Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

Perhaps because the title Being Digital seems to promise the articulation of a new way of being human, it took me a while to realize that the book is not about the transformation of a culture but about money. The first question Negroponte asks of a development like virtual reality is whether there’s a market for it. If a market exists, someone will inevitably exploit it, and so it’s pointless to ask “Do we need this?” or “How might it harm us?”

“The consumer” is a cheerful omnipresence in Negroponte’s book, a most-favored arbiter.

Being Digital is awash in references to a world of moneyed internationalism — to the luxury hotels the author stays in, to his lunches with prime ministers, to transpacific flights, Burgundian vintners, Swiss boarding schools, Bavarian nannies. The ease with which jobs and capital and digital signals now cross national boundaries is matched by the mobility of the new informational elite, those lucky symbolic analysts who, like many a ruling class before them, are finding that they have more in common with the elect of other countries than with the preterite of their own. It’s a revelation, when you notice it, how free of nationalism Being Digital is, how interchangeable the locales. In a brief aside, Negroponte complains that people lecture him about life in the real world—“as if,” he says, “I live in an unreal world.” He’s right to complain. His world is as real as the ganglands that Barry Sanders evokes. But the two worlds are growing ever more unreal to each other.

High above the clouds, the sun always shines. Negroponte paints a tomorrow of talking toasters, smart refrigerators, and flavorized computers (“You will be able to buy a Larry King personality for your newspaper interface”) that is Jetsons -like in its retention of today’s suburban values. To find clues to a deeper transformation, you have to read between the lines. Negroponte has a habit, for example, of reducing human functions to machinery: the human eye is “the client for the image,” an ear is a “channel,” faces are “display devices,” and “Disney’s guaranteed audience is refueled at a rate that exceeds 12,500 births each hour.” In the future, “CD-ROMs may be edible, and parallel processors may be applied like sun tan lotion.” The new, digital human being will dine not only on storage devices but on narcissism. “Newspapers will be printed in an edition of one. . Call it The Daily Me ” Authors, meanwhile, as they move from text to multimedia, will assume the role of “stage-set or theme-park designer.”

When Barry Sanders looks at young people, he sees lost, affectless faces. Negroponte sees a “mathematically able and more visually literate” generation happily competing in a cyberspace where “the pursuit of intellectual achievement will not be tilted so much in favor of the bookworm.” He espouses a kind of therapeutic corporatism, defending video games as teachers of “strategies” and “planning skills,” and recalling how his son had trouble learning to add and subtract until his teacher put dollar signs in front of the figures. The closest Negroponte comes to recognizing the existence of social dysfunction is in his description of the robots that in the near future will bring us our drinks and dust our empty bookshelves: “For security reasons, a household robot must also be able to bark like a ferocious dog.”

IT’S EASY TO FAULT Negroponte’S resolute ahistoricism; harder, however, to dislike an author who begins his book by confessing, “Being dyslexic, I don’t like to read.” Negroponte is nothing more and nothing less than a man who has profited by speculating on the future and is willing, like a successful stockbroker, to share his secrets. Apart from offering a few misty assurances (“Digital technology can be a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony”), he doesn’t pretend his revolution will solve problems more serious than the annoyance of having to visit Blockbuster in the flesh to rent a movie.

In a culture of false perspective, where Johnny Cochran can appear taller than Boris Yeltsin, it’s difficult to tell if the Internet is legitimately big news. Russell Baker has compared the hyping of the Net to the hyping of atomic energy in the fifties, when industry pitchmen promised that we would soon be paying “pennies” for our monthly utilities. Today’s technology boosters can’t offer ordinary consumers as measurable a benefit as cheap electricity. Instead, the selling points are intangible — conveyed through the language of health and hipness.

Digital technology, the argument goes, is good medicine for an ailing society. TV has given us government by image; interactivity will return power to the people. TV has produced millions of uneducable children; computers will teach them. Top-down programming has isolated us; bottom-up networks will reunite us. As a bonus, being digital is medicine that tastes good. It’s a pop-cultural pleasure we’re invited to indulge. Indeed, some of the best television these days is funded by IBM: nuns in an Italian convent whisper about the Net, Moroccan businessmen sip mint tea and talk interfacing. This is both advertising and luscious postmodern art. Of course, the aim of such art is simply to make the giving of our dollars to IBM seem inevitable. But popularity has become its own justification.

If I were fashioning my own killer argument against the digital revolution, I’d begin with the observation that both Newt Gingrich and Timothy Leary are crazy about it. Somewhere, something isn’t adding up. Douglas Rushkoff, in Media Virus ! — his book-length exploration of the media counterculture — quotes a skeptical New Age thinker as offering this bright side to the revolution: “There’s no longer a private space. The idea of literate culture is basically a middle-class notion — it’s the gentleman in his book-lined study with the privacy for reflection. That’s a very elitist notion.” Robert Coover, writing in a similar vein in a pair of essays for the Times Book Review , promises that hypertext will replace “the predetermined one-way route” of the conventional novel with works that can be read in any number of ways, and thus liberate readers from “domination by the author.” At the same time, Speaker Gingrich’s own clutch of New Age authors advertise the electronic town meeting as the perfect antidote to tired Second Wave liberalism. Where Wall Street sees a profit for investors, visionaries of every political persuasion see empowerment for the masses.

That news of this better future continues to arrive by way of print — in “the entombing, distancing oppression of paper,” as a Wired columnist put it — may simply be a paradox of obsolescence, like the necessity of riding your horse to the dealer who sells you your first car. But Negroponte, in explaining his decision to publish an actual book, offers a surprising reason for his choice: interactive multimedia leave too little to the imagination. “By contrast,” he says, “the written word sparks images and evokes metaphors that get much of their meaning from the reader’s imagination and experiences. When you read a novel, much of the color, sound, and motion come from you.”

If Negroponte took the health of the body politic seriously, he would need to explore what this argument implies about the muscle tone of our imaginations in a fully digital age. But you can trust him, and the hard-core corporate interests he advises, not to engage in sentimentality. The truth is simple, if unpretty. The novel is dying because the consumer doesn’t want it anymore.

NOVELS ARE BY NO MEANS dead, of course — just ask Annie Proulx or Cormac McCarthy. But the Novel, as a seat of cultural authority, is teetering on the brink, and in The Gutenberg Elegies , a collection of essays subtitled The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age , Sven Birkerts registers his surprise and dismay that its decline has not been more widely mourned. Not even professional book critics, who ought to be the front line of the novel’s defenders, have raised the alarm, and Birkerts, who is a critic himself, sounds like a loyal soldier deserted by his regiment. The tone of his elegies is brave but plaintive.