Globalization, Cultural Identities, and Media Representations

The Printing Press and the Internet: From a Culture of Memory to a Culture of Attention

The Printing Press and the Internet: From a Culture of Memory to a Culture of Attention ALEIDA ASSMANN I. Media thresholds are always accompanied by reflections about the possibilities of each new medium.1 With every change in the technology of cultural communication , utopian visions and fantasies arise concerning the potential that is released with the advent of a new medium.These visions reveal much about the values, desires, obsessions, and fantasies of the respective era. In this chapter, I will compare the utopian visions of the print age to those of the internet age in order to better understand how these media supplement, contradict, or replace each other. I begin with the utopian visions of the digital media which,surprisingly,not only point ahead and emphasize completely new configurations of word, image, and sound, but also hark back and promise the restoration of something past and lost. At the core of this backward-looking vision is the enthusiastic description of the digital era as a return to an oral culture.The conditions in McLuhan’s “Global Village,”of course, are not exactly those of an archaic tribal society. It is stressed,however,that the multisensuous and multimedia quality of an oral society is, in a new way, restituted in the electronic culture.The utopian claim is that something which had been marginalized, restrained, and even completely lost in literate and print culture is being restored by means of the new media. While the sharp contrast was emphasized separating digital culture from the preceding print culture, a new affinity was discovered that linked digital culture to primordial orality. Generalizing, we may say that the introduction of each new medium is accompanied by a discourse which dramatizes the contrast to the preceding media culture.The achievements of the electronic media are therefore praised as an overcoming of the Gutenberg era and as a restitution of that which print culture had in its turn conquered and displaced. Let me quote one of many references which emphasizes this new link to a lost oral culture: 11 There’s a lot you can do with text, as several thousand years of human culture can attest, but it seemed to me that what the computer enabled us to do was to reach back to the days before printing and recreate the old art of interactive storytelling. . . . It was the coming of print that took away the interactive element, and locked stories into rigid forms. It seemed to me that interactive computer-mediated storytelling might be able to combine some of the best of both forms (Adams 1997).2 These are Douglas Adams’s words of introduction to his computer game Starship Titanic (1997). The new genre of interactive computer games is here presented as a mode of communication that combines aspects of both oral and literate culture.The interactive potential of electronic writing is, however, not only displayed by the computer game of pop culture, but also by the artistically ambitioned nonlinear hypertext. This is also presented in terms of a “second orality” which relieves the reader from the passive role to which he or she had been confined in print culture, turning the reader into the co-author of the plastic material of the text.3 Whether and how a reconciliation of oral and written cultures can so easily be achieved remains, however, an open question. It was in the 60s of the last century, when the technology of electronic organization of data was developed in its early steps, that studies started to focus on media history and on the important differences between oral and literate cultures.4 These investigations made us aware of the fact that the new possibility of writing, namely the arresting of the flow of linguistic sounds in written signs on a material carrier, produced a serious and consequential imbalance in the former symmetry of face-to-face oral communication. To put this in the words of Walter Ong: writing separated the knower from the known. It separated language from voice and symbolic signs from the bodies of those who communicated . For this new form of communication mediated by writing, the German linguist Konrad Ehlich has offered the term ‘extended communication ’ (zerdehnte Kommunikation), referring to a situation characterized by the mutual absence of sender and receiver (Ehlich 1983). In written communication , either one or the other of the communicative dyad is replaced and represented by the written text. Writing creates a form of communication that bypasses interaction. It produces a...