"If Socrates Had E-Mail..."
We seem to be living in a digital Age of Anxiety. A few weeks ago, I attended a conference of college presidents. A consistent theme (sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit) was the distrust of and antagonism toward electronic communication. The incessant demands of email, the potential volatility and viral nature of blogs, the unregulated proliferation of all forms of electronic communication can leave public figures like presidents feeling very vulnerable. Earlier this year, I was amused by the fact that one of my colleagues considered an appropriate sacrifice for Lent to be online shopping. To me, the arrival of online activity as a vice worth giving up said something about the centrality of the IT world in our lives. This past week, we were not amused when another colleague became a victim of online identity theft, causing her fear, frustration, and many hours of unproductive effort to repair the damage.
Whether as public leaders or as individual citizens, many of us feel that information technology has introduced a new dimension into our society -- which has many positive aspects, but which also presents unique dangers. Today, I'd like to consider that proposition (that is, the uniquely challenging nature of contemporary information technology) by shifting our focus to antiquity. Specifically, to classical Greek culture, and to two other information technologies -- and the anxieties that surround them -- which don't so readily (shall we say) "come up on our screens." And those are speech and writing. What I will hope to illustrate is 1) that we are not unique in this era, with respect to our concern about new technologies and 2) to put it bluntly: technology is not the problem; people are the problem.
We may not readily think of the gift of speech as an "information technology." Perhaps we have, unfortunately, forgotten what St. Augustine in his Confessions so vividly realizes, as he attempts, in writing the first autobiography in Western literature, to recollect his own infancy. (It may be worth noting here that the word "infant" derives from Latin infans, meaning "incapable of speech.")
I dwell at some length on this account by Augustine, because his extraordinary intellectual effort to imagine a self before, a self without language reminds us not only of the exceptional power and control which our acquisition of language affords us but also of its contingency, of language's status not as a natural given, but as an acquired capacity for effective interaction with the world (a prosthesis, a technology, if you will).
Little by little I began to realize where I was and to
want to make my wishes known to others, who might
satisfy them. But this I could not do, because my
wishes were inside me, while other people were
outside, and they had no faculty which could penetrate
my mind…For when I tried to express my meaning by crying out
and making various sounds and movements, so that
my wishes should be obeyed, I found that I could not
convey all that I meant or make myself understood by
everyone who I wished to understand me……[But] by hearing words arranged in various
phrases…I gradually pieced together what they
stood for and…began to express my wishes by
means of them. In this way I made my wants known
to my family and they made theirs to me, and I took
a further step into the stormy life of human society.
Confessions Book 1, 6 & 8
Augustine's brilliant emphasis on language as a means of passage between our interior selves and the external world, a bandwidth for the expression of desires, introduces a theme which resurfaces again and again, almost uncannily, in the consideration of communication or information technologies. What is striking is not the truism that media of communication provide a link between internal selves and the world around them; what is striking is the anxiety that surrounds that linkage. We find that anxiety even in Augustine's conclusion, that language acquisition propelled him "into the stormy life of human society."
Let me continue for a moment to focus on the ambivalence attending communication by speech. This capacity has been considered almost universally a good in Western culture. But I say "almost universally" because there is a strain of thought, beginning in Classical antiquity (and continuing, in modified forms, down to the present day) which suggests that it might have been preferable if women, like the dumb beasts of the earth, had remained unable to speak. The archaic poets Semonides and Hesiod, the dramatist Euripides, and the historian Thucydides all indicate an uneasiness with the fact that women possess a voice which enables them to communicate with others. A classic expression of this point of view occurs in Euripides' play, Hippolytus, in a misogynist rant delivered by the title character. Among many other complaints about women, he exclaims:
"I hate a clever woman -- God forbid
that I should ever have a wife at home
with more than woman's wits! Lust breeds mischief
in the clever ones. The limits of their minds
deny the stupid ones lecherous delights.
We should not suffer servants to approach them,
But give them as companions voiceless beasts,
Dumb…but with teeth, that they might not converse,
And hear another voice in answer.
The reasons for this uneasiness about women speaking can be non-trivially summed up in all that "social intercourse" for women might imply. These thinkers feel a need to protect or to police that facile exchange between the inside and the outside made possible by this particular "information technology." The ability to speak -- as Augustine clearly recognized -- renders selves and bodies permeable in a way that may be considered especially problematic for women.
