IT IS MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS since I left the world of computers behind in search of greener pastures, expecting never to return. Without quite realizing it at the time, in moving to London to study calligraphy and bookbinding, I was making a pilgrimage to the place where a resistance movement had been born that stood in opposition to some of the very qualities and modes of being I was then fleeing. The Arts and Crafts Movement had arisen as a response to industrialization and bureaucratization. It wanted to create and sustain an alternative to the modes of production and the values that Max Weber had earlier identified: an emphasis on depersonalized control, efficient production, rationalization, and disenchantment. People could take greater charge of their lives, their relationships, and their time, it insisted, and their labor could be a fulfilling gift and a form of service, not just a way to “earn a living.”
My time in London exposed me to this alternative vision. Some of this exposure came through reading and discussion, through museum visits and study. But mostly it came through experience. I lived a quieter, less dramatic, and less outwardly energetic life than I had lived in Palo Alto. Those many hundreds of hours sitting at a drawing board, using pencil, pen, and quill, were tranquil and even contemplative (although I wouldn’t have used this word at the time). After the trauma of graduate school, this slower rhythm, these inner-centered practices, provided much-needed healing and rejuvenation.
So it was a great surprise when my inner momentum seemed to carry me back into the world of high tech. What carried me most directly was the love of writing, of written forms, of documents. I found myself not only wanting to luxuriate in the rhythms of earlier writing practices, but to study, come to further understand, and perhaps even influence, the newly emerging techniques and technologies. Most of all, though, without quite knowing what it could mean, I wanted somehow to carry the spirit of calligraphy — its values, not its specific practices — into the world of computers.
In the nearly twenty years since I returned from London, the distance between these two worlds — high tech and traditional crafts — seems only to have increased. We are more bureaucratic in our ways, not less. Industrial modes of production — efficient, calculated, impersonal — have an even stronger hold on us. And everything is speeding up. Many of us now find ourselves caught up in a frenzy of activity, both in our work lives and our personal lives. Borrowing a term usually reserved for children, Albert Borgmann, a philosopher of technology at the University of Montana, calls our entire culture “hyperactive.”1 Under such circumstances, some crucial dimension of life seems endangered, which the Arts and Crafts Movement took pains to support. As we rush faster and faster, we seem to have less time to live.
We can see the search for ever-greater speed and efficiency being played out in our documents and document-oriented practices. We’ve managed to create a technological infrastructure that allows us to produce digital forms in a flash and distribute them in unlimited quantities nearly anywhere in the world in an instant. And more than ever before, we think of these new, virtual documents as mere carriers of information, and information as the nutrients that need to be squeezed out of them and quickly ingested. In a fast-paced world in which fast food and caffeinated beverages have become the norm, we want (and have come to expect) that our new documents will deliver to us, as quickly as possible, just the information content we need to satisfy the next item on our agenda: to make a stock trade, to schedule a meeting, to respond to an urgent business or personal message.
In the early 1990s, while driving up Nineteenth Avenue in San Francisco, I saw a billboard advertising a local radio station painted on the wall of a building. “Don’t Drive Around Empty-Headed!” the billboard declared in a bold typewriter font. A cartoon caricature of a man was shown lifting off the top of his skull; you could see that his head was filled with just the information the radio station could provide: sports, weather, recreation, and so on. Not only can we and should we fill up on the right information, the ad seemed to say, but we will be the worse for not having it: we will be uninformed.
At the same time that such messages flood our environment, other, albeit weaker, signals are also present. Other rhythms of living, other modes of being speak to us through our documents and our document practices. For some of us, books and libraries symbolize some of the very qualities and modes of being that are threatened in our fast-paced, instrumental lives. Books speak of time and depth and attention. They speak of a slower rhythm of life. And in their weighty physicality, they draw us back to our own materiality, and to the materiality of the world. Libraries are places not just where books can be found, but where people can temporarily remove themselves from the speed and busyness of life, where they can read and write and reflect. They are (or can be) shared, sacred spaces in a secular, common world — one of the only spaces outside places of worship where quiet and contemplation are not only sanctioned but enforced.2
A year or two ago, I was sitting in a cafe working on this book. A woman at the next table struck up a conversation with me, and asked me what I was writing. I gave her an overview, and this led to a discussion about the place of books in an increasingly digital world. She had recently visited a home that was empty of books, as far as she could tell: no bookcases, no books on coffee tables, none. What she said next has remained fixed in my memory. “I don’t care if you don’t read,” she said, “but how can you live without books?” I know exactly what she meant; I feel much the same way. I don’t know how I could live without books. But the truth is, there are other things even more important to me than books or reading: certain views and values, states of mind and body, qualities of experience and attention.
