One theory of marketing suggests that every interaction we have with other people can be viewed as a conversation, or an exchange of ideas. In this theory, blogs are like dialogue as are research papers, studies, and public events.
There is some concern, however, that too much of reducing life to dialogue separates our symbolic and emotional minds entirely from reality, as Don DeLillo suggested in White Noise, which is still probably the definitive postmodern work for me.
Some have even suggested this tendency is growing with the internet:
We moderns are less nimble at resisting great seductions, particularly those utopian visions that promise grand political or cultural salvation. From the French and Russian revolutions to the counter-cultural upheavals of the ’60s and the digital revolution of the ’90s, we have been seduced, time after time and text after text, by the vision of a political or economic utopia.
LAST WEEK, I was treated to lunch at a fashionable Japanese restaurant in Palo Alto by a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur who, back in the dot.com boom, had invested in my start-up Audiocafe.com. The entrepreneur, like me a Silicon Valley veteran, was pitching me his latest start-up: a technology platform that creates easy-to-use software tools for online communities to publish weblogs, digital movies, and music. It is technology that enables anyone with a computer to become an author, a film director, or a musician. This Web 2.0 dream is Socrates’s nightmare: technology that arms every citizen with the means to be an opinionated artist or writer.
“This is historic,” my friend promised me. “We are enabling Internet users to author their own content. Think of it as empowering citizen media. We can help smash the elitism of the Hollywood studios and the big record labels. Our technology platform will radically democratize culture, build authentic community, create citizen media.” Welcome to Web 2.0. ^
To me, this is the most vital point in his article: we are pursuing a utopia on the basis that if everyone can publish, we can all join the conversation, hopefully without it turning into white noise.
Generation X, as the first group of kids who grew up knowing someone who had ready access to a personal computer, could be seen as the first generation of new digital symbolists. We are, unlike our parents, comfortable with the idea that changing a byte on a server somewhere causes real-world reactions — an ambulance coming, a debit account empty, or even something as mundane as a bill paid.
But I wonder if there’s a price for this, or, if at some point, we get comfortable with changing bytes and stop changing reality.
I’ve been emailing with Frank Gregorsky, of ExactingEditor, who has worked in the past with Generation Xers on some fascinating projects. He pointed me to the community at Fourth Turning, a site dedicated to the book by William Strauss and Neil Howe which wonders how the future will be found through Generation X, Generation Y and the millenials (I’m still not sure which is which).