And the Pixel Was Made Flesh 0 comments

THE advent of the new telecommunications technologies—including the Internet and its primary manifestation, the World Wide Web—has generated a torrent of hype and hyperbole. But even if we were to discount all the euphoric statements that have been made about the wonders of the "electronic global village," the fact remains: we are, willy-nilly, entering the Digital Age. Our most astute cultural observers, whether they are friends or foes of the new technologies, agree that the medium of the printed word is giving way to the faster-paced, point-and-click realm of Net-surfing, hypertext, and multimedia presentations.

Of course, Marshall McLuhan's prophetic voice told us thirty years ago that "the medium is the message—hat reading, a deeply private and internal experience, was soon to be superseded by the public, in-your-face, immersive experiences of television and computers. Over the years, McLuhan has received his own share of hype (and knew how to generate his own)—but he was essentially right. The medium does have a substantial impact on the message.

What are the implications of this shift from books to digital technology for the future of the Judeo-Christian tradition? If the religious heritage of the West is centered on the primacy of the sacred books, and if Christianity understands its savior as the divine Word, how will the digitally-reared generations come to perceive God, grace, and the biblical narrative?

I cannot pretend that I have any answers to these questions. On the one hand I have a variety of concerns and fears, while on the other I have a strong instinct not to respond like a Luddite with my head firmly stuck in the sand. The last major paradigm shift in communications took place in the fifteenth century, with Gutenberg's printing press and the transition from oral culture to literary culture. Both cultures, however, sprang from the spoken word, even if in books the "presence" of the speaking voice was indirect.

In the Greek, logos means not only "word" but also the cosmic "reason" that orders the universe. The logos emerges out of silence and is spoken into the silence of our hearts and minds, where it continues its ordering work. In the Western tradition, reading demanded an arduous act of imaginative response. The critic Sven Birkerts has spoken of reading as putting us in "deep time"—an austere, one-on-one encounter with the mind of the author.

By contrast, the Internet is like a huge bulletin board or public mural that we can skim across, occasionally dipping in to follow a thought or download an image or sound file. Though it might seem reasonable to say that "text is always text," whether in ink or in the colored pixels of a computer screen, I wonder if that is really so. On the Web the use of "hypertext" links to other subjects is a constant temptation to fly off on tangents. My experience of trying to follow Internet trails is that there are rare occasions when I make significant discoveries but countless episodes where I end up in thickets and cul-de-sacs, wondering how I got there in the first place. Significantly, the piece of software one needs to explore the Web is known as a "browser."

If we lose the mental, emotional, and imaginative discipline of reading, shorten our attention spans even further, fill our minds with trivia, and become adept at manipulating surface images, how prepared will our hearts be to recognize the quiet intimacies of grace? Words are certainly not immutable, but they have more stability than pixels, those infinitely shifting points of light.

Then there is the issue of personal presence and identity. Imagine a computer-generated world of "virtual reality" where you appear to others not as yourself, but as a movie star, or a member of the opposite sex, or Roger Rabbit. Netheads glorify this infinite regression of role-playing, but does this type of posturing offer us more than face-to-face encounters? Meeting "f2f," as the computer generation puts it, is hardly a guarantee of a significant encounter. But with the experience of physical presence—an arch of the eyebrow, a gesticulating hand, a sudden change in the timbre of a voice—we have the opportunity to share ourselves honestly and meaningfully. In reading literature, we focus on the very same details that express individuality and character.

Postmodernists love the Internet because they delight in endless role-playing. Christians, however, are supposed to spend an entire lifetime learning how to take off the many masks we wear in order to meet, and love, a Person.

When a new and powerful technology comes along, the proper response, I feel, is not to deny its existence, but to hedge it around with moral and cultural restraints. We continue to live in the midst of huge arsenals of biological and nuclear weapons, but we have dramatized the insanity of their potential use so often that the Bomb no longer looms large in our collective fears. At the risk of sounding like Luddites, we must be willing to utter dire prophecies and sketch out worst-case scenarios. Only then will we be able to inoculate ourselves against the most dangerous tendencies of a new technology.

But in the coming years, don't be surprised to see Image get its own website, and even appear in CD-ROM editions. In our future travels, after we have wedged thick novels and hand-printed poetry chapbooks into our bags, we fully intend to pack a laptop and a modem.