IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

180 Chapter 8
make us switch off than on—especially if those voices are harbingers of bad
news about the environment. The same caveat applies if we feed the data
from remote environmental sensing into fancy interactive displays.
A backlash against interactive displays in museums and science centers is
already evident. Armando Iannucci, a British writer, took his children to
the Natural History Museum in London; he concluded that ‘‘interactivity
is a superficial sham leading only to hunger and emptiness. The relentless,
raucous, lapel-grabbing interactivity of the newer displays was so offputting.
The display cases invited participation in a process, only to lead
you to the conclusion that the process was not worth pursuing. Interactivity
implies participation—but does not deliver it.’’ 58 Dwell time at an interactive
exhibit at the average science center is forty seconds.
Don’t Look, Talk
‘‘All knowledge is dialogic,’’ said the theologian Martin Büber. 59 Maybe we
just need to talk to other human beings more—face to face. It sounds trite,
but for thousands of years, talk was one of the main ways that humans
tried to understand and influence the world around them. Then came media.
Ivan Illich discovered that in the 1930s, nine out of ten words that a
man had heard when he reached the age of twenty were words spoken to
him directly—one to one, or as a member of a crowd—by somebody
whom he could touch and feel and smell. By the 1970s, that proportion
had been reversed: About nine out of ten words heard in a day were spoken
through a loudspeaker. ‘‘Computers are doing to communication what
fences did to pastures and cars did to streets,’’ Illich said in 1982. 60 For
Illich, there was a huge difference between a colloquial tongue—what people
say to each other in a context, with meaning—and a language uttered
by people into microphones.
Theodor Zeldin, who has written a book about conversation, believes
that conversation can penetrate the intellectual barriers that are often associated
with specialized professions. ‘‘The really big scientific revolutions
have been the invention not of some new machine, but of new ways of
talking about things,’’ argues Zeldin, adding, ‘‘what we need now is stimulation,
not information.’’ 61 Thirty-five years after Illich’s comments about
conversation, Zeldin’s book has clearly struck a chord; one reviewer said