Neal Gabler: A modern-day Gutenberg, without the helpful impact
Mark Zuckerberg (he of the social network) offers a revolution. But do we want it?
By NEAL GABLER, Los Angeles Times
America’s favorite boy genius, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, has announced a new form of messaging. E-mail, the last Internet link to traditional, epistolary, interpersonal communication, is, he said, outmoded. Young people, by which he meant younger than his own 26 years, desired something more nimble for their iPads, mobile phones and other devices. What he proposed was a “social inbox” where users could readily access messages from friends and then sort them—sort of a cross between instant messaging and Twitter.
We are so accustomed by now to declarations of new technological revolutions that another one hardly gets noticed, especially when it comes to finding new ways of minimizing how we communicate with each other. And it is entirely possible that this proposed geological change will be no more geological than all those other alleged game-changers. But whether his messaging system really transforms how people communicate or not, Zuckerberg issued what amounts to a manifesto that in its own terse way conveys what is already altering our lives—not only how we interact but also how we think and feel. It may even challenge the very idea of serious ideas. Call it Zuckerberg’s Revolution.
It qualifies as a revolution because how we communicate largely defines what we communicate. You know: “The medium is the message.” When Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, it was rightly considered one of the signal moments in human history. By allowing books to be mass-produced, Gutenberg’s press disseminated ideas far and wide, but it also had the more powerful and less immediate effect of changing the very construction of thought…
KIXYTΘEMTA
Post Edited (Tom) : 12/3/2010 7:57:38 PM (GMT-6)