Untitled - witz cultural

47AN lNrRoDUcrroNtory. If we hope to discern the fate of readingand writing in digital environments,we must not ffeat all previous information technologies of language,rhetoric, writing, and printing as nontechnological.As fohn Henry Cardinal Newman's ldca of a Universityreminds us, writerson education and culture have long tended to perceive only the negativeeffects of technology. To us who live in an age in which educators and punditscontinually elevate reading books as an educational ideal and continuallyattack television as a medium that victimizes a passive audience, it comes asa shock to encounter Newman claiming that cheap, easily available readingmaterials similarly victimized the public. According to him,Whathe steam engine does with matter, the printing press is to do with mind; it isto act mechanically, and the population is to be passively, almost unconsciously enlightened,by the mere multiplication and dissemination of volumes. Whether it bell"ri'J:*::]*r,1':#]:lFif il:rT::r::rTrPart of Newman's rationale for thus denouncing cheap, abundant readingmaterials lies in the belief that they supposedly advance the dangerous fallacythat "learning is to be without exertion, without attention, without toil; withoutgrounding, without advance, without finishing"; but, like any conservativeelitist in our own day, he fears the people unsupervised, and he cannotbelieve that reading without proper guidance-guidance, that is, from thosewho know from those in institutions like Oxford-can produce any sort ofvalid education, and, one expects, had Newman encountered the self-taughtmill-workers and artisans ofVictorian Englandwho made discoveries in chemistry,astronomy, and geology after reading newly available books, he wouldnot have been led to change his mind.Like Socrates, who feared the effects of writing, which he took to be ananon)rynous, impersonal denaturing of living speech, Newman also fears an"impersonal" information technology that people can use without supervision.And also like Socrates, he desires institutions of higher learningwhichfor the ancient took the form of face-to-face conversation in the formof dialectic-to be sensitive to the needs of specific individuals. Newmantherefore argues that "a University is, according to the usual designation,an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, ora treadmill."Newman's criticism of the flood of printed matter produced by the newtechnology superficially echoes Thomas Carlyle, whose "Signs of the Times"