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Technoromanticism
Increasingly, pundits and scholars are putting the computer, and all of its promises -- of interconnectivity, interactivity, the erosion of hierarchies, of sweeping changes in business practices, the potential revitalism of individualism and democracy -- at the pinnacle of scientific and technological accomplishment, well before those promises are well delivered on.
A new book by a Richard Coyne, professor of Architectural Computing and head of the Department of Architecture at the University of Edinburgh agrees that the computer is revolutionary but he argues in Technoromanticism: digital narrative, holism, and the romance of the real (MIT University Press) that these narratives aren't brand new, but grounded in the Enlightenment and, especially, in the romantic traditions, from Marshall McLuhan's utopian vision of social reintegration by electronic communication to claims that cyberspace is literally redefining what reality is.
McLuhan, says author Marshall Coyne, identified the era of preliterate culture as a golden age in which humankind was at one with itself and nature. Speaking and listening in the absence of both writing and technology involved intensely interactive exchanges that come close to directly sharing thoughts. Then, says Coyne, we entered the age of literacy in which we write, lay things out in order and divide the world. Society in this era is urban, global and fragmented rather than local, integrated and whole.
Now, says the author, we are entering a third age in which the hyperactive environment of electronic communications is returning us to a tribal state once again, but this time the whole world is the tribe.
The romanticism of urban narratives represents one of two very different threads of the Enlightenment: rationalism and romanticism.
Coyne links virtual fantasies to other strains in creative history, like surrealism. "To search the web is to explore a vast 'city' within which one stumbles across strange objects and encounters surprise -- the net surfer is a flaneur (an idler, and a loafer)."
The surrealists, says Coyne were excited by this aspect of cities hundreds of years ago. Surrealist writers reported going to flea markets where they could search for objects "that can be found nowhere else: old fashioned, broken, useless, almost incomprehensible, even perverse ... "
This is an academic work published by a university press, and as such, is riddled with some dense jargon about representation, space, time, interpretation, structuralism and identity.
But Coyne is right about technoromanticism. Even if the technology is new, the ideas behind it don't spring suddenly from the earth, something the tech culture tends to forget. They have roots and precedents dating back hundreds of years, and are even more interesting when taken in context. That alone makes Technromanticism a worthwhile, if not particularly entertaining or universally accessible book.
Purchase this book at purchase this book at fatbrain.
Like every other "new" idea that comes around, the net is just a rehash of past concepts which proved unworkable at the time. The fact that people are getting so excited about it merely demonstrates their lack of understanding of history, not that there is a radical new paradigm on the horizon.
The sad fact is that novelty, as defined by Leibnitz, does not exist.
As Tevre would say "both sides are right!".
In four millennia of written human heritage
many ideas recur repeatly.
And there is also true novelty.
Its the the mark of an educated person to
distinguish the difference (go to college techies!).
We see this dialectic in the microcosm of slashdot. Some people think everything they read is new and fantastic.
Then we see articles and postings that are essentially repeats of old ideas.
The author of Ecclesiastes cp 1 vs 9-10
complained about this 2600 years ago!
Not entirely true. Try living in any large city and you'll find a nice mix of languages. Miami is a good example. Spanish is at least as used as English there and you have a mix of people from all over adding little groups with different languages and cultures. Sometimes you can't understand the language but you still can connect with people. I guess the Internet is like real life. People with few interests who stay home a lot meet few people and stay in their own little box but the rest of us like to mingle. I think the Internet just makes it a lot easier to do that mingling. :) You have isolated settlements but you can be in several at once. You are your own bridge.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I've often worked through an evening of conversing with someone using translation tools and a lot of patience. It isn't easy but it can be interesting.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Oops, the book is about technoromanticism, not technomancery.
I'd rather see a review about technomancery.
You make a very good point on the mingling issue(being your own bridge) but I disagree with your take on language. While it is possible to communicate with someone in person(via gestures, facial expressions, or whatnot), when text is your only medium you'd better be speaking the same language or you won't get much done. Of course, this brings up the question of non-textual forms of communication on the net. I personally like ease and privacy of text communication, but I can see where another form of communication could come into play.
Visit the
The odds that the ultimate premise of a 399 page accademic treatise is merely "this stuff ain't new" are so slim, that I surmise that Jon Katz was in over his head.
