Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [74]
Disc manufacturers would rather not pay royalties, of course. A company called Bureau Development has gathered together hundreds of excerpts from antique public domain (i.e., no royalty) editions of classic works, thus often of lesser quality, sometimes bowdlerized, and put them on a “Great Literature” CD-ROM disc. The postmodern reader’s ticket to the classics requires “a PC or a PS/2 compatible computer, a CD-ROM drive that supports the ISO-9660 standard, with interface card, cable and software, Microsoft Extensions version 2.0 or later, a minimum of 640K RAM, with 500K available, and DOS 3.1 or later.” It’s a little more complicated than opening a book, but once you have the equipment “you can run Great Literature directly from CD-ROM drive. Simply log onto the CD-ROM drive and type LIT.”4 New-format great literature may be as little read and innocuous as faux leather “Great Literature” sets of the kind that have decorated the homes of television-watching nonreaders for decades, and CD-ROM formatting certainly need not directly alter literary content any more than textbooks re-created as videotext communicate in anything other than words.
Once they are on CD-ROM discs, however, allied technologies press in on old and new books alike. Meg Cox reports in the Wall Street Journal that as the new computer technologies displace text books, “assignments will routinely include multimedia projects, mixing words with sound and video.”5 Bureau Development’s Personal Library on disc comes with pictures and sound that turn some of the great works into virtual son et lumière shows. When books become subordinate to multimedia projects and words are tied to pretty pictures, print culture is put at risk.
The status of books in McWorld today teaches lugubrious lessons about the corrupting reach of the image makers into the world of print and via that world, into the world of democracy. When we allow Chris Whittle to insert advertisements into books and television (with ads intact) into public school classrooms, literacy and literary pleasure clearly are no longer our aim. When a single picture of a brutally abused soldier’s corpse takes the place of careful debate and the reasoned discourse of words in forging political foreign policy priorities, democracy itself as a deliberative practice is jeopardized.
Television and film do not, to be sure, wholly displace books. Rather, they are parasitic on them. Rather than making television literate, television tends to make books illiterate. Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh “write” best-sellers that are extensions of their radio and television personalities. Reading becomes another form of gossip—as in the O. J. Simpson “book,” published in conjunction with his televised murder trial. Given the scarcity of readers, the trick is to publish books that people who do not read books will nevertheless buy, whether or not they actually read them: for in McWorld, consumption demands only that we purchase but not that we actually utilize products, many of which we do not actually “need” in the first place. An avalanche of embarrassingly huge-selling how-to books finally led The New York Times Book Review to remove them from the regular best-seller list, for they had come so thoroughly to dominate it that “real” books had ceased to be competitive. But the how-to’s were quickly replaced not by real books but by genre novels designed explicitly to meet the imperatives of a quick and lucrative film sale. In the fall of 1993, of the top ten “fiction” listings on The New York Times list, seven were filmic suspense