The sign on the Information Superhighway says, ``Slow traffic keep right.'' I see and obey. I wouldn't know about life in the fast lane. I'm plodding along on the path for ox-drawn carts with an old-fashioned book in my hands, watching the info-joy riders pass me by.
To me, they're forlorn pilgrims searching for trinkets in a landfill. To them, I'm a dodo bird gathering dust in the basement of a museum.
1994 was officially proclaimed the year of ``The End of the Book.'' That's the ominous title of an essay in The Atlantic Monthly (September 1994), by D.T. Max. We're undergoing a revolution, a return to the oral tradition and a book-free society, according to Max. Information will ``explode.''
Cybervisionaries crow about innovations like hypertext which give the reader, ``the choice of whether Alice goes down the hole or decides to stick around and read alongside her sister on the riverbank.''
The coming revolution, according to one prophet, ``makes political revolution seem like a game.'' It will change how people work, communicate, entertain themselves. ``It is the biggest engine for change in the world today.''
In this brave new world, everyone becomes an author, everyone a cinematographer with video camera in hand, recording every half-baked thought and pothole in the road. We will organize ourselves into new types of communities and societies. We will develop new worlds and values.
In his article ``Society's Subcultures Meet by Modem'' in The Wall Street Journal (December 8, 1994), Scott McCartney tells how teenagers find it easier to communicate on the Internet, the global computer highway, than talk to their peers directly. Notes left on hallway lockers are ``snail mail.'' Anonymous electronic communication helps them come out of their adolescent shells, express their true selves, even build self-esteem.
The communications explosion is heralded as the ultimate democracy. It has toppled totalitarian regimes and has been a boon to freedom. George Orwell was wrong, according to Joan E. Rigdon in another Wall Street Journal article (December 8, 1994). Big Brother is not in control.
But democracy presupposes literacy. Can television junkies and Internet addicts follow an argument, spot inconsistencies and bunk? Our political debate has degenerated into mindless slogans, and illiterates are easily suckered. A return to the ``oral tradition'' sounds like cave-people enchanted by shamans. What good is instant access to information if you don't know how to interpret and transform it? How can we sift through an explosion of information to find the messages worth reading?
According to multimedia cheerleaders, books are handicapped because they can't make you literally see and hear. But making you see and hear is precisely what's wrong with contemporary entertainments. They do the work of the imagination, depriving us of life's most rewarding labor.
Great books are the work of geniuses. One of the miracles and privileges of existence is the opportunity to become familiar with them. Reading is the ultimate interactive pastime.
In The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in the Electronic Age (Faber and Faber, 1994), critic Sven Birkerts argues that new technologies supplanting the printed work threaten the core premises of humanism.
In A is for Ox (Pantheon), Barry Sanders connects illiteracy and addiction to electronic images with the growing violence of our youth. Reading is essential for the development of self, according to him.
``My generation may be the lastto have a strong visceral affection for books,'' said a publishing industry spokesperson quoted by Max.
Novelist John Calvin Batchelor attended a symposium of America's literary-intellectual elite sponsored by the New York Review of Books and reported that virtually no one other than the featured speakers showed up.
``If you write badly enough, you'll have an audience,'' sniffed William Gass. ``If you write well enough, you'll have readers.''
Sign in our office: ``One civilized reader is worth a thousand boneheads.'' Newspaper writers worry that they're an endangered species, too.
But if masses aren't reading, why is the $18 billion book-publishing industry going great guns? Nearly 50,000 titles were published last year. Someone apparently believes there's a market, even for The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus and The Guide to Bodily Fluids, with chapters on mucus, saliva, sweat.
One cyberprophet predicts that the coming revolution is going to be like a ``communication cocktail party.'' Exactly. We're creating a forum for incoherent babble, the kind produced by boring drunks.