The hope of fulfilling the demands of individual self-assertion and community building while simultaneously defusing the conflict between autonomy and belonging, has been recently invested in cutting edge technology known for its astonishing facilitation of inter-human contact and communication. Frustration of the hope so invested is, however, gathering force and spreading.
Such frustration is perhaps an unavoidable price of the accelerated passage of information, offered by the creation of the “information highways.” All kinds of highways tempt more people to obtain vehicles, to use them, and to use them more often; hence the highways tend to become rapidly overcrowded (they, so to speak, invite, create, and beef up overcrowding), which defies their original promise. Getting the travellers promptly to the planned destination may prove to be a much more harrowing task than expected. There is another powerful reason to be frustrated: the destination of messages, of the “vehicles” meant to rush and dash along these highways, is after all human attention, which the internet is unable to expand, just as it cannot render its consuming-and-digesting capacity greater! On the contrary, adjusting to the internet-created conditions makes attention frail and above all shifty, unable to stop and stay still for long, drilled and accustomed to “surf” but not to fathom, to “zap” through channels but not to wait until any of the zapped-over plots is revealed in all its width and depth. In short, attention tends to be trained to skate over the surface much too fast for getting a glimpse of what hides beneath.
