What’s Next with Your Glass Teats?

 

What's Next with your Glass Teats?

For Christmas my family gave me a brand-new, cutting edge iPad 2. The thing is still in its shrink wrapped box. 

 

I mean, what’s the use of opening it? Right after Christmas, word came out that a much-more-advanced iPad3 was in the works, but anyone buying that cutting-edge version will be just as disappointed as I am now because—surely as the sun rises in the east—a few months or weeks later, the iPad4 with SG9X or whatever will be driving the Apple-devotees over their purchase cliffs like so many white-earbudded lemmings.

 

In 1973, my friend Harlan Ellison gathered the early columns of TV/cultural criticism he’d written for the Los Angeles Free Press into a nonfiction book which he titled The Glass Teat. His second collection of such columns was titled—of course—The Other Glass Teat.

 

Born in 1934, Harlan wasn’t raised on any Glass Teat—his daemons of choice were imagination-stimulating radio and motion pictures—but my generation, while not born with the Glass Teat of television already in our mouths and brains, connected to it soon enough. By the time most of us were seven or eight, on those Friday evenings when Dad was traveling on business, Mom would let us eat dinner on TV trays in front of Cheyenne and Rin Tin Tin.

 

Most of my generation was never weaned from the Glass Teat of TV, but in later years—even in Martindale dorm, which had one lousy black-and-white TV in the basement, and it hauling in only two-and-a-half channels—the demands of growing up, earning a living, graduate school, earning a living, marriage, earning a living, parenting, and earning a living all combined to keep us away from our favorite and only Glass Teat of choice for days, months, or even years at a time.

Today, no one need ever leave his or her Glass Teat behind for so much as a single waking hour.

 

We commute to work chatting and texting on our cell phones with their increasingly busy screens that can stream TV so that our connection to this all-essential Ur-Glass-Teat need not be interrupted, move to our desktop computer at work to check our Facebook page where we have hundreds of friends whom we’ve never met, and haul our multiple laptops and now even more portable tablets when we need to be mobile. And now we’ve begun getting our “books” almost solely via cheap little e-readers that have far more basic disadvantages—needing electricity, most aren’t readable in the dark, making marginal comments is difficult, older marginal comments by the book’s previous owners aren’t there—and very few of the advantages of even a modest paperback book.

 

Social critic Neil Postman’s predictions of a truly technopolized society are no longer predictions; they’re our daily reality. Excuse me while I leap to Wikipedia—ah, here’s the information I wanted, elapsed search time 1.9 seconds—and I quote from the least-reliable quotable source on the planet (after the Huffington Post):

 

In his 1992 book Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology, Postman defines “Technopoly” as a society which believes “the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency, that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment...and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.”

 

Sound familiar in any way?

 

Postman was one of the few educational theorists who realized how profoundly undemocratic runaway technology combined with unrestricted capitalism can be. Who was it, exactly, who voted to make all our LP vinyl record collections obsolete—not to mention the expensive turntables and “sound systems” we’d invested in to play those records? When was the democratic referendum held in which the majority of us voted to begin our lifelong music acquisition efforts from scratch again, first for CDs, then for burnable singles from iTunes (or someplace where we pay nothing because the artist’s work is stolen), now to stream to and through and from all our Glass Teats?

 

Postman understood the need for the “creative destruction” element of capitalism, augmented as it is through dizzying technological change, but he wasn’t ashamed to call himself a Luddite. That group—followers of a mythical, Robin Hood-like Ned Ludd, who sabotaged early-industrial-age looms—fought to preserve their culture and the value of their (non-industrialized) work. Postman’s identification with them is his acknowledgment that each new technology, however ill-conceived or temporary, may bring a greater reality of damage to a culture than the technology might be worth.

 

Neil Postman realized that the headlong rush to more and faster and shinier and more omnipresent Glass Teats in our lives would have dark consequences.

 

“Give us the name,” thousands of American parents might shout, “of the man or woman who put texting capabilities on a cell phone and then sold these ma-chines to our sons and daughters who’ve just received their drivers’ licenses!”

