Mark P. Mills and M. Anthony Mills in City Journal:
How will these technologies transform human communication? The beginnings of an answer can be found in the nearly century-old writings of German critic Walter Benjamin, who came of age during the first information revolution. He belonged, as he put it, to a “generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar” but that “now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds . . . and the tiny, fragile human body.” Among these changes, Benjamin thought, was the loss of an authentic form of human experience—storytelling. Before the telegraph and the printing press, storytellers communicated by word of mouth. Stories imparted practical wisdom and timeless lessons that were seamless and intuitive to the listener. These lessons were preserved in a collective cultural memory. But the era of storytelling was overtaken by the era of information, a wholly new mode of communication revolving around facts, rather than experience. The purpose of facts is to inform, not teach. Information, Benjamin says, is “understandable in itself.” It does not need to be preserved but is “consumed” and forgotten as soon as it becomes “old.” Information is not timeless but timely. The communication of information requires not storytellers but intermediaries. Benjamin’s time saw the rise of an expanding cadre of professional journalists critical to the process of selecting, interpreting, and communicating facts. Moreover, information was not universally accessible; its consumption was subject to social, educational, and financial constraints.
Today, we stand at a historical turning point similar to the one that Benjamin lived through. A generation that went to school in buses driven by human beings will likely live to see a world of vehicles driven by robots. Data sensors and recorders are embedded into machinery, the environment, and even our bodies. Wireless networks share and algorithms sort, analyze, and store the data in virtual collective-memory banks, compiling treasure troves of—as yet—mostly untapped knowledge. More than 80 percent of all data remain beyond the reach of today’s nascent big-data analytics.
More here.
