Speed Limits by Mark C. Taylor

Author:Mark C. Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

Fragmenting Fragments

The modernity that began with Luther’s privatization, deregulation, and decentralization of the subject, which resulted from the inward turn to the individual, appears to be reaching closure with the personal, religious, social, political, and economic fragmentation brought about by today’s high-speed networks. While industrial grids and post-industrial networks are structurally very different, both are characterized by the contrasting and sometimes contradictory rhythms of connection and separation, and splicing and dicing. Just as print standardizes production and individualizes consumption (that is, reading), so too networks of networks create global connections that divide as much as connect. Some walls fall and other walls rise, sealing individuals and communities in silos and cutting them off from genuine connection and conversation. The more sophisticated the technology and the faster the connectivity, the more these fragments are fragmented until the horizon disappears and each person becomes sealed in a bubble where it is difficult if not impossible to hear anything but the echo of one’s own voice or the voices of those who are just like oneself. The result of this fragmentation is the loss of common knowledge and shared values that are the basis of every community.

We have seen that mass communication began with the invention of the printing press and the mass circulation of Luther’s Bible, sermons, and tracts. Attentive observers quickly realized that print both standardizes and individualizes. Kierkegaard, who was one of Luther’s most faithful followers, was the first critic of what he regarded as the dehumanizing effect of mass media. His focus was the newspaper industry in nineteenth-century Europe. Ever the champion of the individual, Kierkegaard was convinced that modern mass media repressed individual thinking and acting by transforming people into unknowing vehicles for the opinions and interests of others he labeled “the crowd.” In his brief 1845 book The Present Age, which was the first influential work of media criticism, he writes, “And eventually human speech will become just like the public: pure abstraction—there will no longer be someone who speaks, but an objective reflection will gradually deposit a kind of atmosphere, an abstract noise that will render human speech superfluous, just as machines make workers superfluous. In Germany there are even handbooks for lovers; so it probably will end with lovers being able to sit and speak anonymously to each other. There are handbooks on everything, and generally speaking education soon will consist of knowing letter-perfect a larger or smaller compendium of observations from such handbooks, and one will excel in proportion to his skill in pulling out the particular one, just as the typesetter picks out letters.”33

The correlative dangers of depersonalization and homogenization that Kierkegaard identified so early become even more evident with the spread of mass media throughout the twentieth century. With the introduction of national radio, television, newspapers, and magazines, the dissemination of information expanded but the channels of communication were controlled by a few major corporations. By midcentury, the information people received tended to be as uniform as the half-hour format of nightly news programs around which housewives scheduled family dinners.

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