Interview with Mark Curtis - Author of Distraction - Page 4

For example, pesticides eliminate pests, but damage other parts of the food chain too, which in time makes the growing of crops harder because natural predators of other pests are affected for the worse. Indeed, the original target pests themselves often out-evolve the poison, and the new superbugs are much harder to get rid of.

The digital revolution, now roughly ten years old, will not be without its revenge effects, most of which will be social. This book begins to examine what some of these might be and suggests how we can ameliorate their influence and build on some of the very positive aspects of new technology.

Erik Davis in Techgnosis relates the following story, taken in turn from Plato, and narrated by Socrates. It concerns Thoth, the Egyptian god of magic and invention.

One day Thoth approached King Thamus with an offer of a brand new techne (art): writing. By giving the gift of writing to the king, Thoth hoped to pass on its wonders to all of the Egyptian people, and he promised Thamus that the new invention would not only augment memory, but amplify wisdom as well. Thamus carefully considered the matter, weighing the pros and cons of this major communications upgrade. Finally the king rejected the gift, saying that his people would be better off with out the new device. And reading between the lines of the story, it's clear that Socrates and Plato agree.

Thamus feared that the gift of writing would take away his people's memory. He reasoned that once you could write ideas and stories down, the facility to remember them would fade. As Davis points out, it is hard to disagree when you consider the loss of oral tradition in societies that have put pen to paper and ink to press.

Well, Thoth has been laying on the gifts thickly recently, and we have no all-powerful Thamus to say "no, thank you." As media guru Marshall McLuhan observed (some time ago now), when you gain from technology, you always lose something too. The aim of this book is to contribute to the debate about losses and gains in the field of human communication.

Who should read it?

Anyone who wants to think about our world and how we live in it in the early 21st century.

And argue about it.

What's the big picture for mobile technology? One of the things we're written about a lot for instance, is the mobile taking over from the computer as the most important digital device to access the net? Is this a theory you subscribe to?

Article Author: Russell Buckley

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