Levi on technologies

My parents used to reflect that the generation of their own parents had seen the greatest changes in human civilization– radio, air travel, etc. I think Levi is right that his and mine is getting pretty close:

“Then there are the technologies. Most of my students are in their late teens and early twenties so they can hardly discern the revolution that they are living through. At the age of 35 I lived prior to the personal computer and the invention of the internet and thus– following a line of thought Jameson explores somewhere in relation to Adorno and Benjamin and the changing circumstances through which they lived –have had the privilege (and culture shock) of living between two entirely distinct temporalities. The impact of internet communication, cable, cell phones, satellite communications, etc., has fundamentally changed the nature of our world, collectively increasing our reality as actors. When I first started studying philosophy around the age of 14 or 15, we only had B. Dalton’s and Walden Books which were little holes in the wall that carried crap. I had to scour the vintage and used book stores for miles around to find anthropology, history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and literature texts. And I was forced to read whatever I happened to find, which partially accounts for my eclectic background. Now, however, I can link to the internet on my iPhone while hiking in a wooded park and order the newly released copy of Souriau’s Les différents modes d’existence from France. I can acquire bootleg transcriptions of all of Lacan’s seminars, and online for free, no less! Additionally, SR and OOO would not have been possible without the intertubes or back in 1991. For SR/OOO to come into existence all sorts of relationships had to be forged among eclectic and diverse thinkers in a variety of fields and this simply would not have taken place in the conference format that traditionally brought thinkers together. The nature of research and interaction changes significantly as a result of these new network links, allowing for new forms of organization and resistance.”

Exactly! And I did in fact buy my initial copy of Being and Time at a B. Dalton store. It’s amazing that they had it, since they did carry mostly crap. Very close on the shelf to Being and Time was another philosophy volume called (I’m not kidding) Pissing in the Snow, and Other Ozark Folk Tales.

As a teenager at a summer school in Wisconsin, I did have what I now recognize in retrospect as an email account. But it was only for internal use there, or at least I thought it was. Otherwise, I had my first real email address at age 23 (and you know, I’m not too much older than 23 right now, when you think about it). And it was a pain to get it! I had to go to some ultra-tech-savvy woman at DePaul who was hidden away in some laboratory office, and go through complicated paperwork to get it. And even then it was bitnet rather than internet, though I no longer even remember the difference.

The web didn’t exist until I was 26, and I had it running at home at 27. By comparison, my 6-year-old nephew, his birthday soon approaching, was discovered to have entered “Lego toys for 7-year-old boys” into the Google window. He’s way beyond me at age 7.

Another big difference I’ve mentioned before is the conditions of travel. My first summer in Europe was in Bremen in 1989. The only news source was Herald Tribunes with 2-day-old American news. Once in awhile you’d catch American stories on German radio (such as the dramatic plane crash in Iowa that summer). But I was actually having a friend in Maryland cut out newspaper clippings of baseball stories and send them to me in Germany. That was just 20 years ago, folks. It would now be a laughable waste of effort. Some people already think newspapers as such are a laughable waste of effort.

I came to Cairo in 2000, and it was already livable at something like a Western standard for those with the appropriate sort of job. But apparently as recently as the early 1990’s, there were no supermarkets here. Now, you can get fresh and unmelted Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in Cairo. You can get A & W Cream Soda. You can get any book sent here via Amazon very quickly.

The only things you can’t really get are (among snacks) Wheat Thins, and maple syrup is very expensive because I think Egypt has probably not even one maple tree. And among academic necessities, interlibrary loan books (no problem with articles; those are very fast). The problem with books is that no one wants to send their books on loan to Egypt; I can understand why that sounds scary to some libraries. But in ten years that won’t matter either.

The birth of the web to now spans 1994-2009, 15 years. What might thinks look like in 2024, when the same span of time has passed?