Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
“Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art,” Susan Sontag wrote in 1964. “Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.” I have thought about Sontag’s prescience again and again in my decade-plus on the internet, watching creative culture reduced to mere “content” as the life of the mind and world of substantive ideas collapse into an abyss of marketable sensationalism and cynicism; watching the cowardice of clickbaitable outrage eclipse the courage — at this point a countercultural courage — to create rather than tear down, to refuse to flatten life’s nuance, complexity, and dimensionality into simplistic binaries, to grow the container that holds our understanding of the world rather than purvey its continually cheapened “content.
”More than a decade before Sontag and more than half a century before the social web as we know it, the mathematician, philosopher, and cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894–March 18, 1964) offered a prescient admonition against this tendency in The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (public library) — his visionary 1950 treatise on communication, control, and the moral dimension of technology, which went on to influence thinkers as diverse as beloved author Kurt Vonnegut, anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier.
In a sentiment that applies with striking precision to the cultural economics of the Internet, Wiener writes:
The newspaper business has come to be the art of saying less and less to more and more… [This] applies equally to the radio, to television, and even to bookselling. Thus we are in an age where the enormous per capita bulk of communication is met by an ever-thinning stream of total bulk of communication. More and more we must accept a…
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