Casualties of a Bloodless Revolution, Part II

The Industrial Revolution convinced us that most, if not all, services and hard goods can be reduced to constituent parts and reassembled into versions much improved over their handmade, homegrown, or personally-produced ancestors. Thus we are surrounded by countless and ever-changing forms of nutrient-packages replacing real food, entertainment-packages replacing real fun, and so on.

In some ways the Digital Revolution appears to have returned commerce to a more personal level - eBay is a good example. But there is still virtually no relationship between buyer, seller, producer and product. Online auctions do not recreate a time when we knew what the builder of our furniture looked like, where he lived, how he worked, where his wood grew, and so on. We no longer touch a living hand when we offer our money for his chair, and then "shake on it" when we strike a deal. Yes, those days are gone forever, except in very small niches. But that kind of awareness once made us a part of an important circle which united buyer, seller, maker, product, and the earth that produced the raw materials. In the same way, eating real foods can connect us with a grower and through that grower, to the very dirt and sunlight that birthed and nourished those foods.

Furthermore, what the Industrial Revolution has done to tangibles, the Digital Revolution has largely and increasingly inflicted upon intangibles such as education, friendship, courtship, conversation, community, etc. Digital technology offers the promise of reducing these, and all other relationships, to raw data which may be manipulated, reproduced, stored, transmitted and translated at will. Both as a process and as a philosophy, digitization reduces its subject to a series of zeros and ones. One need look no further than down the pages of this very blog to discover the high degree of success with which images and sounds can be so reduced, reproduced, transmitted and translated. But relationships are more than images and sounds.

Education is about more than delivering data from teacher to student. For instance, the most important stuff I learned about music from guys like Grant Wolf and Fred Forney and Randall Shinn and Robert Oldani had little to do with the hard facts of theory and history. Rather, I was more changed by a single glimpse of what they felt and thought about music than I was by daily inundation with facts they knew about music.

Similarly, friendship is not measured simply by how many pieces of information we collect about one another. Courtship cannot be reduced to the answers on a compatibility survey. Conversation is not always as much about the factual content of our sentences as it is about the setting where we speak, the tone of our voices, the set of our faces, and so on. Community involves far more than submitting our name and optional, brief biographical data to an online site and agreeing to abide by its rules. The premise is flawed that considers relationships matters of data that can be reduced to binary code.

It may be too late to rethink the Industrial Revolution in terms other than philosophical, but we are not yet irreversibly sunken into the digital realm; we can still face this revolution differently than we handled its predecessor. We can employ digital technology as an instrument for storage and transmission of impersonal data, and not adopt it as a philosophy of life. The success of the Industrial Revolution gave us the tools, processes, science and free capital necessary to launch the Digital Revolution. Perhaps we can also learn from its failures how to deal with the shortcomings of digitization before we have shed too much bloodlessness on its altar.