There are two parts to this reading. The first is the foreward to the book:
We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
Here's the second part of the reading. It's a piece of a chapter:
How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio
or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your
plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have
taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve?
For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have such
consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an
occasional story about a crime will do it, if by chance the crime
occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of
our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us
something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. This
fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an
abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be
called the "information-action ratio."
In both oral and typographic cultures, information derives its
importance from the possibilities of action. Of course, in any
communication environment, input (what one is informed about) always
exceeds output (the possibilities of action based on information). But
the situation created by telegraphy, and then exacerbated by later
technologies, made the relationship between information and action both
abstract and remote. For the first time in human history, people were
faced with the problem of information glut, which means that
simultaneously they were faced with the problem of a diminished social
and political potency.
You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series
of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in
the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment?
What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk
of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA,
affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha'is in Iran?
I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of
expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even
say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. the last
refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a
version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it
in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what
else?--another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of
impotence: the news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which
you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you
can do nothing.
Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was
sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to
control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew
about had action-value. In the information world created by telegraphy,
this sense of potency was lost, precisely because the whole world became
the context for news. Everything became everyone's business. For the
first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had
asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply.
We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public
discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was
not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent.
It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention, to
use Lewis Mumford's phrase. the principal strength of the telegraph was
its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze
it. In this respect, telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography.
books, for example, are an excellent container for the accumulation,
quiet scrutiny and organized analysis of information and ideas.
Interesting, I myself have not read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s 1984. I am intrigued by how many people were worried about 1984, yet did not panic about Huxley’s predictions. These predictions have turned out to be more accurate than any that 1984 warned. What are people doing about any of them? Huxley’s prophetic wisdom foresees that “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” This has a familiar ring to it, in our week 3 reading, Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains, this is the point that author was trying to convey. People have come rely on technology mare than their own capabilities to think for themselves. Perhaps this would be the time for people to do as Huxley so eloquently states, “What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha'is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.” People have become lazy, they expect others to make changes. Start thinking on your own, take a stand and be independent from technology, do not wait for someone to change something that requires change, we must relearn to do it ourselves.
ReplyDelete