The internet is exciting, no? Everyone just loves to make their little predictions about the illusion known as the future, and I will do no different here.
I never bought Jay David Boulter’s argument that we (as general a “we” as you can imagine) are in the “late age of print” and at the verge of the next step in communication. At first glance, Boulter is stating the obvious: newspaper sales have plummeted while bloggers and e-moguls are making millions from their AdSense-bolstered webspaces. Alas! The next wave is upon us, so let us cast off the shackles of print and embrace electronic communication in all its glory, turning to books only for nostalgic value!
That the internet ushered in the late age of print is akin to saying that the photograph introduced the late age of painting. Of course photography changed painting, pushing it toward the abstract and back again, but these are two discreet disciplines to be approached individually in this post-/-modern/-human world.
In his wonderful essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin elaborates on the difference between human-created and machine-reproduced artforms: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Thus the virtues of solid media, such as books and newspapers, are their ability to portray a time and place that has passed and reflect on human culture at that particular moment. The virtues of liquid media, like the internet, are their ability to reflect the past, present, and (hell, why not?) future moments of human culture. The internet is human-as-mechanical re/production at its finest, where minds and fingers and webcams from all over the planet get together in a 24-hour information orgy.
I really can’t think of any media that have moved beyond their “late stages” to… well whatever Boulter thinks will come after late (morning?). I have trouble communicating with anyone who sees the course of human history as a linear progression from one age to the next rather than what it is: a set of interloping cycles and vibrations. Even Benjamin quotes a writer who claims that film is an adaptation of Egyptian hieroglyphs, except that the pictures change little from one to the next and move much faster.
What I can say is that the human mind is strong. So strong, in fact, that I think we’re jumping the gun here. When we have truly reached the “late age” of print, I think whatever replaces it will be so powerful as to completely appropriate print and all media as one, where information flows between all post-humans at the same rate. Or perhaps it will just be nuclear weaponry, and then we’re back to chipping away at rocks.
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