I would expect the premise of such a book to be much more specific. Until I actually know what the book has to say, ideally through reading it myself, I have no idea if it has merit or not.
In light of this, I certainly don't feel inclined to accept Katz' summary as authoritative.
----------------------------------------------
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
from the Dictionary of Foreign Words in English by John Ayto :
flâneur
French flâner means 'stroll around idly or aimlessly', and its derivative flâneur has come to denote an 'idler' or 'loafer', 'someone who passes his time in aimless amusement'. English began to use the word in the mid-19th century, and it has also taken over the related flânerie 'idling, lounging'. It has even, semi-facetiously, coined a verb from it, variously flâné or flane : 'In Paris, in London I have been a happy flâneur; I have flânéd in New York and Washington and most of the great cities of Europe' (H.G. Wells, Apropos of Dolores, 1938). The ultimate source of the French work is Old Norse flana 'wander about'.
If you are a happy idler, you may enjoy a collection of writings on idling called The Idler's Companion : An Anthology of Lazy Literature. Writers selected include Samuel Johnson, Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, Miles Davis, Will Self, Rimbaud and more
Hmmn.. my senior year in high-school in an English class studying all of the authors and the time-period etc I had the same idea, and again doing my research paper in my English class I reflected on this just a little.
;) and then your bound to repeat mistakes etc, at least thats the idea right..
:)
My conclusion is anyone who is even aware of what romanticism and the Enlightenment can and usually do quickly grasp the parallel of the 'freedomistic' movements today, Free software, Free thinking etc.
I think anyone who has to read a book to see this isnt among the crowd (not to say the author isnt obviously he *gets* it). I always found my self thinking on tangents in High School, this was one when English got to dry.
Its amusing to see a book written on it, but not shocking and really I do think this is another good reason to be "broad" in your education. You can easily forget your 'root's
Jeremy
"Warning: This is heavy-handed academic writing but with a fascinating premise."
"This is an academic work published by a university press, and as such, is riddled with some dense jargon about representation, space, time, interpretation, structuralism and identity."
"...Technromanticism a worthwhile, if not particularly entertaining or universally accessible book."
After reading these quotes, isn't it not surprising (due to his attitude towards academia) that Katz gets ripped by /. (nearly universally) for HIS writing style?
This is another view of the world.
Try this link for auto-generated post-modern mumbo-jumbo.
Lessee here... Nice bit of work there, wish I had time to order and read the book before posting, but I don't.
;-) and private bathrooms/kitchens and all the comforts of home. Sounds very much unlike a dorm, but it's not the PHYSICAL implementation that I want to be similar.
The "global village" isn't here yet, as another poster has mentioned. And, yes, the author of the book is right in that the "ideals" of the Internet providing us with such global connectivity is really just the same Enlightenment ideas being attributed to new sources.
I for one would like a tighter community. One very much like a university dorm, but with better sound insulation on the walls (VERY important...
It's the SOCIAL one.
Maybe it's just where I live, but I sure don't see anyone leaving a door open with cool music coming out, inviting random passersby to stick their head in and knock and see if anyone wants to chat or something. And I am SURE that if I tried to just walk up to random houses and/or apartments around where I live and knock and try just chatting with people I'd get wierd looks and maybe a visit from the police...
Why are we so interested in cocooning ourselves away from everyone else? The fragmentation it produces is is why we all love our Internet connections so much, it is a SUBSTITUTE for the physical community that is so obviously lacking in the "real world".
Or, at least, that is the typical "geek stereotype" reason, I guess.
We've lost much more than we've gained with rampant consumerism and an ad-driven popular culture. In exchange for boatloads of shiny trinkets and a feeling of "security" behind the gates of our suburbs and the wheels of our Expeditions we've given up just about everything I can define as "community".
If things are different where you live, please describe it. I might want to move there!!!!
What good is prosperity if you can't enjoy it? A more "open" community model would alleviate quite a lot of alienation, lonliness and abject boredom, methinks...
And the cooperation such communities would engender would bring a higher standard of living to everyone involved.
