Consider that I am reading one of Plato’s Foundational Texts: the Republic, for instance. Meanwhile, you are close at hand, playing with an iPad. Suppose I interrupted your game to ask you a question regarding Republican forms of Government. At first, you might be tempted to confuse my position for something referring to the Republican PARTY of the United States of America. With time, however, it would become clear that I am talking about Something Else Entirely.
Would you care? Perhaps not, if you
presume that whatever Plato had to say on the matter of Government is dated and
unimportant. You return to your Game, only to discover that a new Notification
has popped up from your Media Outlet of Choice: as it turns out, Republican
Radicals have raided the Capitol!!
You are furious and indignant. I
try to seize my opportunity, to no avail; by the time that I bring up Plato’s Republic
again, you have already moved on to spreading the News to anyone in the building
whose iContraption is not currently plugged in.
Finally, after an hour or so of
collective quibbling with your fellows at the Café, you return to your table. I
comment that you won’t get very far in Life if you dismiss books in favour of
quick fixes on your iPad screen. To this you simply seethe: “The information I
receive by Internet is just as good as anything you read up in a book.” When I
contest that Information isn’t all there is to Knowledge, you call me a
Luddite, or perhaps a Boomer, and you leave, most probably to spread the Word to
all Our Neighbours.
That I was not born during the Baby
Boom, nor have I ever thrown shoes into a Factory to save my livelihood, is
well beside the point. I did not challenge your use of the latest technology; I
simply pointed out that it was INSUFFICIENT.
Why? Because, having used much
OLDER technology in order to enrich my Understanding, I had something to offer
which was, given its legacy, far more FOUNDATIONAL and COMPLETE than a mere
blurb about political uprising. The remote quality of the text is one that
allows me the Sanctity of Mind in which to observe its contents with Objective
Detachment, rather than Emotional Outburst. Though my satire herein is clearly
a caricature, it is in fact an UNDERSTATEMENT of contemporary protest.
Real-life protest is far more dangerous than my comical, hypothetical
antagonist in the second person, and it is no less absurd to witness from a
literate perspective.
Why is my perspective the more
literate? To be clear: I’ve never read the Republic in Actuality. I use
it to illustrate an extreme in order to counterpoint another extreme with
sardonic wit.
In this example, there is nothing
preventing you from downloading a PDF of Plato’s work and reading it from your
Tablet; in fact, by reading it from a “tablet”, you might ironically contend that
you are honouring Plato’s original intentions BETTER than I do by my reading it from Paper, though perhaps if you
know a bit about Socrates you will insist that none of this ought ever to have
been inscribed at all.
Yet all of this is farcical, aimed
at lampooning the presumption that the printed word on paper holds the sort of Sacred
Dignity which men in bygone centuries projected onto it, just to show that THEY
knew how to read. In Truth, you would not even BOTHER with what those men had
to say, nor with what Plato chiseled tirelessly into blocks or tasked his
slaves with doing. How far would you get into the preface before you were
interrupted by another Notice from our Media? How much time would you agonize
over the strife of bygone city-states before you chose to fall back into
Present Times?
Presuming that the “Internet”
suffices for your “Information” is not just to say, “I’ll read your Plato from
my Tablet and save Trees,” but it IMPLIES instead: “I need no Plato, since I
have what he had never dreamt of in his wildest drunken fantasies.” So much for
the Symposium, then; you would gladly state the obvious: that all the
Ancient Greeks who wrote were drunk and horny, and no one could tell them
otherwise, so why should what they have to offer matter?
Yet the irony here is that your
Technology becomes Useless to you, whereas YOU become USEFUL to IT. The iPad
was not DEVELOPED with the INTENT of being used by college undergraduates to
study Plato’s ancient writings, since the casual consumer has no interest in
such archaic fancies. The iPad was intended for swift access to compact
information, ease of manipulation, electronic communications, and Entertainment.
You are right: Plato had probably never dreamt of it, and, presumably, the men
and women who designed the iPad did not feel they owed him any favours, even if
they did, under Closer Examination.
As such, if you were to PRESUME
that the Apple iPad, coupled with Internet Access, were all you needed with
which to Understand Politics, and if you were to equate Evidence to the Contrary
with an attack upon Technology and Technocratic Progress as Such, were you to
thus suppose that all New Forms of Technology are Superior to Older Models,
that their Limitations ought to be disregarded in favour of their INTENDED
USES, then you are effectively BEING USED BY your Technological Devices of Choice.
Rather than employing the privilege of a diverse Inventory of Devices in order
to arrive at the most Inclusive AND Consistent Frame of Reference, you would simply
DISOWN all older forms; the suggestion that any of them might retain MERIT to
the point of NECESSITY would be tantamount to destroying all iPads. The iPad,
fashioned towards a specific SET of USES, thus determines what YOU equate with “Usefulness”,
and it follows FROM this equation that OLDER forms are “Useless”.
Yet “useless” to whom? Everyone who
is not a Luddite Boomer.
[({R.G.)}]
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