The appearance of the new technology of writing, however -- rather like the development of the Internet -- clearly produced high anxiety more broadly throughout the culture. A telling example is the first reference to writing that we have. It occurs in the 6th book of Homer's Iliad (itself a work which we believe was composed as an oral, not a written, text). Homeric heroes are apparently not literate. At one point, a lottery is arranged, to determine which Greek warrior will go into single combat against the Trojan defender, Hector. Each man makes a "mark" on his lot and tosses it into a helmet. Then a herald selects a lot from the helmet. But it is not something he can read out; rather he must take it round and show it to each man in turn until Ajax, seeing it, recognizes it as his own. Clearly, this "mark" was not one which could be read by all. But Homer knows that such legible marks (that is, writing) exist. In his one allusion to them, he calls them semata lugra ("sema", the Greek word for "sign", from which we derive "semantics" or "semaphore" and "lugra" meaning "sorrowful" or "mournful," from which we derive "lugubrious"). The reason why these "signs" are "sorrowful" in Homer's tale is intimately related to the kinds of fears and suspicious that surround the introduction today of a new technology for communication.
Homer's story about writing in Iliad 6 is complex, and I won't go into it in any detail. It involves the hero Bellerophon being given a written tablet (with semata lugra enclosed within it) to carry to a distant king. The aspect of the tale that concerns us here is a narrative pattern that we know well from later versions (I think especially of the example in Shakespeare's Hamlet). And that is the use of writing to convey the message: "Kill the bearer of this message." In Hamlet, you'll recall, this double-cross is actually itself double-crossed, when Hamlet manages to transfer the onus of the message from himself to his erstwhile friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. (Actually, in Homer's version as well the message is controverted.) But what must call our attention here is the fact that the earliest reference to writing in the Western tradition profoundly mistrusts it, presumes in fact that it will be used to nefarious ends by unscrupulous men in power.
Today, we may think that this Homeric representation of writing -- the notion that it is fundamentally useful for the "kill the bearer of this message" genre -- is naïve or ludicrous. But in some profound senses, Homer had it right. As with strong individuals, so with powerful technologies -- their strengths are also their weaknesses. The strengths of writing precisely include the ability to transport a message, a writer's intention (for good or ill), across distance and across time. Further, this transport can occur without the distortion that relay might entail (as in the game of "telephone") and, indeed, without the bearer even being aware of the message's content. The fixity and portability of writing are certainly among its greatest assets as a technology -- but the "kill the bearer of this message" scenario highlights precisely the potential abuses of these virtues.
Of course, as I noted, Homer's brief but troubling characterization of writing comes from a period when the technology of writing is new and little known. We believe that the Homeric poems were composed around 750 B.C.; we begin to find the first evidence for writing in Greece around 730 B.C.; it is simple writing for the record-keeping of bureaucracies: inventories, lists. What of that later Greece, Pericles' "golden age," which we tend to think of as the height of civilization? Surely we'll find that, in this later era, Homer's rather naïve and unsophisticated suspicion of writing will have been superseded.
Well, no. What we actually find is that, in our admiration for classical Greek culture, we moderns have readily foisted our own ideals onto that ancient society. So, for example, it has been claimed that "the great majority" of Athenian citizens were literate in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. -- the great "golden age" of Athens. The most rigorous recent analysis of the question, however, concludes that, for the population of Attica as a whole (that is, the region of Athens), the level of literacy should probably be set in the range of 5% to 10%."1 (Usefully, this same study reminds us for comparative purposes that in the Sicily of the late 19th century the literacy rate was 21% for men and 9% for women.) In the ancient Athenian context, then, it is perhaps not surprising that, two and a half centuries after Homer, Greek culture still displays a remarkably strong concern about the potentially negative effects of the technology of writing. Most famously, the arguments are distilled by Plato (put, of course, into the mouth of Socrates) in his dialogue the Phaedrus.
