Instead, I will point out questions that many of you are probably already asking yourselves: Are all those numbers from the same poll? Were all those polls taken in the same year? Who conducted those surveys? Were they part of peer-reviewed studies, or were they wacky Internet polls? I purposely didn’t give the sources. I didn’t give the contexts. I didn’t note that, in fact, every one of those numbers comes from a different poll, with a different sample size and different methodology. In sum, those numbers are not comparable. But if I were on a television or radio talk show, I could run through them unchallenged. I could cite them in a peerreviewed article in my own field (American studies), and no one would question them, I guarantee you. In this country, we only pretend to be crazy about empiricism.
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n The Education of Henry Adams (first printed in 1906), which all American studies students read at some point, the historian Adams relates his experience of attending the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Adams describes entering an exhibition about electricity and confronting the dynamo. The moment he sees this big, buzzing, whirring machine, which is destined to light up the world, he recognizes it’s over for him. His mind is trained in the classics. He knows the Old Testament. He knows Greek and Latin. He went to Harvard. But he is totally unprepared for the
ally riding unicycles. There’s been much written about this scene, but frankly, as a workplace, it’s not that different from my own (a university, where people wear shorts and occasionally ride unicycles). Indeed, what struck me about Google was how familiar it seemed. And isn’t this what we’re experiencing with technology today in America? The dynamo that will flood the world with data is somehow opaque to us, its action invisible.
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ver a short period of time, we’ve gone from an almost spatial relationship with digital technology to a magical one. It used to be that when you decided to check your e-mail you would go to the room in your house where the computer sat, and you would dial up a distant server on a modem, and you would hear the warbles and bleeps and eventually connect. And then you would download all the waiting e-mails, upload your responses to the server, and out they would go. You did this at most three times a day. The whole process was expressed spatially: I’m going online. I’m logging on. I’m downloading. I’m uploading. I’m entering a chat room, even. This is how we would talk about cyberspace, and it’s how we still talk about it, even though it represented our experience for only a very short time. Now these same processes are deeply embedded in our lives. They’re instantaneous. Many devices no longer require
I tell the English majors, media studies majors, and sociology majors that if they get out of college without taking courses in statistics and computer science they will not be among the people who pull the levers in society. 20th century, which will be the century of the engineer and the scientist. It’s hard to think about technology today without being haunted by Henry Adams’s ghost. When I visited the Googleplex—the Google corporation’s headquarters in Mountain View, California—for the first time, in 2006, I expected a Henry Adams moment. I expected to be awed by this powerful, brilliant, dynamic institution. And it didn’t happen. Nor did it happen over subsequent days and later visits. What you see at the Googleplex is a certain eccentricity—people in shorts skateboarding around, occasion30
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the mediation of a keyboard. They have been designed to be, as Marshall McLuhan would say, “extension[s] of ourselves” in a way that is just barely metaphorical. Our skin activates the signal, or our voice does. If it ever was true that there was a separate place called the Internet, or a place called cyberspace, that’s no longer the case, and it probably never will be again. The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And indeed, when the iPad first debuted, its lead designer, Jony Ive, compared operating it to per-