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• Tuesday, December 23, 2008 11:55 AM

  @ripleybelieves

  Anyone else think this article was a little dramatic/pretentious?

  Yeah. On both counts. Except for the "a little" part.

  It's wonderful how the imagination of science fiction writers such as Brin has opened up new possibilities for the rest of us.

  However, when they offer speculation, disguised as analysis, based on mistaken assumptions which are easily disproven by the either the celebrated new cross-disciplinary specialists or anybody who has experienced or is aware of daily life 40 or more years ago, I get cranky. Yes, Brin discusses others' incredibly annoying and irrelevant viewpoints that are even less grounded in fact than his are but look:

  What we need to remember is that there is nothing unique about today's quandary.(emphasis mine) Ever since the arrival of glass lenses and movable type, the amount that each person can see and know has multiplied, with new tools ranging from newspapers and lithographs to steamships and telegraphs, to radio and so on. And every time, conservative nostalgists claimed that normal people could not adapt, that such godlike powers should be reserved to an elite, or perhaps renounced.

  If that's the case, then why the drama, nowagainsomemore? I've seen this issue visited and revisited, and much better and more knowledgeably than this article, ten years ago. And the controversy he describes goes back much further, at least to the time the intellectual elite of ancient Greece argued that the play-viewing proletariat would confuse the fiction of the plays with real life.

  Other annoying point? Brin's as big (and as impotent) an elitist as the "conservative nostalgists" that history has repeatedly proven wrong. See "infections"; a wish for some magic ritual to destroy "the insipid, vicious and untrue"; and the "unimaginative, fad-following and imitative" who "will matter as little tomorrow as couch potatoes who stay glued to television matter today".

  There are exciting and engaging discussions to be had about the internet and its effect on society. This is not one of them.

  —Yehlaina Read Yehlaina's other letters
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