In one brief passage toward the end of the Phaedrus, Socrates marshals a barrage of arguments against the use of writing and, more specifically, denigrates writing in comparison to speech. The practice of writing, Socrates is certain, will introduce forgetfulness, for men will no longer rely on remembrance from within themselves, but will put trust in (mere external) marks. Such writing will provide the appearance of wisdom, not its reality, so that those who make use of writings will hear many things but not actually learn them, yet will imagine they know much, knowing in fact nothing. Men who rely on writing will be well-versed in opinion (doxa), not truly wise. Such men, Socrates warns, will be "filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, and they will be a burden to their fellows."
In addition to worrying about the loss of memory that the aide-de-memoire of writing will bring about, Socrates also counts against writing its inflexibility, the fact that it signifies only the same thing, over and over. In this, he compares the art of writing to that of painting: "The painter's products," he says "stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words: they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever."
Now this criticism particularly intrigues. In part, it clearly exemplifies a problem that has been well discussed by a number of scholars. And that is that reception of a new technology (whether it is television or radio or writing) often entails criticizing its inability to perform what the old technology did -- even if (in fact, precisely if) these are not the appropriate ends for the new technology. Thus, the Socratic dialectician sees writing as seriously flawed because it does not, indeed cannot, engage in Socratic dialogue. You cannot question it; it does not respond. At some level, this critique is simply irrelevant to writing; it profoundly misses the point.
Yet Socrates' criticism is further interesting to us, because, to moderns, the point is --in large part -- writing's stability. This we recognize as one of its most valuable strengths. It is this, precisely, which we cling to in the book and the loss of which we fear on the Web. The potential mutability of the electronic text, its instability, appears to many of us not as the virtue of dialectic but as the vice of promiscuity. I shall return to this, but it leads us back, somewhat paradoxically, to Socrates' final criticism of writing-and that is writing's egalitarianism: (and, again, I quote from the Phaedrus) "[Writing] drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn't know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong."
Here we are confronted with the embarrassment of the Real Athens, rather than the idealized Athens of our humanist fantasies. Yes, it was a democracy; but no, it was not a democracy that we would recognize or feel comfortable in. Socrates is worried, in fact, about the very democratization of knowledge that writing threatens to make possible-how will you keep knowledge (if it is in a written form) out of the hands of the "wrong" people? For Plato, on the one hand, writing raises the spectre of truly public information, information distributed indiscriminately among the "hoi polloi" (which, of course, in Greek simply means "the many"). But on the other hand-and the point which Socrates dwells upon more seriously-writing makes possible in a new way the development of a private knowing and a private self, without the give-and-take of dialogue in the marketplace (the agora), without the possibility of public scrutiny or, for that matter, public enlightenment that discourse involves. Today, we seem to worry most that electronic technologies will threaten privacy; it is scarcely too much to say that Socrates feared that writing would create privacy.
With this, I want to turn more specifically to consider the continuities-and discontinuities-we encounter in these critiques of information technologies. I wanted to bring to you especially the Phaedrus' meditation on writing because I think -- if you have not encountered it before -- it's really rather shocking. Some of the assumptions Plato makes strike us as utterly counterintuitive; yet others are (perhaps uncomfortably) familiar.
Confronted with a new technology for communication, we find, in both Homer and Plato, the fear that it will introduce dangerous secrecy, an undesirable development of privacy. Today, we worry that IT will usher in an untoward openness of communication, a lack of the privacy we have come to value. Contemplating the written word, Plato was concerned about its fixity, the inability to enter into exchange; today, we worry about the fluidity of the electronic text, its ability to introduce exchange between the "author" and "reader" -- roles which may no longer remain fixed, as we have become accustomed to them. Plato's concern that in the wake of writing would follow the loss of memory may have a certain ring of truth to us. Should it lead us to discount or to deepen our concerns that, as the amount of data on our chips increases, the duration of our own attention spans decreases? In some cases, the ancient and modern concerns are precisely parallel; in others, almost equally precisely opposite. But their array reveals to us, I think, that the specific "technology" per se, is clearly not the real concern.
A few years ago, Educom Review sponsored and then published a provocative round table discussion among computer guru types ranging from Sherry Turkle of MIT to Bran Ferren -- at that time, Vice President for Walt Disney Imagineering. At times, the exchange becomes the stuff of sci-fi, as when Turkle blandly asserts:
We acknowledge that machines are now enough like
people for us to enter into a kind of social intercourse
with them…The line has moved away from the
Turing test to the question at the end of Blade Runner
where a machine is saving the protagonist's life and
he is falling in love with it. What kind of relationship
is it appropriate to have with a machine?
