| Digital Shock has been justly described as the best book on digital culture since Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte. However, Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, emphasises the opportunities created by the digital revolution. Hervé Fischer strikes a balance between the gee-whiz of technophiles and the oh-my-God of technophobes. The technophiles tend to be participants in digital culture and technophobes tend to be observers of it. Participants often get so immersed in it that they become like the legendary fish unaware of water, whereas observers can see the water but refuse to swim in it. As an anthropologist in his own culture, Fischer is a participant observer. He is a multimedia artist who has founded organisations for multimedia artistry. But he is not a blind enthusiast. He bemoans the fact that we have become so fascinated by iPod and YouTube that we neglect I and You.
However, Digital Shock may perhaps be better considered as a worthy successor to Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. Toffler described how we were becoming culture shocked in our own culture; Hervé Fischer now describes what precisely is so shocking. Toffler continued to explore antidotes to culture shock in two other books - The Third Wave and Power Shift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century. Fischer presents this book as the first in a series of six books. Presumably in the five following books, he will explore antidotes to digital shock in the wake of that third wave which has now swept us into the 21st century.
Fischer describes his project as the establishment of the rudimentary principles of mythanalysis. One creation myth that we new humanists (which Fischer advocates) can rally behind is the theory of evolution. We are all members of a single family in which each of us is given the conception-day gift of memory to store and speech to transmit information. We are born wise. The history of media is a sequel to this myth - it tells how we have extended our nervous systems by storing and transmitting information outside our bodies to deal with increasingly complex societies. Fischer rightly argues for the importance of multimedia and the internet for this is the latest (and last?) chapter in this basic story of our species. Comparing the digital revolution to the discovery of fire sounds like hyperbole. However, by comparison, Prometheus is a barroom philosopher entertaining with match tricks. |
