When Marshall McLuhan famously said, "The medium is the message," he was talking about the way television and movie images influence thought processes. After the invention of the printing press, we studied by reading language as written in books, but that began to change as television images trumped the thousand written words. With virtual reality, visual pathways and iconic doorways, we're subject now to a different medium and message that poses a subset of dangers we're only beginning to explore.
If television appeals to the short attention span and the Sesame Street approach to learning, the Internet exposes us to a bombardment of even faster and often more superficial ways of gathering information. Computers change the way we write, talk, think and persuade.
In an essay in the New Yorker critiquing Microsoft Word, the ubiquitous word-processing program, Louis Menand warns that we're played for fools by a microchip and held hostage by a system overloaded with icons, menus, buttons and incomprehensible Help windows. A student can turn in a term paper, he writes, that "is now 65 elegantly formatted laser-printed pages, including a four-color cover page and scanned-in illustrations." But a question remains: What has he learned?
My high-tech friends tell me that we're on the brink of a mind makeover. Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, predicts that computers combined with smart drugs will dramatically change human nature as we know it. Intelligent machines will bypass our brains and do most any informational task better than we can do ourselves.
In "Tomorrow's People: How 21st-Century Technology is Changing the Way We Think and Feel," she becomes a Jeremiah of cyberspace. "The private ego is the most precious thing we have," she writes," and it is far more vulnerable than ever before."
Let's hope she's wrong. Whatever difficulty the private ego causes us today, it's surely better than a mentality standardized by data-processing machines. So pass the tower of sliced ruby-crescent fingerlings and freshly blessed lamb, and log off. The Help button can't help.