A pox on their virtual burkas
by George Jonas
National Post
July 21, 2010
The world is switching from print to digital as inexorably as it once switched from sail to steam. That was before my time (no wisecracks, please). I'm using the example only to indicate that it isn't a matter of hoping or fearing: It's just the way it's going to be.
When I started school, writing technology consisted of an inkwell, a steel-tipped pen for fair copy, and a lead pencil for drafts. Today all that survives is the expression "I'll pencil it in." I haven't seen a typewriter in 20 years, and an inkwell in 50.
I like computers. For me, the web's pluses outnumber its minuses easily. It puzzles me why some of my contemporaries are suspicious of the digital age: After all, they invented it. The youngsters who feel comfortable in cyberspace are merely passengers.
I feel unthreatened by digital displays, as a writer as well as a reader, and it doesn't worry me that the electronic dissemination of information and entertainment, currently supplementing paper-based dissemination, may gradually supplant it. Assuming it does, will it necessarily change the culture?
The late professor Marshall McLuhan would likely have said yes. It was commercial television, and specifically television advertising, that inspired Professor McLuhan's famous dictum: "The medium is the message." At one time it was the most frequently quoted phrase by a Canadian.
To be quotable, it's more important for a phrase to be catchy than true. Taken literally, "the medium is the message" may be gibberish, but like other catchy quips, it does contain an element of truth.
The medium certainly isn't unrelated to the message, if only because it would be difficult to transmit Homer's Iliad using smoke signals. But the medium need not "be" the message to shape it or to be limited by it, along with the rest of the circumstances in which it's sent or received. The Ten Commandments wouldn't have been different if, instead of carving them into stone, God had text-messaged them to Moses.
Media technology will affect the message in the digital age just as it did in the print age, the papyrus age and the stone-tablet age. The medium will have something to do with the message, all right, but I doubt if it will "be" the message. It has never been.
The day isn't too distant when the print and digital editions of newspapers will switch status, with the digital edition becoming the more significant and prestigious of the two. When that day comes, will anything else have changed in the culture?
The safest prediction is that the changes making the greatest impact will come out of left field. The age of digital communications will have its upsides and downsides, as all ages do, and whatever is least expected will probably turn out to be the most important. But while deciphering tea leaves is a mug's game, it's possible to read the handwriting on the wall.
Will the digital press cater more to its less educated consumers than the print press did? Possibly. The digital world will pride itself on being more democratic. In fact, it's likely to be simply more down-market. But will, in fact, consumers and producers of the digital press be less educated then the writers and readers of the paper-based press used to be? I doubt it.
The digital press will be far more interactive than the print press has traditionally been. Sitting down with the paper will be more of a dialogue than a reading experience. Readers will have a chat with their newspaper over coffee rather than just read it while they're having breakfast.
Will this be a good thing? Depends on the quality of the conversation. Though literacy and IQ haven't declined -- if anything, both increased -- self-confidence has increased even faster. In the age of snail mail, people who weren't sure they could read and write, rarely did. In the email age, they don't let such nagging doubts stand in their way.
Anonymous screen names aggravate this problem. They're the Internet's burkas. Until the advent of the web, the ballot was secret, but not much else. People generally stood by their opinions (or kept them to themselves). In free societies, only scum sent unsigned letters. Anonymous communications used to be thrown out unread.
The Internet has fundamentally changed this. People are now encouraged to hide their identity, ostensibly to "protect their privacy," but also to secure a free ride for their passions. At the Boston Tea Party, participants wanted no taxation without representation; at the web's tea party participants feel entitled to representation without taxation. Anonymity becoming socially acceptable has done little to raise the level of discourse.
Treating online readers like print correspondents, i.e., expecting them to put their names where their mouths are, may restore some civility to cyberspace, but defeats the purpose of the online community's masked ball. Reading one's morning paper in the digital age may turn out to be having breakfast with a dysfunctional family. For some, it will feel cozy and familiar.