the Wall Street Journal; it also can be construed as a fountain of youth pouring
out data streams in directions heretofore unimaginable and unknown, allowing
David Carr, media columnist and critic for the New York Times, to believe that
“someday, I should be able to walk into a hotel in Kansas, tell the television who
I am and ;nd everything I have bought and paid for, there for the consuming.”
Carr presumably knows whereof he speaks, and I’m content to regard the
Internet as the best and brightest machine ever made by man, but nonetheless
a machine with a tin ear and a wooden tongue. It is one thing to browse
the Internet; it is another thing to write for it. ;e author doesn’t speak to a
fellow human being, whether a Spaniard, a Frenchman, or a German. He or
she addresses an algorithm geared to
accommodate keywords—insurance,
Steve Jobs, Muammar Qadda;,
mortgage, Casey Anthony—but is
neither willing nor able to wonder
what the words might mean. It
scans everything but hears nothing,
as tone-deaf as the ;ltering devices
maintained by a search engine or the
Pentagon, processing words as lifeless
objects, not as living subjects.
;e strength of language doesn’t
consist in its capacity to pin things
down or sort things out. “Word work,”
Toni Morrison said in Stockholm,
“is sublime because it is generative,”
its felicity in its reach toward the
ine;able. “We die,” she said. “;at
may be the meaning of life. But we
do language. ;at may be the measure
of our lives.” Shakespeare shaped the
same thought as a sonnet, comparing
his beloved to a summer’s day, o;ering
his rhymes as surety on the bond of
immortality—“So long as men can
breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives
this and this gives life to thee.”
Maybe our digital technology is still too new. Writing ;rst appears on clay
tablets around 3000 ;;; it’s another 3,300 years before mankind invents the
codex; from the codex to moveable type, 1, 150 years; from moveable type to
the Internet, 532 years. Forty years haven’t passed since the general introduction
of the personal computer; the World Wide Web has only been in place for
twenty. We’re still playing with toys. ;e Internet is blessed with undoubtedly
miraculous applications, but language is not yet one of them. Absent the force
of the human imagination and its powers of expression, our machines cannot
accelerate the hope of political and social change, which stems from language
that induces a change of heart.
One Morning, by Kurt Schwitters, 1947.