To get rid of the "tragedy of the commons" you need to keep the community tight-knit enough that everybody knows what's going on. This necessarily involves smallish groups, like a few blocks or somesuch, but these block-level groups can work together in larger groups without losing the advantages that the small block group size affords in dealing with keeping common areas in good shape.
I hope to find some sort of community someday in the real world that is as accepting and open as some of the online ones I am a part of...
-cajun
Does anyone else notice that Katz is the only person doing book reviews that don't seem like reviews? I mean, it seems like his reviews are more of a chance for him to spout off some theory. Now, maybe this theory is the one the author was trying to convey, or maybe not. Personally, I doubt it very much. Katz seems to miss the point on so many things (witness some of his latest columns published here) that I have a really, really hard time believing he would get the premise of a book right.
I really wish he would just give us a sampling of the book, and a breif outline of the general topics discussed. Instead, what he gives us is another diatribe of his idiotic ideals wrapped in the premise that the author of the given book shares his ideals.
Sorry if this seems flamebaitish, but this doesn't seem to be a book review. It seemed more like an editorial inspired by a book reading.
Bite my yammer.
Jon should do more of his articles in this style, because this time we get a nice summary:
ploddingly written but important premise
Much easier than wading though his prose :)
Coyne links virtual fantasies to other strains in creative history, like surrealism. "To search the web is to explore a vast 'city' within which one stumbles across strange objects and encounters surprise -- the net surfer is a flaneur (an idler, and a loafer)."
Well that pisses me off just about enough to get out of my chair and do some work for a change.
Surrealist writers reported going to flea markets where they could search for objects "that can be found nowhere else: old fashioned, broken, useless, almost incomprehensible, even perverse ... "
:))
That pretty much sums up the eBay experience!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The whole world won't become a village until we all speak the same language. On the scale of human population, cities are fairly small-scale. It's easy to hook up with your neighbors in a city. On the internet, you generally meet a few people who have common interests. These are your intellectual "neighbors." The internet seems to be shaping up to be a model of the current world -- many isolated "settlements" of people who share common interests.
Visit the
You imposter! Where's the real Jon Katz? What have you done with him!?
I ran that whole article through Babelfish and it still came out gibberish.
The real DunkPonch is user 215121. Everyone else is Bruce Perens.
We haven't forgotten our roots. However, we live them so intensely that we tend to forget that they're not delivered for everyone else. Most of us live in very privileged conditions, and we very much feel like we're in McLuhan's "global village" (McLuhan's idea; NOT Clinton's). This is especially true compared to the cold-war, pre-Internet era when simply having a Russian accent in America was considered exotic. (Or vice versa - I've heard stories about either.)
In a world where over half the world population goes hungry every night, and where maybe only 1% of the world population has access to a computer, much less the internet; the global (well fed, at peace, and in touch with their spirituality) village is far from achieved. But then is a state of utopia really achievable anyway? (Another discussion altogether.)
It is indeed a romantic vision that allows us to believe that everybody benefits from this fairly small-scaled renaissance that is occurring because of technology. The whole world will not be the tribe until the whole world has access to the same infrastructure.
If we're lucky, we might a achieve a worldwide tribe of the intelligentsia. That would at least allow the world's thinkers and leaders to have the medium as a support mechanism when they implement the best-of-breed cultural norms through the influences of their writing, art, etc.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Wendell Berry also says that language and technology as they're now often used divide the world (see "Life is a Miracle" or really, just about anything else by him). I wonder what he thinks of the internet...
This reminds me of something that I was thinking about the other day as I passed some ad that said "communicate with anyone! anywhere! anytime!" I don't own a cell phone. Yes, I check my email twice a day, but I find that I don't really have to (several weeks in Australia reminded me of that).
How much of the communication ideals that seem to be pushed out (or community website ideas) do we really want? Need? I don't need to communicate with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Sometimes I need the opposite. Sometimes I just need to be able to communicate with a few people, in the right places, and then have time to do something useful, like build a bookshelf (so I'll have a place to put those collectors items when people buy only eBooks that expire in 4 months).
Yeah, I'm starting to sound like Cliff Stoll and I'm also something of a hypocrite because I like the internet and technology as much as the next guy. But there's just something about the promise of virtual community (and often "Insta" or
some other manufactured word like that) that, like virtual books, doesn't seem quite as promising as community in the real world.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.