New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1995, 243 p.
If one is interested in engaging even a few sustained ideas about problems of contemporary technological culture do not hope for even that little in Nicholas Negroponte's new book, Being Digital. That the text reads like breathless advertising copy should come as no surprise for the author is one of the more high profile participants in the massive promotional corporate project (which began in the late 1970s with the diffusion of the personal computer but that has intensified in the last several years alongside the mass-marketing of the Internet) to naturalize the disciplinary interface of human body and keyboard, and to make this modality of existence seem necessary, desirable and inevitable. One of the striking things about this book, though, is how unconvincing is his celebration of this word of “digitality”. Negroponte is so committed to the imperatives of technological production and consumption that he simply is not very skilled at explaining why we should even consider wanting to inhabit the terrain he sketches out for us, other than vapid encomiums about being able to communicate better, to work more efficiently and that we will have access to lots of information. It is vision of a world where the social disappears or is made identical with the purchasing and using of new electronic products.
Most of us live in social environments so alienating that we don't even speak to the people who live next door to us ; yet Negroponte is eager to convince us that technology will magically overcome that deeply ingrained social fragmentation and allow us to “communicate”. So much of what he and others assert about on-line communication is part of a huge phantasmagoric promise of social intimacy which, despite its fraudulence, is very appealing. At the same time, Negroponte reiterates the familiar and banal claim that the mass availability of electronic data will be linked with what he vaguely suggests will be “social progress”.
It is difficult to know where to begin in indicating the spuriousness of such claims. That Western patterns of technological consumption could ever be expanded to a world of now six, soon ten billions people boggles the most elementary economic and ecological common sense. What Cyber-cheerleaders like Negroponte continually dissemble about is that participation in the emerging information imaging and communication technologies will never (in the meaningful future) expand beyond a minority of people on this planet. No matter how much he talks about satellite dishes in Senegal or computer networks in Indonesia, the vast majority of people on this planet will be completely cut out or have only the most crude or relatively powerless kinds of interface with precisely those systems that Negroponte poses as universal and egalitarian. Whatever the local value our new electronic communities, it is crucial to understand how they are also part of an intensifying process of global polarization, segregation and impoverishment.
The most interesting kinds of questions, about the appearance of new machinic modes of human subjectivity and their larger cultural impact is not even hinted in a book so deeply unimaginative as this. What is becoming clear (and few will be honest about it) is that alongside the spread of new electronic modes of communication and interaction will be a complex array of psycho-chemicals, far beyond Zoloft and Prozac as essential supports for the functioning of these much hypes but deeply melancholy environments. Words like “psychosis” and “depression” are less and less adequate to describe what's happening across a whole dispirited social landscape. But these are not issues for Negroponte who is really writing about which corporate strategies and product lines will be successful in the 21st century global marketplace.
Jonathan Crary ⌐