 

If you invent and sell a non-osmotic semipermeable crunch-enhancer for cereal (a la Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation) and it kills thousands or tens of thousands of people, largely those under 21, someone or some corporation is going to be held responsible. There’s going to be hell to pay and that payment will begin in the tens of billions of dollars to the parents of the dead kids.

 

But cellphones alone used by drivers of cars—much less cellphones with texting capabilities—have already killed thousands of young people (and those of all ages whom they plow into on the highways) and will, despite draconian laws and punishments being proposed in all states, kill hundreds of thousands more. 

 

Couldn’t someone designing cellphones (especially with text capabilities) have foreseen this highway carnage as young people, already suffering from the human race’s worst Age of Constant Attention Deficits, lose what little driving attention they were able to muster in the first place? Oh, give us a name—we’ll take the whole design committee if you give us their names—and give us a gibbet.

 

Postman understood that Glass Teats—all Glass Teats—not only are the drug of choice for shallow people, but they are deadly treacherous as well. Like the 1,207 “friends” I’ve accepted after being on Facebook for less than two months —about 7 of whom I’d recognize in person—context-free information flowing like botulized milk from all these Glass Teats creates a “comprehension field” that’s 25,000 miles wide and 1 millimeter deep.

 

Mostly, the gorilla-glass myriad of Glass Teats in 2012 will do what the Mother of All Glass Teats did in 1955: Mostly, it will distract us from more important and more human thoughts and interactions.

 

What’s Next with Childhood?

Nothing.

 

Childhood—as a separate time and place in one’s life—is gone. Dead. Finished.

 

Childhood was “born” in the late 1840s, largely due to the work of its midwife Charles Dickens, and it died in the mid-1990s, largely due to the indifference to it from all of us.

 

Look at paintings of children pre-1840s. The ratio of head size to body size is all wrong. They’re the proportions of shrunken adults. They’re bizarre. A Charlie Brown cartoon is closer to the head-body ratio of children than the portraits of some of the finest artists of the 15th through 19th centuries. That’s because no one really paid attention to “children”; they were thought of and even visualized as miniature adults.

 

Through his books, Dickens helped create childhood as a protected and sentimentalized new period in a human’s life.

 

But it’s dead now. As Postman pointed out decades ago, what separates the adult from the child is a restriction of information (and responsibilities and behaviors) for children. But when children and adults get all their information from the same source—today TV and the Internet—childhood, as a viable concept, is dead. By doing this, parents have helped remove the door to their bedroom—everything from sexual details to worries about money and mortgages now flows over the “child.”

 

When the culture deliberately sexualizes the child, childhood is dead.

 

When children are targeted for hundreds of billions of dollars as little consumers, childhood is dead.

 

In 2012, the culture will notice that we’ve killed childhood forever. The head-stone might read:

 

What’s Next with The Book?

“The Book” being not some group’s idea of sacred Scripture, but the very bookness of a physical book, whole and entire unto its own self.

 

In my Colorado Front Range community of some 90,000 souls, the only bookstore that carried new books was Bor-ders. As a writer, I’m supposed to praise only independent bookstores, but the truth is that our Borders was a clean, well-lighted, coffee-smelling place, filled with thousands of books in spite of their wish for more “diversified” inventory. 

 

It was one of the few places open after 9 p.m. on any given night, and it folded up, literally, over night. 

 

The same was true in 2011 in mid-size towns all across America—good towns and cities that could never support a large, independent bookstore like Portland’s Powell’s or Seattle’s Elliot Bay or Denver’s The Tattered Cover, but that offered an oasis for readers in the night with their Borders and Barnes & Nobles. The latter is now our last national chain of physical bookstores and its success or extinction, one reads in the Wall Street Journal, will depend on how well B&N sells their proprietary e-reader, the NOOK®, to their patrons.

 

Why do I imagine a cartoon of dinosaurs designing an asteroid to drop on themselves?

 

If you read only two books in 2012, I recommend that one of them be The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by the fine Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt. On page 248 of the hardcover version you will encounter this:

 

In 1989, Paul Quarrie, then the librarian at Eton College, bought a copy of the splendid 1563 De rerum natura, edited by Denys Lambin, at auction for £250. The catalogue entry noted that the endpapers of the copy were covered with notes and that there were many marginalia in both Latin and French, but the owner’s name was lost. Scholars quickly confirmed what Quarrie suspected, as soon as he had the book in his hands: this was [Michel de] Montaigne’s personal copy of Lucretius, bearing the direct marks of the essayist’s passionate engagement with the poem.

 

THE SWERVE is not primarily about the rediscovery of a Montaigne-annotated copy of Lucretius’ then-more-than-1,500-year-old poem, but rather about the original rediscovery of Lucretius’ work by one Poggio Bracciolini in the winter of 1417. It is Bracciolini’s deliberate search for old scrolls and copied manuscripts that led to the rediscovery of Lucretius’ De rerum natura and to the eventual transformation of the world. (To get the full spectrum of Lucretius’ effect on poetry and drama, one must—as I did by sheer accident—follow the reading of Greenblatt’s book with Harold Bloom’s The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life.) The splendid 1563 De rerum natura for which Quarrie spent all of £250 shows us the direct line of thought connecting Lucretius’ writing, Montaigne’s musings on Lucretius’ writings, and Shakespeare’s extraordinary soliloquies for his character Hamlet—the playwright’s efforts to express a theatrical character’s thoughts in a form equal to the essays of Montaigne, which Shakespeare had recently read.

 

This ink trail of transformation makes a powerful point: Only physical books can survive across time to tell such tales, not only in their text, but in and by their physical form. And yes, in their marginalia.

 

It’s a point we seem to be missing.

 

In the May 2003 edition of D-Lib Magazine—a librarian’s journal dedicated to the digital preservation of print materials—authors Deanna Marcum and Amy Friedlander write:

 

Electronic storage media degrade, just as paper does, only perhaps more quickly. Signals stored on electronic media also degrade, and not at a consistent rate, and hardware and software become obsolete. Data must therefore be transferred to new media or migrated to newer platforms, operating systems, and program applications…Each item in a digital archive requires active management. Discs, tapes, and other electronic media, like print, must be maintained in controlled environments, but may take more labor than print to preserve. Finally, metadata is vital for information management but is labor-intensive and hence expensive to create.

 

From the 1960s to the mid-1980s, the Library of Congress attempted to “save” their non-acid-free-paper books by transferring to microfilm and then onto analog tapes electronic codes that could be reconstructed by special “reading machines” which turned them back into pages projected in spool-and-sprocket microfilm format. By the late 80s the Library realized that the future was digital. The Library of Congress also realized that the analog electronic “reading machines” were no longer being manufactured: 20 years of sloppy, murky, scratched, page-to-microfilm-to-analog-tape copying was now worthless.

 

Meanwhile, the original books continued to slowly deteriorate—save for those which had been tossed out after being “saved” by the wizard analog transcription machines.

 

By the late 1980s the Library had started over, digitally copying books and putting the digitized pages and books on CD-ROM. (Question: Does your new Apple iPad or newest computer have a CD-ROM player or burner? It’s the day-before-yesterday’s technology. So are the 1080p HDTV in your living room and the Blu-ray player supplying it with high-def digital data. “Streaming data” is cutting edge today but will be obsolete—players and streaming decoders impossible to find—in 10 years or less.)

 

Imagine a future Poggio Bracciolini—say some 1,200 years after the thermonuclear conflagration and deliberate electromagnetic-pulse attacks wipe all digital content clean from our machines (and shut down all solid-state circuitry forever). He comes upon the Kindle Fire or NOOK or iPad that once held the future Dark Ages equivalent of De rerum natura—perhaps the illustrated children’s book How Things Are Made. Only the “book” this future Bracciolini encounters is just so much broken plastic and gorilla glass melted into fused solid-state circuits. (Even if he found an intact e-reader, our future Bracciolini—capable of speaking and reading in the dead language of English so as to speed along his search for ancient wisdom—will have no batteries or other forms of electric current with which to activate the dead lumps of plastic and silicon.)

 

To paraphrase William H. Gass, books—books in their classical physical form—are minded things. They share the contents of long-dead human minds with the yet-unborn future human minds. But books—as opposed to temporary electronic squiggles—also seem to have a mind and will of their own. Read Greenblatt’s The Swerve and you’ll be sorely tempted to believe that Lucretius’ De rerum natura was willing itself to be found.

And real books are disappearing from our world.