Queen's Quarterly , Fall 2002 v109 i3 p359(6)

Virtual illusion. Dominique Wolton.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2002 Queen's Quarterly

The fast and furious hype surrounding the twenty-first century's myriad "virtual" experiences has become so overwhelming as to be numbing. We are led to believe that all manner of positive development are made possible by the simple existence of the World Wide Web, to the extent that one might be forgiven for thinking that we need do nothing else but await the fruits of its divine benevolence. But before we get too carried away, we would do well to remember the countless times humanity's technological prowess has outpaced our collective wisdom -- and to remember that "virtual" still means "almost, but not really."

MORE and more it seems, the speed of the World Wide Web gives us the dizzying feeling of being released from any constraints of space and time: we can surf the net night and day, access instantaneously countless information banks and services online, and send electronic mail simultaneously to thousands of different people. This certainly is an abrupt change in our relationship with the world, and it transforms profoundly our minds' ability to reach out to the rest of humanity -- but our human brains still lack the internal memory and processing speed to make sense of the full anthropological picture here. What is left of man when he confronts the huge dimensions of a new world system so overpowering and having such instantaneous effect? So far, the Internet is only envisaged in its dimension of progress, which of course obliges us to regard it with the utmost naive enthusiasm. But with the benefit of thousands of years of human intellectual development, we should know better.

The web network is indeed touted as the new frontier for humanity, a frontier of the conquest of knowledge. The new information technologies are heralded as a way for each individual to scan a limitless horizon of knowledge; they are supposed to offer a tremendously accelerated democratization of know-how, all of it available online. And it is in fact true that the speed of the Internet has dramatically increased our access to information.

But this extraordinary progress is also illusory in more ways than one. Carried away by our myriad netsurfing experiences, we are feeding a collective phantasm of limitless knowledge, deluding ourselves into believing that accessing information in real time is the same as immediate knowledge. The Internet's lightning performance has left us so awash in instant data that even those who should know better have developed a confusion between information and knowledge.

Access to knowledge is quite a different matter from access to information, because regardless of how operator-friendly our machines become, the human mind still does not follow the model of the computer. The process of assimilating knowledge takes time, following an organic rhythm which is different for each human being. And this process depends upon a human being's ability both to remember and to forget, to sort, to set matters to rest. This is not simply the accumulation of a huge store of data, but is rather the creation of a sense of order among myriad different aspects of that information. Since our capacity for absorption is limited, the Internet's high-speed transmission exposes us to a saturation effect; for human beings, unlike computers, there is a need to disconnect in order to memorize, to internalize. Knowledge is always qualitative and cannot be formatted like flies on a hard drive. Simple information, on the other hand, need only be sorted and stocked into information banks for later retrieval .

In many cases, the time saved in speedily accessing digital data is likely to be lost during the process of interpretation, which demands that the individual take account of all acquired knowledge; in other words, the speed of the network only lays more and more responsibility on individual human competence. And in this respect the Internet takes on a more interesting role -- exposing social and cultural inequalities in this area.

The performance of the Internet as a tool is greatly hampered if one lacks the knowledge, let alone the hardware and software, to optimize all of its potential. All the professions that have long required a narrow specialization or a constant updating of their knowledge base will benefit first: the researchers (the earliest users to fully exploit the Net), physicians, lawyers, and other such experts. But for those on the margins of society, or even those going through temporary social difficulties, the Internet is of limited use. It cannot correct the inequalities of society -- although its boosters like to promote the dream that Internet use will empower people by "jumpstarting" the accumulation of knowledge and skill among the underprivileged segments of society.

If speed is associated with the emancipatory values of modernity, it is because it offers us the illusion of compressing time, of being able to obtain immediately what we otherwise would only know through the lengthy elaboration of experience. The Internet neglects history and the heterogeneity of social time. If one considers that there is no human work without time, the idea of treating time with such contempt should be abhorrent. This is not to say that we should let ourselves develop a nostalgia for slowness, but we should appreciate what it often represents in our working relationships.

We may often grumble about the slowness of the legal process, but in doing so, we are refusing to recognize the incompressibility of procedural time. The time necessary for the legal process as well as the time required for the fair functioning of the political process cannot simply be accelerated to accommodate the technical time of networks. Network time, however, may correspond to business time, which is statistical and well measured. But in the end, whatever time is saved because of Internet speed will have to be lost to preserve social links.

Democracy is not an integrated system; its function is to dissociate from one another the different domains of human activity and to respect their separate characters. To shun the multiplicity of time is at a deeper level to refuse to validate the Other.

In this age of acceleration, the very old question of identity reappears in a different form. If in the past century the question of identity was something of an obstacle to progress, the constant "zapping" of today's relentless globalization seems to remove all value from the identity problem. The Internet exacerbates the myriad inequalities between North and South. It should be perfectly obvious that not everybody has equal access to the web, and yet it is still promoted as a great tool of equality and social justice.

The same network that seeks to be the template of a global sense of solidarity is thoroughly Western by conception and configuration. All the information highways lead toward the dominant economic powerhouse of the West. And among the most pernicious phantasms fed by the Internet's speed is the notion that we are building a splendidly effective connectivity when in fact we are embracing a mindset that refuses to accept alterity. Cyber culture fosters a false sense uniformity to the extent that it tries to avoid, and ultimately to deny, the complexity of the real world. Countless Internet users find "community" in cyberspace by joining tightly together with other like-minded individuals and shunning those with different values or different cultural backgrounds.

Finally, the speedy nature of the Internet tool makes it even more urgent that we question the project itself. What is the purpose of all this speed? We all know that its excitement is intoxicating, and in this rapturous state we neglect the real question of meaning.

It is interesting to note that in the shadow of the West's Worldwide Web worship, a number of much more venerable modes of information exchange are seeing a huge resurgence of popularity, however archaic they may seem to the websurfer. Consider the spiritual pilgrimage, for example, that most ponderous yet determined of human quests. Regardless of how ambitious we may be in our electronic communications projects, it would appear that many still believe that our real speed limit for comprehension is embodied in humanity itself, as it has been from the start.

A theologian might say that the cult of speed is the product of a society that has dissociated itself from metaphysical preoccupations and severed its links with its deepest and most vital traditions. We are free but uprooted; the linkage to the network becomes the counterpart of an anthropological anguish. As long as things have their meaning through time, existence is limited: the genius of the Moderns is to have believed that one can resolve this contradiction by escaping into extreme mobility. But beyond mere acceleration, there remains our real yearning, for eternity.

DOMINIQUE WOLTON is director of research at the French National Scientific Research Council (CNRS). His most recent books are Internet et apres? and Internet -- Petit manuel de survie.