Will books go away? Is a universal library just around the corner? Will e-mail supplant or revive the letter? Will digital technologies diminish, and perhaps abolish, paperwork and red tape? What are we really asking here? I suspect that these questions serve less as requests for information or insight than as expressions of concern for the character and quality of our lives. And I suspect that the artifacts, institutions, and practices we are inquiring about are largely functioning as symbols of qualities we want either to embrace or to avoid — qualities of time and attention, of intimate connection, of impersonal entanglement. Although I am concerned about the possible disappearance of books, for example, I am even more concerned about preserving and protecting these ways of being.
We make a mistake, I believe, when we fixate on particular forms and technologies, taking them, in and of themselves, to be the carriers of what we want either to embrace or resist. Not only do we fail to see the forms and technologies in their full complexity, but we use them, in their symbolic simplicity, as blunt instruments with which to beat one another over the head. We also make a mistake, we limit our possibilities, when we assume that one technology, or one form of activity, must necessarily replace another. It isn’t a question, it needn’t be a question, of books or the Web, of letters or e-mail, of digital libraries or the bricks-and-mortar variety, of paper or digital technologies. Nor need it be a question of speed and efficiency versus a slower pace of life. These modes of operation are only in conflict when we insist that one or the other is the only way to operate. Who would argue that speedy care is unimportant when someone’s life is at stake? But equally, why should we have to justify the time — either in the workplace or in our personal lives — to think through the consequences of important decisions?
What we’re most in need of, I believe, is balance. Depersonalized, disenchanted ways of being have increasingly come to dominate our lives. Melvil Dewey — obsessive, controlling, making order, and fearing death — is the symbol of our times. We see too little of Whitman — expansive, accepting, lingering, celebrating — even though he lives in us too. Ironically, though, to see this imbalance, and to stand a chance of correcting it, we need the very qualities of time, attention, and reflection that are so sorely lacking. It is almost as if the condition of modern life conspires to deprive us of that which would allow us to make the necessary adjustments.
Why, then, are we driving ourselves ever faster? On one level, the answer seems obvious enough. We are part of an economic system that defines success as progress, and progress as growth, and growth as productivity of a particular sort. Greater productivity means a higher standard of living, which means a better quality of life. From this standpoint, it is clear enough, faster is better. But from another point of view — the wear and tear on our bodies, the loss of “quality time,” the narrowed perspectives on life — it is less obviously so. Yet the logic and momentum of our economic system take precedence over these other basic human needs.
What prompts us to ignore the needs of our bodies and psyches? There are many factors and reasons, I’m sure. Certainly, many of us feel we don’t have a choice: we need to earn a living, to support our families, and we will do whatever it takes. We may well feel that other people — those with wealth and power — are setting the agenda, and deriving the greatest benefit. And while there may some truth in this, I suspect that we are all to some extent suffering from a system we didn’t create. As I’ve tried to make sense of this picture, I have found some clues in examining the existential, or religious, dimension of our lives. Could it be that we are rushing ever faster, hoping to save ourselves, to liberate ourselves from our suffering and our sense of lack?
