It is still hard to tease out and identify precisely the mental qualities that the new systems encourage at the expense of the old ones. We are to a great extent our text systems; our values are heavily influenced by them, so much so that it is hard for us to conduct the self-scrutiny necessary to examine them. The search for knowledge in typographic culture was physical: to find out something you had to lift and shift heavy objects, fill out cards and carry them about, wait on line for access to stacks and shelves, ride from one building or institution to another. Of course to research via the computer also has its physicality, but the nuggets of knowledge are already in some sense stuck together. Knowledge in this new system shares much of the mathematical relativity from which it was born. Its certainties are interim versions of an unending text, to the totality of which the computer can give us access.The late eighteenth-century fascination with all manner of nebulous phantasmagoria stemmed, I believe, from their tantalizing capacity to stay in a transient state for some time before settling into a single pattern. Substitute apparitions were manufactured specifically to mime the innumerable real drifting and flickering ephemera that swirled above the horizon.
In the Faustian conversion from linear thinking to mosaic presentation, typical of the new media, can we suggest models for how to cope?
The production, management, and consumption of the flood of bytes spilling out of worldwide databases and computer networks has become a universal obsession. It is not accidental that this overwhelming volume of information coincides with a mounting concern for bolstering and maintaining language literacy. Yet the simplistic identification of verbal skills alone with a properly "humanistic" education is profoundly disturbing. It does not take into account the conceptual and perceptual revolution that has been occuring in the presentation of knowledge since the eighteenth century.