn’t a dead end at all. And in what he writes there’s an inkling of a new start, as well.
But what he’s saying in that statement about futility is something we’ve all felt. That the new technologies and the information tsunami they send surging our way feel threatening and alien to us. But nothing is alien to a human being that she or he can think or feel or experience. How could it be?
What all this information can be, and is, is a distraction. What is happening around us is a distraction on a scale unknown before in the world. The scale is unknown, but not the function of the distraction itself.
We live in an imperial world, filled with horrifying inequity and the constant threat of destruction, both long term and short. Now many people reading this will think to themselves, “Surely people have always thought the end was near.” Well, they haven’t. Not always. And when they did, they were frequently right, that the end of their way of life really was near. The Christians were right about the end of the Roman Empire, for example. The more prescient Greeks could see, at the end of the Peloponnesian Wars, what was likely to happen next. And these were people who weren’t staring at environmental destruction on an unprecedented scale or the possible use of nuclear weapons. We are. Yet we go on, every day, sleepwalking, as if it wasn’t so. If we weren’t all in a mutual trance, the threat of our situation would be quite plain to us, and it would be impossible for life to go on as it has – people would naturally demand a structural change. Nothing else would make any sense.
But we are in a trance, and that trance is sustained and protected by a system of distractions that is awe-inspiring in its technical sophistication and apparently magical abilities. Systems protect themselves once they’re in place, and the system of inequality and hierarchy that has produced our present situation has, among other defenses, thrown up a huge, distracting web of information. There is so much of it out there, so stimulating, so mesmerizing, that we all just look at it, and, like Dennis at the start of his essay, decide it’s futile to do anything to try to understand it.
This is an illusion. And the illusion is based on a confusion between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is information: facts, technologies, narratives, media of all kinds. But wisdom is what you do with that knowledge. And for all the gaudy modernity of present day knowledge, the questions wisdom tries to answer have stayed the same for as long as human beings have been around to ask them. Wisdom is concerned with the right way of life. What is the best way to live? It seeks to answer the basic questions a human faces, none of which have ever changed. Who am I? What is my duty? What is my place in the community and what am I doing about it?
Or, communally: Who are we? What is our duty? What is our place in the universe and what are we doing about it?
Anything – any information, any knowledge, any technology – that does not go toward answering these questions is useless from wisdom’s point of view. And if, say as an example, technology claims that it is important in itself, and not for what it can do to create a better life for the humans who invented it, then its claim is wrong. It becomes at best a distraction, at worst – as we can see happening in many areas around us – a destructive force, an end in itself. Technology becomes an end in itself, when we don’t have the wisdom to contain it.
Take all of the items that Dennis lists in bemusement, as examples of how the world has changed as a result of technology. There isn’t a one that isn’t an example of how humans still lack basic wisdom – of how the age-old problems of human triviality, vanity, laziness, malice and cruelty still ruin lives. An editor uses a picture of a young girl without permission? Is that an issue of technology or of human arrogance? A vengeful mother manipulates a young girl into suicide? Is that technology or malice? A woman dies from playing a game? Technology or triviality? The woman who is appalled by the man she met on the Internet is not the first to be wishfully blind about a potential mate. And plagiarism has been around since there was something to plagiarize and people lazy enough to want someone to do their own work for them.
I think the most poignant of the examples Dennis gives for me was that of the father who communicated with his son over the Internet a few days before the son died in the Iraq war. Now this is a scenario that is as old as humanity — a father losing a son to war. The whys of it have never been properly answered. And now, when we are clamoring for a proper answer, can it be a coincidence that new distractions rise up to tell us that question is not the issue at all?
But it is the issue. The issue is not how we talk to each other. The issue is why we talk to each other. What we talk about. And what we do with what we conclude. How we do it – that may be exciting, distracting, astonishing. But, in the end, it’s not very important. And no matter how new the technology might seem, if you look back at history, you’ll see that newness, that modernity, is a little deceptive. Take what the MIT professor Henry Jenkins, who Dennis cites, says about ‘convergence cultures’. It’s worth quoting again in full: “The new knowledge culture has arisen as our ties to older forms of social community are breaking down, our rooting in physical geography is diminished, our bonds to the extended and even the nuclear family are disintegrating, and our allegiances to nation-states are being redefined.” Now think about an ancient technology, that was just as new, groundbreaking, and startlingly modern in its day as the Internet is in ours: the Roman Empire’s system of roads. Never before in history could anyone travel in relative safety to foreign lands, and to the capital of the world itself. Those roads, originally built with a military application in mind, became arguably the single greatest democratizing force of history…until now. Social communities broke down, physical geography was diminished, the old forms, customs and religions disintegrated, and former seemingly immutable allegiances disappeared.
That technology seemed godlike. It seemed bigger than man. Then as now. But unexpected things happened as the result of that system of Roman roads. Most famously, of course, the destruction of Rome itself by the barbarians who used the technology for their own ends.
But other humans, more creative, used those roads also to spread an unprecedented doctrine: that all people are equal, and can join together for their common good. The Christian religion was an attempt, even if a flawed one, to use knowledge and technology in the service of wisdom.
What people discovered back then when those roads first appeared is what people discover now when they look at the changed map of communication. You can go as far as you can, you can reinvent yourself as much as you like, but unless you know where you’re going and why, and who you really are, you might as well just have stayed home and saved yourself – and your loved ones — the added wear and tear.
But if you know what you want, and you know that the only real wisdom is to want the good of the whole tribe of men and women, then setting out on that road might not be as hopelessly confusing as it first appears.
I don’t think we have entered an age of egocentric communication – quite the opposite. With the democratizing possibilities of the Internet, the traditional hierarchical structure of subject and object, with subject always superior to the object it observes, is being eroded. When critics like Andrew Keen wail about “The Cult of the Amateur,” they are essentially defending the special interests of the hierarchy already in place – a hierarchy that, unsurprisingly, has richly rewarded critics like Andrew Keen. But what these critics ignore, as superior subjects pontificating about inferior objects, is that those subjects have been proved to be a special interest. They defend their prerogatives even at the expense of truth. “Traditional” music, movie, and news industries, clearly corrupted by the need to sell a hegemonic agenda, are no longer trusted (and rightly so) by their audiences. These audiences now, with our own version of the Roman roads in place, can no longer be counted on to remain as passive recipients of the pronouncements of their betters. They can speak for themselves, and they do. Their confusions and mediocrities can be understood as a search for a previously unused voice, as necessary baby steps on the way to a full authentic adult self. And it’s my contention that a fully authentic adult self – not an ‘invented’ self, or a reinvented one, either – is the most revolutionary being in the modern world.
It’s important to remember that information doesn’t make you happy. Information is merely knowledge. What you do with that information is what’s important. If what you do with it and why you do it that way provides happiness for yourself and others, then that is wisdom. And wisdom is what comes with the growth of the authentic self.
Don’t let us get distracted or fall into despair by the illusions set up all around us. We’re here to understand who we are and to make the world a better place for those around us and those who come after us. That is – it always has been – our only authentic hope. And it doesn’t matter what kind of technology we’ve got in getting there, either. It never did and it never will.
(Then there's Dennis Dunleavy's THE INTERNET: ONE VIEW…)