Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/02/11/in_dark_woods_of_high_technology.php
Friday, February 11, 2005
We are awash in information, as never before. It is staggering. We live amid a great electric cloud of information, buzzing invisibly around us, all the time.
By disposition and experience I am against technology and against computers. I find these things maddening, unsatisfying, numbing, impossible, and untrustworthy. I do not understand how they function, nor do I have the desire to learn, and I have only grudgingly and recently risen to the level of competence. I understood I did not have a technical mind when I reflected on how a toaster works and realized I did not honestly care. You put bread in and toast comes out. What more do you need to know?
Sadly, a computer is not a toaster. Important information is stored in there. The piece of bread never dissipates into thin air when the toaster malfunctions. A computer can 'crash,' like a dirigible. That happened to mine last year. The devastation rivaled that of the Hindenburg.
Of all the elements of Dartmouth I wish were different, I am well-apprised that my desire to do away with this school's voracious preoccupation with technology is easily the most unrealistic. Easily. It would be fatal. It is patently and utterly ludicrous. And yet while I am conscious of this, I cannot help but wish. Dartmouth College is soundlessly breezing into the future and we are not looking back. There is no other choice. The problem is not with Dartmouth College. It is with me—
Technology has always been a part of our College. Was it not founded as a civilizing enterprise, carved out, here in the woods? That took technology, though it had no pretensions: the axe, the saw, the hammer, the plow. The fields would not lie fallow.
We have moved on. John Kemeny, Dartmouth's thirteenth President, loved computers, he really did. He dreamt up some variety of pathbreaking computer language, an important thing. In 1964, he installed the first real computer at Dartmouth, a G.E.-635 telebit machine, in the basement of College Hall. It cost a half-million dollars and had capacitators and resisters and vacuum tubes. I believe it worked out calculations with punch cards. President Kemeny appropriated the new computer room from the office of the official College photographer.
I refuse to use a digital camera, on principle.
In the mid-nineteen-nineties, the College people laid a long heavy cable down the side of Webster Avenue, which connected the Greeks and the Choate dormitories to the interweb. They called it a 'backbone'—how important sounding. My fraternity house would have nothing to do with it, for reasons that are no longer understood. We were hooked in only recently. I believe it was the last building on campus to be 'wired.' Now the hoses snake across the ceilings and up the walls in great coils. It is really quite futuristic. There are times I like to pretend I am a Jetson. I have no respect for the robot maid. She does a slipshod job with the cleanup, though given the extent of the squalor, it is not her fault.
The kids at Dartmouth, like most kids, are keen on computers these days. We would have it no other way. Still, we are required by the College, as a precondition of matriculation, to purchase a personal computer. We are also conducting a torrid love affair with a program called 'Blitz-Mail,' an electric-mail system, which is fast and convenient. I can get all the unsolicited e-mail I do not want, in a few blinking flashes of electrodes. There are computers everywhere, so people can check their e-mail on the fly.
Well sure the kids love the computers, you say, they are so preposterously hip. Somewhere along the line, when the beige boxes became boring, they decided to make them precious. The computer terminal I use to layout this paper is an Apple,—the popular 'I-Mac.' It is not that particolored lump, but a monochromatic ivory lump, with a craning silver neck and an appended gleaming flat monitor, which I can position to my liking. I often think about flipping it up and using it to serve hors des oeuvres and light snacks.
It is heavy and not portable, designed to stay put. Most computers are as light and as slender as periodicals. They can be used wherever. Brad Noblet, the director of Technical Services, recently described the College's wireless network—it allows you to connect your small computer to the interweb everywhere on campus, including the center of the Green, without plugging into an outlet—not as the convenience that it is but as a "mission-critical network," critical to the mission of the College. Dartmouth has more than a thousand tiny transmitters studded about the campus which emit the blips that allow unplugged operation. A little stamp of the New England wilderness is now wonderfully without plugs.
Students are no longer issued real paper report cards. Grades are accessed on a website, and while it is suggested that you do so it is not required. We do not register for classes face-to-face, but do so on-line. Though considering the lassitude and light working hours of the Registrar, maybe this is for the best.
We have something called a 'Digital Library' here, which is not a real library but exists only in the ether of the machines. We are told that the Digital Library allows us to access information quickly and easily. Quickly? For most, certainly. Easily? I don't know. I think it is hopelessly complex, and I am often infuriated by my inability to perform basic tasks. I find myself in a dark and gloomy wood, astray, where the straight way is lost; and it is not easy to tell how savage wild that forest, how rough its growth—the thought within me renews my fear. I have no Virgil.
In a very fine essay in the Times of London, Ben Macintyre argued that traditional libraries will outlast the digital revolution because of their symbolic power—the library, he said, is "a temple, a symbol of power, the hushed core of civilisation, the citadel of memory, with its own mystique, social and sensual as well as intellectual."
Baker Library is superior in every way to its swollen protuberance, Berry Library, because it has this and Berry does not. Baker is full of life—Macintyre called it "that intoxicating mixture of vellum, paper, and dust"—while Berry is sterile, dismal, mechanical, gray. The elegance of Baker communicates the best of history and humanity; Berry is a flip postmodern sendoff, a sly, desperate joke. Berry is many things, but most of all it is a computer. Baker is not.
While keyword searches in databases give us instantaneous access to that great cloud of information, they do nothing to organize it. It is just there, all at once, sloshing about. There is no inherent virtue to instantaneousness. Information must be organized—this is the important function of the physical library. The old way, the card catalogue, slowed all that information down and put it in its place. And there were aesthetic, tactile pleasures, too, the slide of the drawer, the thumb of the cards, the way that information was a real thing and you could see it and feel it and know where it went. It was a hierarchy of information, of knowledge. It was not an electronic signal. Electronic signals dull the mind.
There is something much more satisfying in the simpler pleasures of a card catalogue. Many research libraries still use them today. The old lacquered cabinets that housed Dartmouth's cards used to line the entrance hall of Baker Library. The sight of them all still there is one of the most beautiful things I have ever laid eyes on. I have only examined the photographs. The catalogue was closed on July 1st, 1991. I was eight years old. The cabinets were later sold off.
There is a faded sense that things that are past are infinitely past and can never be recovered. It is inexorable.
Winter Carnival is a celebration of rusticity. I am glad for this holiday, when we can enjoy the simpler pleasures of athletic endeavor and rural splendor and the cold and the wilderness and the thawing influence of fellowship. I am glad we still have these things.
When I die, no one is ever going to say that I was ahead of my time.