A giddy and aggressive optimism

From Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century.

I do not mean to imply that prior to the written word, analytic thought was not possible. I am referring here not to the potentialities of the individual mind but to the predispositions of a cultural mind-set. In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas. The public for whom it is intended is generally competent to manage such discourse. In a print culture, writers make mistakes when they lie, contradict themselves, fail to support their generalizations, try to enforce illogical connections. In a print culture, readers make mistakes when they don't notice, or even worse, don't care.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content. It is no accident that the Age of Reason was coexistent with the growth of a print culture, first in Europe and then in America.

We must come back, then, to the first question and ask ourselves, not Jefferson, Does any decline in the significance of the printed word make democracy less rational? Can a representative democracy, even a participatory democracy, function well if its citizens' minds are not disciplined by the printed word? Those who are cheerleaders for digital processes are not concerned with this question. They look straight ahead with a giddy and aggressive optimism to a world of easy and fast access to information. And that is enough for them. The slower, linear, reflective forms characteristic of print are not taken by them to represent a philosophy of thought, a mind-set, a way of ordering knowledge. For the most part, they do not think that intelligence, rationality, and critical judgment have mush to do with forms of communication. In this belief they may be colossally mistaken. Shall we remind them that the people who invented the digital age - indeed, invented the communications revolution - were themselves educated by the printed word? Does this tell us something important? Is there anything to be learned by recalling what the "guru of the Electronic Age," Marshall McLuhan, said about the book as it increasingly ceases to be, as he put it, the ordinary and pervasive environment? He remarked in a letter to a publisher that we must "approach the book as a cultural therapy, an indispensable ingredient in communal diet, necessary for the maintenance of civilized values as opposed to tribal values." Is it possible that as print loses its dominance, the underpinnings of a democratic polity crumble? As we cross the bridge to the new century, shouldn't we at least chat about this? Or are we too enchanted by the information superhighway to notice that there might be a problem at the other end?