T R A N S C R I  P T

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Kinograffiti Today's, not tomorrow's, technology announces the possibility of travel, friendship, saved labor, transcultural literacy, reality, and other goals valued in our industrial societies. Though seemingly repetitious of a twentieth century modernist hyperbole, even skeptics must regard these pronouncements with a degree of seriousness. What would significantly differentiate today's fervor over technology from what we are in the habit of associating with an earlier modernism does seem somewhat unclear. It may be that today, perhaps after modernism, and perhaps after postmodernism, we are in possession of some greater critical awareness. But I don't think that such self-blindness could be further from the case. What encourages even the greatest doubters among us to indulge their imaginations with the possibilities of today's technology? What indeed is it we talk about when talk about today's technology? No doubt if I were to ask this of almost anyone I pass on the street of any industrialized center (and perhaps beyond), I would probably receive responses approximating one word: digital. After all this word is why we are all here. "Technology in the 90's" refers to this one word. To be sure it is not the singularity of this word, "digital," that so attracts us. It is, rather, its ubiquity. It inundates all areas of cultural production. We brace ourselves against this torrent of linguistic dissemination which will not ebb short of a world-wide economic collapse, a collapse that would no doubt curtail more than the so-called digital revolution. So why not move with the flow, "go with the flow," at least for a while?

Topograph

To go with the flow, this expression I use anachronistically, may suggest giving up resistance. In a historical moment characterized by the metaphor of flowing information, resistance to digital technology may be seen as not only futile, as the bionic race known as the Borg collectively assured the crew of the starship Enterprise, but not an issue at all. One would certainly try swimming against the flow of a dangerously strong current, but why would one want to try so hard to struggle against a medium which holds the promise of universal communication or the closest we've come to it thus far? In a hi-tech parody of Doctor Dolittle, we may soon be able to tell our stoves our plans for dinner; they would in turn react by consulting our cookbooks and checking in with our refrigerators, letting our personal agents know which groceries to strike a bargain for on the Internet market, and so on. Of course this parody holds a curious reference to an age of serfdom. But until our appliances can successfully pass a Turing test or any other such measure of artificial intelligence, we need not worry about such troubling references.

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