Vectors of the Virtual in New Media Theory

Abstract

nature of these activities, altering what and how we read and write, as well as producing deleterious effects on our very language. Thus, in The Gutenberg Elegies literary critic Sven Birkerts argues that the electronic millenium will inevitably bring about an erosion of language, the complexities and expressive capacities of the language we now use and assume being gradually replaced by more telegraphic sort of 'plainspeak,' with an attendant flattening of his- torical perspective and waning of the private self.1 In this view the Internet continues or even increases the debilitating effects on literary culture produced by radio, cinema, and television. But predictions also run in the contrary direc- tion. Theorists like Pierre Levy herald the formation of the many new virtual communities and on-line identities—indeed, the creation of a new Internet superlanguage—as prospects for a more egalitarian, even Utopian, society.2 This double and polarized reaction to technological change is of course his- torically familiar. A classic example is Plato's denunciation of writing and his banishment of the poet from the Republic. In Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates argue that writing things down not only weakens memory but worse: it promotes lying and the irresponsible propagation of fictions, since the writer never has to meet face to face with his or her interlocutor. But in The Republic this defense of oral culture is reversed and the poet as its representative sent packing. In his remark- able study, A Preface to Plato, Eric Havelock explains mat poetry in Plato's still mostly oral culture is associated with an aggregative, paratactic style reflecting a fluid, situational, and dispersed subjectivity, whereas the Republic must be founded upon an absolute and unquestioned truth arrived at in an abstract, ana- lytic style. The Republic thus requires a fixed, coherent, and stable subject, the very subject (Havelock suggests in a later book) produced by alphabetic writing. Adding vowels to the original Semitic alphabet, Havelock argues, allowed the