Or (and this is again Turkle): "people are not rational animals, they are emotional machines." Near the end of the discussion, however, Ferren ventures the point "that what people are finding most meaningful on the Net has little to do with computers. The Net is really a string and two tin cans. The computers are in the middle, but they are just doing the message passing." Exactly.
We are back to the Augustinian emphasis on information technology as the medium which connects what is inside of us with what is outside in the world, a transmission which is always somewhat mystifying, always potentially threatening -- whether it occurs via a whisper or via the Web. The information technologies which have become available to us, from speech to writing to telecommunication of various forms, have continually expanded the area over which we may exercise some influence or control. But concomitantly, of course, they have expanded the networks (both of persons and phenomena) by which we may be influenced-just as Augustine's entry into language not only enables him to express his desires to others but also renders him subject to the desires, the intrusions of others.
The advent of electronic media has raised the ante on this interaction, but I believe it has not changed the fundamental character of the transaction. If today, we feel that the encounter with the bound book as we know it is somehow safer, more stable, less invasive than encounter with the electronic text, that is largely because we have habituated ourselves to it. We need to realize, on the one hand, how troubling the insinuation of the written word into the soul once seemed (for example, to Plato). And perhaps, on the other hand we need to remember (because we may have forgotten, through long familiarity) that books do indeed insinuate themselves into our souls. I'll turn here to Sven Birkerts' sensitive description in The Gutenberg Elegies of what he calls "the shadow life of reading."
When I am away from the book it lives its shadow
life, its afterlife…If we have been deeply engaged
by the book, we carry its resonance as a kind of echo,
thinking again and again of a character, an
episode…Some works, the ones that really reached us…
become permanent points of reference. We not only
recall them fondly, but we often recall parts of our
lives through them. (p. 95, 103, 104)
If we recognize this account as answering to our own experience -- and I, at least, do -- then I think we must conclude that turning the pages of the codex book is every bit as fraught for the soul as surfing through cyberspace -- perhaps more. We are laid open to the thoughts and intentions of others. Our information technologies render us powerful, yes, but also permeable, vulnerable to others -- as well as to our own impulses to control. Here, I would find myself echoing Birkerts' own characterization of himself as "one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle." (p. 6.)
The concern about communication technologies it turns out -- whether Plato's or ours -- is not really the forms in which we create and apprehend information, but rather the kinds of selves that we become and the kinds of societies we construct. Questions that recur in confronting information technologies have to do, to be sure, with the ways in which our minds or mental capacities will be shaped (whether extended, diminished, or curtailed) by the technologies of information to which we accustom ourselves. Plato feared that our memories would atrophy with the coming of the printed word -- and perhaps he was not so far wrong! Contemporary technophobes predict equally confidently the diminution of the attention span -- despite the consecutive hours logged by many members of the x-generation in front of the currently most popular computer game.
But the real fear is more insidious even than the shortening of our memories; it is the severing (or --perhaps worse -- the corruption) of our human ties. Homer associated writing with secretive and murderous intent. On the whole, our uncertainties about electronic media are less extreme. But further, they have almost nothing to do with technology. Our uncertainties have to do with our abilities to understand and control ourselves -- and to enter into meaningful, reciprocal relationships with others. An article in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education discussed the rampant fears of publishers about Google's announced project to digitize library resources; the author suggests that what is needed is "an act of faith;" we need, he says "a bit more trust, so that we can take advantage of the new capabilities of a networked society."2; "Faith," "trust," -- I believe that these are indeed what are really at stake in our interactions with the new technologies. In the Phaedrus, Socrates ultimately moves away from the issue of writing. Finally, he concludes, it makes a little difference whether a man speaks or writes; the only thing that will matter is whether he understands the soul. I could not agree more.
1 Harris, William V. Ancient Literacy (Harvard University Press, 1989) p. 114.
2 Jensen, Michael "Presses Have Little to Fear from Google," Chronicle of Higher Education July 8, 2005.