on3

A very thoughtful article in Friday’s Wall Street Journal explores this question and draws an excellent parallel between the introduction of the printing press and the introduction of the web in terms of societal, cultural and political implications:

Every increase in freedom to create or consume media, from paperback books to YouTube, alarms people accustomed to the restrictions of the old system, convincing them that the new media will make young people stupid. This fear dates back to at least the invention of movable type.

As Gutenberg’s press spread through Europe, the Bible was translated into local languages, enabling direct encounters with the text; this was accompanied by a flood of contemporary literature, most of it mediocre. Vulgar versions of the Bible and distracting secular writings fueled religious unrest and civic confusion, leading to claims that the printing press, if not controlled, would lead to chaos and the dismemberment of European intellectual life.

The author goes on to point out that in fact print advanced our intellectual pursuits and abilities to a degree that nobody had dreamed possible: print ushered in scientific journals, scholarly knowledge-sharing, newspapers and non-fiction. At the same time print made trashy romance novels possible, and most would agree that there’s a lot of mediocrity lining the shelves at your local Chapters. Similarly, the web creates vast opportunity for enhancing and enriching our intellectual lives, but it also provides gossip blogs and YouTube. The author argues that the Wikipedias outweigh the “LOL Cats”, and that the internet is in fact making us smarter.

The case for digitally-driven stupidity assumes we’ll fail to integrate digital freedoms into society as well as we integrated literacy. This assumption in turn rests on three beliefs: that the recent past was a glorious and irreplaceable high-water mark of intellectual attainment; that the present is only characterized by the silly stuff and not by the noble experiments; and that this generation of young people will fail to invent cultural norms that do for the Internet’s abundance what the intellectuals of the 17th century did for print culture. There are likewise three reasons to think that the Internet will fuel the intellectual achievements of 21st-century society.

First, the rosy past of the pessimists was not, on closer examination, so rosy. The decade the pessimists want to return us to is the 1980s, the last period before society had any significant digital freedoms. Despite frequent genuflection to European novels, we actually spent a lot more time watching “Diff’rent Strokes” than reading Proust, prior to the Internet’s spread. The Net, in fact, restores reading and writing as central activities in our culture.

It’s an excellent article that reminds us of the incredible potential of the open web and what it might mean for our evolution, depending on how we choose to adapt to it. Read it here.