Zelf had ik dit artikel van Adam Gopnik in de New Yorker gemist toen het in februari werd gepubliceerd. U misschien ook, dus bij deze alsnog de link. Het is zeer de moeite waard: Gopnik biedt een overzicht van het huidige Debat over Internet. Hij zet de volgens hem belangrijkste auteurs op een rij (geruststellend gevoel: de meeste genoemde boeken heb ik in huis – of ik de stapel allemaal al heb gelezen is een tweede). Enkele aardige citaten:
Over de drie soorten auteurs:
The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment.
Over hoe internet ons geheugen vervangt (grappig genoeg het onderwerp van Bert Wagendorp in de Volkskrant vandaag):
My memories and my wife’s intermingle. When I can’t recall a name or a date, I don’t look it up; I just ask her. Our machines, in this way, become our substitute spouses and plug-in companions.
Over niets nieuws onder de zon:
…[W]hen people struggle to describe the state that the Internet puts them in they arrive at a remarkably familiar picture of disassociation and fragmentation. (…) The odd thing is that this complaint, though deeply felt by our contemporary Better-Nevers, is identical to Baudelaire’s perception about modern Paris in 1855, or Walter Benjamin’s about Berlin in 1930, or Marshall McLuhan’s in the face of three-channel television (and Canadian television, at that) in 1965.
Peter Teffer 