Of course, if these social trends had coincided with the birth of the Internet, theorists would be claiming that the change of dominant medium had clearly changed society. But history is messier and more ambiguous than that. The idea that the Internet is making young people more critical and less deferential seems a little odd, when, as we saw in Chapter One, these trends were already there in the 1950s, with James Dean, the Beats and the birth of pop music. The biggest youth and student revolts of all time–which took place in 1968–came smack-bang in the middle of the TV era, not the Net era. And is the collaborative attitude highlighted by Tapscott really new? We’ve seen how the instinct to cooperate was one of the fundamental advantages of early humans, and that this characteristic has probably been honed by evolution. For sure, the Net hugely facilitates collaboration, but the instinct has been there for thousands of years. Of course, the Internet might be having numerous effects on young people; but if so, at the moment it’s unclear precisely what they are.
Moreover, many other forces, besides new means of communication, are also at work, moulding society. If we were forced to pick one single technological change that has transformed society since the eighteenth century, it would be the invention of the steam engine, which facilitated the Industrial Revolution and led to massive increases in both the number of people in the world and their living standards. Given the same task for the nineteenth century, it would probably be a toss-up between the invention of railways and the automobile–both of which essentially derived from the steam engine–and the practical exploitation of electricity. None of these developments was in communications media. For the twentieth century, the invention of the transistor–which led to the silicon chip–might top the poll.
Beyond inventions and new technologies, society is most profoundly changed by radical ideas, such as the dignity of all human life, liberalism, nationalism, democracy and socialism, or more practical concepts, such as Keynesian economics and the importance of maintaining purchasing power to avoid depressions and mass unemployment. Despite the regressive tendencies of some recent world leaders–some now mercifully dead or retired–most people in Europe and the Americas are now free from the fear of being tortured, something that was not true three hundred years ago. Ideas and social norms are at least as important as the means of communication that propagate them–to some extent at least, the message really is the message.
So, if you grew up with television or the Internet, ask yourself whether either of them has fundamentally changed your attitudes, your behaviour, or the way your mind works. It seems a dubious claim.
What would a big change in attitude and thought look like anyway? Let’s compare the impact of electronic media with two earlier shifts in the prevailing means of communication. (Incidentally, with these, we think McLuhan was right about their profound effect on humankind.)
In the previous chapter, we saw how the invention of language–the most fundamental and important change in communications technology ever–not only affected human nature, but helped create it in the first place. Language really did change everything. You’ve probably observed the ease and speed with which a child acquires language, or even two languages simultaneously. The software certainly downloads easily. Over millennia, our brains have become, in part, wonderful language machines, purpose-built for this function. The medium of language has become so important to humans that the species appears to have become specifically designed for it.
But we don’t have to go that far back in history to notice another epoch-making change.
Contrast television and the Internet with the effects that gradually flowed from the advent of typographic print around 1450. This separated speech from the speaker, made ideas portable across physical and social distance, and moved us from communal to private thought. Before printed books, only a minuscule elite of people could read books, all of which had to be copied by hand. Everyone else–999 people out of 1000–relied on their leaders for new information: kings, tribal chiefs, lords, priests, landowners and occasionally merchants. Ordinary people had little opportunity to think, read or reflect internally. They were too busy listening, obeying and just scrambling to survive.
Johannes Gutenberg and his co-inventors changed all that. The demand for, and supply of, knowledge increased faster than ever before–the Renaissance transformed ideas, art, medicine and science. There was a tremendous outpouring of new writing and knowledge: as the Scottish anthropologist James Frazer (1854–1941) noted in The Golden Bough, the pace of innovation speeds up enormously with written books: ‘For literature accelerates the advance of thought at a rate which leaves the slow progress of opinion by word of mouth at an immeasurable distance behind. Two or three generations of literature may do more to change thought than two or three thousand years of traditional life.’50
The authority of priests and the Church of Rome became fatally compromised. Everyone could now read the Bible and many other books and make decisions about the meaning of life, the universe and everything. New forms of Christianity proliferated; scepticism and atheism were born. Nationalism became possible, because for the first time since ancient Greece and Rome there was such a thing as public opinion within each country. Europe entered an age of reason that led eventually to the American and French revolutions and modern democracy. Attitudes towards commerce and industry changed. The so-called Protestant work ethic emerged and spread to all civilised countries, whatever their religion, transforming the self-confidence and power of ordinary people. They began to think and reflect; the individual could find inner direction towards remote objectives. Inventions proliferated. While the printing press with movable type did not directly cause all these phenomena, they would have been inconceivable without it.
At a personal level, printed books, popular journals and private reading really did transform life, but it was not an easy process. Readers had to embed a complicated symbolic technology in their minds–to learn the alphabet and each letter’s phonetic representation, how they combined to form words, how to read those words, how to write them, how to think them. Given the oral society that had preceded it, typographic society imposed dramatic changes on personal lives.
Once mastered, though, a whole new world of thought, structured and linear organisation of ideas, private reflection allowed by non-synchronous correspondence, and ultimately individual interpretation and individualism began to prevail beyond the intellectual elites of monastery and court. Movable type touched millions of people in lower echelons of society–merchants and traders; craftsmen and guild members; parish priests and teachers; artists and scientists. The alphabetic mindset changed and extended our thought processes in a highly significant way. Together with the emergence of language, it is the clearest and most profound example of how a new medium altered human life forever.
Frankly, any changes to human nature or conduct that have been wrought by electronic media, so far at least, pale by comparison.
Rather than being an unprecedented development, the Internet simply combines and repackages a range of older media in a very flexible and convenient way. It uses established modes of communication–we read, write, speak, listen, watch and project ourselves, in much the same manner as we did before, but without having to leave our chair so often. It doesn’t impose any radically new mode of communication or novel way to use our minds. It does advance the creation and circulation of knowledge, but not to the same relative degree as when printing catalysed the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution.