The Interactive Future: Individual, Community, and Society in the
Age of the Web
Collapse and catastrophe as opposed to hope and unprecedented
possibilities- these are the party lines in the heated
discussions centered on the dynamics of ongoing changes in which
the whole world is involved. Paul Virilio is quite expressive in
his formulation of the problem: "An accompanying evil...is the
end of writing, as it unfolds through image technology,
cinema/film, and television screen. [...] We don't read anymore,
we hardly write each other, since we can call each other on the
phone. Next, we will no longer speak! I'd really like to say:
this will indeed be the silence of the lambs!" No less powerful
in their assertions are those who see chances for social renewal
in interactions not embodied in the rules of literacy. The
electronic forum of the European Commission, involved in Project
Information Society, lists Ten Bones of Contention from which I
chose the following: "The system we are stuck with and
frantically trying to fix comes from another time and an
entirely different set of circumstances. It is changing
massively in front of our noses and needs to be completely
rethought and radically overhauled." The statement is less
expressive than Virilio's, but no less intolerant.
As discussions continue to bring up extremely important aspects
of the conflict marking this time of discontinuity, the billions
of people populating our world today constitute themselves
through a broad variety of practical experiences. A list of these
experiences-from primitive patterns of hunting and gathering food
to eye movement command of remote systems and applications
driven by voice recognition in the world of nanotechnological
synthesis-would only augment the confusion. Given this broad
pragmatic spectrum, no one could seriously project the future as
one of virtual communities, or of an electronic democracy,
without sounding overly naive or directly stupid. We know how
far we have come, but we do not really know where we are.
In advancing a comprehensive pragmatic perspective, I chose to
undertake an elaboration well beyond the short-breathed
argumentation peculiar to this moment in time. The advantage of
this approach deserves to be shared. Endorsing one perspective
or another, such as the California Ideology-defined by its
critics as "global orthodoxy concerning the relation between
society, technology, and politics"-or alternatives-the so-called
European model, or the transactional structure, or neo- Marxian
solutions, to name a few-is not an option. Indeed, the argument
of this book is that answers cannot result from infatuation with
technology, cultural self-replication, models based on
biological mechanisms, unfocused bionomic elaborations, or
incessant criticism of capitalism. Affirmations of a deep nature,
above and beyond the rhetoric of intellectual controversy and
political discourse, must originate from those affirmative
actions through which our identity as individuals, communities,
and society are established. The metaphor of the interactive
future is the expression of a simple thesis: At the global
scale, human interaction, as the concrete form of engaging
infinitely diverse cognitive resources, is the last available
resource on which the future of the species can depend.