The latest issue of Granta includes an article on Nostalgia. Part of that issue includes this Web-only feature that reprints an old essay called Ribbon of Valour. The discussion about whether new technology is really better didn’t begin with the invention of the Internet. From Granta online: “Hal Crowther’s essay ‘One Hundred Fears of Solitude’, a blistering critique of digital technology and the internet age, is printed in Granta 111: Going Back. This article, which voices similar concerns about a dawning technological age, was printed in The Independent Weekly of Durham, North Carolina, upon Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1992. Principally an ode to an ageing typewriter, it is also the sound of an increasingly rare voice: a concern that we may not, after all, be trading up when we digitize.”
I particularly like this line: “Silent in the computer showroom, a 47-year-old digital virgin among high-tech commandos speaking the brave new language, I stared at my future laptop as a college freshman might gape at his first blind date. I felt like one of those Japanese soldiers on the Pacific atolls who surrendered twenty years after the war was over.”
And then there’s this prescient line, written in 1992: “Another thing that worries me is that the tendency of all this technology – laptop, desktop, electronic bulletin boards – is to make every writer his own publisher. Eventually there will be more publishers than readers, better than a one-to-one ratio between the sources of information and its consumers. Besides dilution and a loss of focus, there will be a tendency for consumers to eat what they like and ignore what is nourishing.”
