Media evolution, like biological evolution, is no simple progression from prehistoric to futuristic, but a patchwork of fits and starts - it's mosaic. Paul Levinson takes this literally, kicking off his ode to transformative technology, The Soft Edge, with Moses' march down Mount Sinai.
Monotheism, it seems, failed to take hold in ancient Egypt because the dominant medium - hieroglyphics - could be mastered only by a rarefied priesthood. The Hebrew lawgiver, on the other hand, was blessed with a concise system of writing conceived to facilitate commerce. The rest, as they say, is history: the phonetic alphabet begat increasingly distributed information - and social transformation - by means of the printing press, the wordprocessor, and the Internet.
Remarkable in both scholarly sweep and rhetorical lyricism, this "natural history" spells out how remedial technologies, like the VCR, have outpaced their ancestors' limitations, gradually extending human faculties across space and time.
Yet what first promises to be the digital Origin of Species turns out to be a sequel to The Odyssey: media's progress is presented as an epic journey toward freedom, unseating censors along the way.
Ironically, The Soft Edge largely ignores the mischievous observation by its mentor, Marshall McLuhan, that the medium is the mass age. Levinson's archetypal "open" Web is a pull-centric, public-minded Internet. The online world, meanwhile, has morphed from global village into a city of nets fueled by competition and consolidation.
Of course, paradigm shifts have unleashed creative turbulence since at least the time of Noah. And The Soft Edge's bit-driven cosmology has a deus ex machina that saves it from the information deluge - an arc of accelerating growth steered by an invisible hand.
The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution, by Paul Levinson: US$25. Routledge: +1 (212) 216 7800.
STREET CRED
Age of Interpretation Online Synergy
Media Odyssey
