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 The Information Age Has, Indeed, Delivered Us A Brave New World By Gregory McNamee Disappearing Through the Skylight, by O.B. Hardison, Jr. (Penguin Books). Paper, $11. IT'S A STRANGE new world out there. Factory workers are made of metal and plastic; money, an increasingly abstract proposition, is made and lost not in workshops and fields but on flickering screens. Databases grind through a million mainframes, assembling your biography and mine to a fantastic degree of detail. Food is synthetic, and we nuke it to edibility in microwave ovens. Half the country can't place Russia on a map, but the rest can direct-dial a telephone number in Moscow in a minute's time. The electronic age has been upon us for a decade or more now, and we are scarcely able to fathom the enormous changes it still portends.
Disappearing Through the Skylight abounds in his excitement over these effects. And if Hardison bites off more than he or his readers can comfortably chew, he's unapologetic for it. Instead, he takes us on a whirlwind tour of the history of the future--that is, of 20th-century developments leading to today's electronic wonderland. His expedition spins from subject to subject: Architectural semantics, artificial intelligence, mathematical biology, the Dada movement in the arts, and the politics of the machine all enter into it at one point or another. The result is a sometimes incoherent (making it perfectly postmodern) but thought-provoking excursion into the new and unknown. Technology, Hardison writes, can be a liberating force, freeing workers from the drudgery of the assembly line and double-entry bookkeeping. (He does not, however, go on to say that technological advantages are generally held by the very few, nor that all the time-saving machines surrounding us have increased the typical American workweek from 40 to 60 hours.) It is also a universalizing power, one that subtly erases the differences between, say, a Holiday Inn in Schenectady and one in Singapore. Daniel Boorstin complained about the process 35 years ago in The Image: the same sunlamp in the bathrooms, the same chocolate on the pillows, the same paper umbrellas in the same green drinks. Independent of cultural values, the new technology permits a McDonald's hamburger restaurant to arise by Gorky Park, a Madonna video to entertain children in Dar-es-Salaam. Its universalizing force can diminish differences between human beings as well, perhaps lessening their individuality and certainly compromising their value in the economic machine. Thanks to the new technology, it's now cheaper for Ford Motors to manufacture some car parts in Korea, others in the Philippines, and still others in Brazil, all to be assembled on the Mexican border; it's now more cost-effective for an American airline company to process tickets for a New York-to-Chicago direct flight in computerized offices in Ireland and the Lesser Antilles. Given no shortage worldwide of cheap labor and easy technological access to it, small wonder that American workers are scrambling to keep even something of the standard of living they enjoyed 10 years ago...even in the face of what's being touted as an unprecedented economic boom. But for Hardison these are passing matters too mundane to observe. Ever the highbrow, he's more interested in exploring how scientific ideas penetrate popular culture than considering the displacements they may cause, or shock waves they may send off.
In bringing the arts to bear on his discussion, Hardison shines brightly. In the late 19th century, he notes, French writers all but rose up in arms over the Eiffel Tower, an engineering feat that, Alexandre Dumas protested, "even the commercial America would reject." Today their Parisian counterparts exalt the glass pyramid that fronts the Louvre, and speak adoringly of the plastic-and-metal playhouse that is the Centre Pompidou. T.S. Eliot's great poem The Waste Land, written during the First World War, is "an expression of bafflement; a kind of silence, you might say," in the face of technological horror; today our required reading is Philip Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, the secret hero of which is a personal computer. The arts are no longer predominantly modernist, opposed to technology, reliant on individual craft, informed by the classical European past. They're modern and even postmodern, often collectively produced, generated by word processors or light pens, ahistoric. Hardison seems to think this condition is well and good, that the "disappearances" (a word encountered a bit too often in his pages) of artistic and cultural elites "complete the democratization of art begun by Dada." Anyone, he seems to be saying, can be an artist--provided, he does not add, that the right technological goodies, still expensive enough to keep them a province of political and financial elites, are at hand. Hardison's vision of an exotically happy future, populated by intelligent robots and electronic artists, full of interactive novels and vaulting skyscrapers, will not be to everyone's taste; and in any event, the jury's still out on whether such trifles as the greenhouse effect and global deforestation will throw a monkey wrench into the works. First published at the dawn of the Information Age, which is to say way back in the 1980s, his book, punctuated by one gee-whiz after another, is nonetheless provocative reading, if only because it foresees so clearly how closely linked once-separate worlds--the arts, finance, languages, politics and technology--have become.
The question remains whether what we think of as the best of
our present culture will indeed disappear through the skylight,
or simply sink into a glittering mire.
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© 1995-97 Tucson Weekly . Info Booth |
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O.B. Hardison, Jr., badly wants to help. A professor emeritus
of English literature and former director of the Folger Shakespeare
Library, Hardison set up shop as a futurist late in life, having
grown interested in the effects of all this newfangled technology
on the arts, our culture, and our souls.
A century ago, John Rockefeller, having caught wind of Darwin
along with the rest of the industrialized world, was fond of saying,
"The growth of a large business is merely the survival of
the fittest." Today, words like gigabyte and paradigm
fill the air, bandied about by citizens in white lab coats and
mechanic's overalls--and also, Hardison points out, by artists
and writers, for whom it was not so long ago fashionable to shun
any contact with the new and metallic.
