Farewell to the Information Age - （告别信息时代-）.pdf

Farewell to the Information Age Geoffrey Nunberg From The Future of the Book, Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., Brepols (Belgium) and University of California Press, 1996 Paper is just an object that [some] information has been sprayed onto in the past… — Ted Nelson So far we have placed all of our intellectual protection on the containers and not on the contents. And one of the side effects of digital technology is that it makes those containers irrelevant. Books, CDs, filmstrips — whatever — dont need to exist anymore in order to get ideas out. So whereas we thought we had been in the wine business, suddenly we realized that all along weve been in the bottling business. — John Perry Barlow [In cyberspace, communication will be] redeemed from all the inefficiencies, pollutions, and corruptions attendant to the process of moving information attached to things. — Michael Benedikt Introduction: The Word Turned Upside-Down Nothing betrays the spirit of an age so precisely as the way it represents the future. Take the picture that appeared in Popular Mechanics magazine in 1950 in an article on The Home of the Future. It shows a woman in an apron in the middle of a living room full of furniture with the rounded futuristic forms of the period, which she is spraying with a garden hose. The caption reads, Because all her furniture is waterproof, the housewife of the year 2000 can do her cleaning with a hose. Like most such representations, it gives itself away in two complementary misapprehensions. The first and most obvious comes of taking some recent innovation at the steepest point of its curve and projecting it linearly to a point where it has swept all its predecessors aside. No one makes provision for the inevitable banalization of the new, or for the reactions that it invokes — what Régis Debray describes in his essay here as neolithic bac