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October 8, 2010
I'm not sure what this cartoon by John Spooner about the digital age means. Is it anti-technology? The computer means the decline of reading printed books? Or that the internet rots your brain and makes us stupid?
I'm interpreting it that way---as digital technology causing the waning of literary culture and its dire consequences for society. If this interpretation is plausible, then the cartoon is ironic as the only way that I can see the cartoon in Victor Harbor is by using digital technology: ie., a computer, the internet and broadband.
The main reason I'm reading less books these days is that I find them too expensive and I cannot afford to buy them. It is the economics that is forcing me to read books online.
The problem with the standard kind of arguments by a conservative literary culture is that they're fundamentally rehashing the technological opposition of the television age, the kind of opposition that McLuhan wrote about so powerfully back in the 1960s: word versus image, text versus screen. That was about the long-term decline towards a pure society of image.
Honestly, I would have thought we are better off in front of our computers and not zoning out in front of the TV--especially when are presented with junk such as Dangerous Ideas by Matt Frei. Frei can talk about the Enlightenment and modern Germany without once mentioning the German Enlightenment or Kant and Hegel.
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Well I hope your sitting up straight while your doing that. The internet must of been good for chiropractors.
Perhaps this chap is learning to be a chiropractor on-line.