Max Weber believed that the roots of the capitalist system could be found in a displacement of the religious quest for salvation onto the economic sphere. Weber’s thesis, as he presented it in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, was controversial in its time, and it remains controversial to this day. But others have continued to take up the spirit of his argument without fully adopting his specifics. Certainly, Ernest Becker’s story of the denial of death has a Weberian ring to it. David Loy’s version, in which unexamined and unacknowledged lack drives us to seek a resolution we can never actually achieve, also points to the displacement of religious longing. “[A]lthough we think of the modern world as secularized,” Loy says, “its values ... are not only derived from religious ones . . . , they are largely the same values, albeit transformed by the loss of reference to an other-worldly dimension.”3
I find this existential/religious perspective on our current circumstances useful in two ways. For one, it helps me make sense of the extreme claims, the hype and exaggeration, that are such a notable feature of our discussions of the new technologies. For some time now we have regularly heard that everything is revolutionary: that digital technologies are the biggest thing since Gutenberg (or are they bigger?); that digital books will fulfill the true (yet unfulfilled) promise of books; that we are on the verge of a universal library and a single, globally connected community; that digital technologies portend the arrival of global democracy; and even that the Internet is the infrastructure of Teilhard de Chardin’s global consciousness, the noosphere.
Faced with such extreme and unsupported statements, I find myself wanting to turn away in frustration and disbelief. But in examining the claims more closely, I’ve come to see them as important expressions of something quite real, quite genuine. For what I now see in much of the current hype is a response to our existential plight: the longing to be freed from the confines of our earthly (and therefore mortal) conditions and our lack, the hope that information and knowledge will ultimately set us free, and that our new technological circumstances will provide the vehicles for achieving this. What is the long-standing dream of a complete, universal library about, if not the hope that knowledge will ease our burden, that it will ultimately save us?
I find the existential lens a useful one in another way as well: it serves as a reminder of the central questions of life. Especially when life is so busy, even frantic, when the claims on our time are impossible to meet, when we seem only to fall farther behind, and when the language of technology claims near-canonical status, it is useful to be reminded — at least I find it useful — that we are fragile creatures living uncertain lives, that the world is much bigger than any of our plans or projects. Looking through this lens, I see more clearly
In the climax of Borges’s story “The Aleph,” which served as the basis for the calligraphic piece I mentioned earlier, the protagonist comes upon the point in the universe that contains all other points. Gazing into this point, the Aleph, he sees the entire universe. “And here begins my despair as a writer,” he exclaims. How can he possibly describe what he has seen? For “[w]hat my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive.” He then launches into a description that owes much to Whitman, a catalog of the mundane and the miraculous:
I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; ... I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; ... I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards. . . .
“And I felt dizzy and wept,” he concludes, “for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe.”
Borges is regularly invoked by commentators wanting to extol the virtues of the emerging digital age. A number of people have been quick to note the parallel between the Aleph and the Web. “The Aleph,” says Douglas Wolk, “the portal through which one can see every point in the universe, is Netscape Navigator in all but name.”4 In much the same vein, Douglas Davis observes that “Mac-and-Netscape is my personal Aleph, in an early T-model form. Already many of us harbor a tiny screen about the size of the one described by Borges that permits us instant access to deep space (cf. The Hubble telescope site) and to reams of information about any subject, including yourself. Can you doubt that within a decade you and I will be seeing countless eyes, hearing countless voices on this universal plate of glass?”5
I’ve come to wonder, though, if all points in the universe — and all things and all creatures — aren’t alephs. Certainly anything closely observed has the potential to surprise, mystify, and enlighten us. Perhaps some of us are just more attuned to the portals present in particular kinds of things: some find God in the Web, while others see the divine in nature, or in the faces of men and women. My privileged route is through documents. At times, looking at a cash register receipt is enough for me to recall Whitman’s words: “Why should I wish to see God better than this day?”
In the end, how can we separate hype from hope, and both of these from present reality? Through careful examination and reflection, through pointed questioning, through public discussion. By admitting our ignorance, our concerns, our fears. By looking at present instabilities to see what they have to show us. We may not be able to predict the future, but in looking at documents we can perhaps see something at least as important: ourselves. For to look at our written forms is to see something of our striving for meaning and order, as well as the mechanism by which we continually create meaning and order. It is to see the anxiety within and behind this order. And it is also, potentially, to peek at that which lies beyond all formulations — “the unimaginable universe” — not just as an object of fear and denial, but of wonder and celebration.