Is Digital Culture Damaging Us? Ask a Technoskeptic Techie

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But in the past 20 years, and with the growth of the Internet, the idea of a stable digital document has grown much stranger. Can something as ephemeral as a blog be a document, even though it might look like one? What about a series of hyperlinks leading us 'into' an interactive fiction site? What about a series of interrelated tables in a database?

One measure of the instability of digital environments is the rate at which we hit the print button. Levy believes that printing documents represents an attempt to turn volatile and mutable digital forms into something more stable and long-lasting. As the editors of New Scientist point out (Nov. 22, 2003), citing the same Berkeley study, the world's offices consumed 43 percent more paper in 2002 than they did in 1999.

This effort at stability (and its failure) is at the heart of the anxiety we're feeling in an overloaded society. If Becker and Levy are right -- if culture is an 'immortality project' we use to combat our existential angst, and if documents are one of the primary, stable products of that culture -- then our anxiety is understandable. And just as environmental degradation disrupts our ability to rejuvenate, Thoreau-style, our psychic selves, information instability and excess short-circuit our ability to cope with our own mortality.

Levy recently organized a conference at the University of Washington-Seattle on 'information pollution.' John Seely Brown, former director at Xerox PARC, and Bill Hill, a software developer from Microsoft, were among those who spoke at the event. The mere fact that techies of Levy and Brown's stature are acknowledging the issue marks a shift in our relationship with technology, Levy believes. 'There's a growing sense that something is out of whack,' he says. 'I have the feeling that we're right on the verge of perceiving the extent of the problem.' He hopes that, just as we've taken steps to improve the physical environment, this awareness will impel us to mend our mental environment in the digital age.

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