Untitled - witz cultural

49AN tNrRoDucnoN essential spirit. Digital information technology, in other words, is only thelatest to shape an institution that, as Carlyle reminds us, is both itself a formof technologX a mechanism, and has also long been influenced by those technolosieson which it relies.,i ,..o.rd form of resistance to rccognizingthe role of information technologyin culture appears in implicit claims that technology, particularly informationtechnology, can never have cultural effects. Almost always presentedby speakers and writers as evidence oftheir own sophistication andsensitivity, this strategy of denial has an unintended effect: denying thatGutenberg's invention or television can exist in a causal connection to anyother aspect of culture immediately transforms technology-whatever theauthor means by that term-intoa kind of intellectual monster, somethingso taboo that civilized people cannot discuss it in public. In other words, ittakes technology, which is both an agent and effect ofour continuing changingculture(s), and denies its existence as an element of human culture. Oneresult appears in the strategies ofhistorical or predictive studies that relatecultural phenomena to all sorts of economic, cultural, and ideological factorsbut avert their eyes from any technological causation, as ifit, and only it, werein some way reductive. The effect, of course, finally is to deny that this particularform ofcultural product can have any effect.We have to remind ourselves that if, how, and whenever we move beyondthe book, that movement will not embody a movement from something naturalor human to something artificial-fromnature to technology-sincewriting, and printing, and books are about as technological as one can get.Books, after all, are teaching and communicahng machines. Therefore, if wefind ourselves in a period of fundamental technological and cultural changeanalogous to the Gutenberg revolution, one of the first things we should dois remind ourselves that printed books are technology, too.Analogues to theWhat can we predict about the future by understanding theGutenberg Revolution"logic" ofa particular technology or set oftechnologiesl Accordingto Kernan, "the 'logic' of a technology, an idea, or an institutionis its tendency consistently to shape whatever it affectsin a limited number of definite forms or directions" (a9). The work ofKernan and others like Chartier and Eisenstein who have studied the complextransitions from manuscript to print culture suggest three clear lessonsor rules for anyone anticipating similar transitions.First of all, such transitions take a long time, certainly much longer thanearly studies of the shift from manuscript to print culture led one to expect.