The Information: How The Internet Gets Inside Us

A Critic at Large
February 14, 2011 Issue
The Information
How the Internet gets inside us.

By Adam Gopnik
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/14/the-information
When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the
universal search engine Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger, that
charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library and spends hours and hours
working her way through the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to make
a love potion. The idea that a wizard in training might have, instead, a magic pad
where she could inscribe a name and in half a second have an avalanche of news
stories, scholarly articles, books, and images (including images she shouldn’t be
looking at) was a Quidditch broom too far. Now, having been stuck with the
library shtick, she has to go on working the stacks in the Harry Potter movies,
while the kids who have since come of age nudge their parents. “Why is she doing
that?” they whisper. “Why doesn’t she just Google it?”
That the reality of machines can outpace the imagination of magic, and in so
short a time, does tend to lend weight to the claim that the technological shifts in
communication we’re living with are unprecedented. It isn’t just that we’ve lived
one technological revolution among many; it’s that our technological revolution is
the big social revolution that we live with. The past twenty years have seen a
revolution less in morals, which have remained mostly static, than in means: you
could already say “fuck” on HBO back in the eighties; the change has been our
ability to tweet or IM or text it. The set subject of our novelists is information; the
set obsession of our dons is what it does to our intelligence.
The scale of the transformation is such that an ever-expanding literature has

emerged to censure or celebrate it. A series of books explaining why books no
longer matter is a paradox that Chesterton would have found implausible, yet there
they are, and they come in the typical flavors: the eulogistic, the alarmed, the
sober, and the gleeful. When the electric toaster was invented, there were, no
doubt, books that said that the toaster would open up horizons for breakfast
undreamed of in the days of burning bread over an open flame; books that told you
that the toaster would bring an end to the days of creative breakfast, since our
children, growing up with uniformly sliced bread, made to fit a single opening,
would never know what a loaf of their own was like; and books that told you that
sometimes the toaster would make breakfast better and sometimes it would make
breakfast worse, and that the cost for finding this out would be the price of the
book you’d just bought.
All three kinds appear among the new books about the Internet: call them the
Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe
that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and
democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies
will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off
if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is
superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and
magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of
information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity
something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and
connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something
like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. One’s hopes rest
with the Never-Betters; one’s head with the Ever-Wasers; and one’s heart? Well,
twenty or so books in, one’s heart tends to move toward the Better-Nevers, and
then bounce back toward someplace that looks more like home.
Among the Never-Betters, the N.Y.U. professor Clay Shirky—the author of

“Cognitive Surplus” and many articles and blog posts proclaiming the coming of
the digital millennium—is the breeziest and seemingly most self-confident.
“Seemingly,” because there is an element of overdone provocation in his stuff (So
people aren’t reading Tolstoy? Well, Tolstoy sucks) that suggests something a little
nervous going on underneath. Shirky believes that we are on the crest of an ever-
surging wave of democratized information: the Gutenberg printing press produced
the Reformation, which produced the Scientific Revolution, which produced the
Enlightenment, which produced the Internet, each move more liberating than the
one before. Though it may take a little time, the new connective technology, by
joining people together in new communities and in new ways, is bound to make for
more freedom. It’s the Wired version of Whig history: ever better, onward and
upward, progress unstopped. In John Brockman’s anthology “Is the Internet
Changing the Way You Think?,” the evolutionary psychologist John Tooby shares
the excitement—“We see all around us transformations in the making that will
rival or exceed the printing revolution”—and makes the same extended parallel to
Gutenberg: “Printing ignited the previously wasted intellectual potential of huge
segments of the population. . . . Freedom of thought and speech—where they exist
—were unforeseen offspring of the printing press.”
Shirky’s and Tooby’s version of Never-Betterism has its excitements, but the
history it uses seems to have been taken from the back of a cereal box. The idea,
for instance, that the printing press rapidly gave birth to a new order of
information, democratic and bottom-up, is a cruel cartoon of the truth. If the
printing press did propel the Reformation, one of the biggest ideas it propelled was
Luther’s newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism. And what followed the
Reformation wasn’t the Enlightenment, a new era of openness and freely
disseminated knowledge. What followed the Reformation was, actually, the
Counter-Reformation, which used the same means—i.e., printed books—to spread
ideas about what jerks the reformers were, and unleashed a hundred years of
religious warfare. In the seventeen-fifties, more than two centuries later, Voltaire
was still writing in a book about the horrors of those other books that urged
burning men alive in auto-da-fé. Buried in Tooby’s little parenthetical—“where
they exist”—are millions of human bodies. If ideas of democracy and freedom
emerged at the end of the printing-press era, it wasn’t by some technological logic
but because of parallel inventions, like the ideas of limited government and
religious tolerance, very hard won from history.

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A Critic at Large

February 14, 2011 Issue

How the Internet gets inside us.

The scale of the transformation is such that an ever-expanding literature has

Among the Never-Betters, the N.Y.U. professor Clay Shirky—the author of

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