The Information - Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker
Just bought ‘The Digital Revolution’ - a collection of New Yorker articles which looks back at the ‘digital’ discourse on it’s pages of the last ten to 20 years (with one or two really old articles). Anyway, this little bit of the article from Adam Gopnik is very true of ‘digital’ commentary and made me laugh… Can anyone think of anyone who has successfully negotiated this? Anyway, worth a look…
” All three kinds [of position on technology] appear among the books about the Internet: call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters (Shirky et al) believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, new will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organising data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others- that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. One’s hopes rest with the Ever-Betters; one’s head with the Ever-Wasers; and one’s heart? Well, twenty or so books in, one’s heart tends to move toward the Better-Nevers and then bounces back toward someplace that looks more like home.”
