The Socially Divisive Internet

Today is my day to lounge, a deserved day of rest and respose.  My house is relatively clean.  The gardeners come tomorrow so I don't have to worry about such things.  My younger son is idly sleeping before a day of software and calculus -- my older son is taking an exam in a more difficult level of calculus.  And the cat is sleeping.

A few minutes ago, I finished reading Theodore Dreiser's The Genius, a rare book I've wanted to read for years.  It is a dissolute book of illicit sex and twenty-something ambition, but also of touching sensitivity. The artistic mentality -- allowing oneself to be pulled into a vortex of passion -- is unmasked, for passion is both entrancing and dangerous, lovely and deadly.

I will not commit my thoughts of art-mindedness to paper.  These ideas remain unwritten and hidden within.  

But I will write about finding Dreiser's book on the Internet, in full text, each page carefully photographed. What an incredible experience.  I haven't left home and here it is on my screen.  A reader before me had bracketed words, lines and paragraphs. Those brackets remain.  The book, then, feels real, not virtual.  It's been marked. Pondered over. Someone has been to its words before me.

Such availability of information, once confined to elite university libraries, will have a profound impact on society.  At the Yale Beinecke rare book library with its eerie, yellow-green light through translucent marble walls, I remember putting on white cloth gloves to touch books written years -- no, centuries -- prior.  I was overwhelmed with the notion of perpetual learning; a writer's mind was knowable long after death through his or her writings.  Writings, then, were that touch of immortality, for in my hands, in musty view, were the words of another person, long gone but strangely present.

Similarly, the Internet brings this presentness of the past to people who ordinarily would not have access to such monographs, maps and other material.  Seeing texts on the Internet is not quite the same experience as having them in hand -- not fully sensual -- but, still, a good approximation.  In this way the Internetlevels knowledge by making it accessible to almost everyone. Now, an isolate, wandering into a library with a computer can look at books that only the studious elite had been able to see. How wonderful this is!  I worry, though, that it will further birfurcate society into the intellectually curious and intellectually dull. Accessibility used to be the obstacle to learning. Now, it is ability. And our differing abilities cut deeper. They divide crisply.  

In the past, raw intelligence had both a nurtured and natural component. It still does, of course, but when nurture is everpresent and available, people who seem less learned can no longer be thought of natively intelligent, but unfortunately lacking access to the materials of learning. The Internet denies that excuse. When nurture is everywhere, nature is dominant.  

For any individual who desires to know ... can. 

What this portends for our well-functioning society with its patina of egalitarianism, I don't know.  I'm just thinking, here.  Aloud.

Comments

[Petro]

You know about this http://lecturefox.com/ right?

There are now several universities putting whole classes online.

[Kristen Burroughs]

Petro,

A few months ago, I went to the MIT site to find information on solar panels, heating and cooling, etc. To be honest, I didn't know the other courses existed. What a treat! I only wish I had more time. And yes, the description by one of the profs about the Internet and information was much like my own -- only better.

Please stick around. I'm curious about you.

K