Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Techno-pessimism vs. Techno-optimism In the wake of last week's U.S. Supreme court ruling in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/ I've been feeling as if my bright shiny new ideals have gotten a little tarnished. All I really wanted was to see more people being able to access--electronically and economically--more books. Call me crazy. Or call me "radical" and "counter-culture." I knew from a young age, reading is a radical act. Or, perhaps, it is only that reading leads to radical acts. I have also been struggling with another anti-technology argument, that put forth by Postman in his _Technopoly_. I'm trying to be fair, but really, it is an extensive rant about how technology is killing the book and leading to the death of culture. I think some people are just a little nervous that the definition of "culture" is beginning to extend to pop culture, cyberculture, world culture, disAbled culture...There are no longer just a handful of high priests of culture deciding what is culture and what is trash, but they still like to believe someone is going to believe that only The New York Times Book Review can define what is a "good" book, or even what is a book. I think I'm going to go reread "Howl" and listen to some Dylan tunes... Oh, yeah, so, n.s., there I was, feeling like the technodream was suffering from its recent brush with RL (that's "real life" for you non-radical non-counter-culture un-hip cats) when I went off to Arisia http://www.arisia.org. People with tech toys, people in weird costumes, heck, people in weird clothes that weren't even costumes, people reading books, people with kids who read books, people who wrote books--there were lots of books...What I am trying to say is, there were lots of books. There was lots of technology. I did not notice one thriving at the detriment of the other; as a matter of fact, what I noticed was mostly people using the tech to read and write and produce the books and the culture. I also got to pet a hawk. I feel much better now. 3:21:31 PM    comment []