What Plato Knew about E-Mail
I ran into an acquaintance recently at a local bookstore. In the course of exchanging greetings, my friend asked, "Do you have E-mail?"
"No," I said.
"Get it," he instructed me, "I have some things I want to send to you."
I live in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. My friend lives in the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood, five or six miles to the south. It's still a local call from Macalester-Groveland to Falcon Heights. I've actually been on-line (with a telephone) as long as I've been able to hold a receiver. My number is in the book. So is my address, for that matter, It's true that we don't have an answering machine, but my friend hadn't chided me for that lapse. E-mail was the issue.
Once upon a time, television was the issue (we have one of those) and before that it was telephones. Once, in fact, writing was the issue, as we learn from those societies that have left a record of their struggle to adjust to the displacement of the spoken word by reading and writing.
Plato explores the problem in his dialogue, Phaedrus (274-276). In the dialogue, Socrates cautions a companion concerning the illusions inherent in the substitution of writing for the spoken word. Writing is to the spoken word, he contends, as a painted portrait is to a living human being. The written word projects the illusion that it heeds and responds to those who read it, but is, in fact, no more than a shadow of living speech. A treacherous gulf separates speaking from writing, he suggests, but in the course of time we have grown insensitive to the differences between them.
There is no denying the ever-increasing power of each succeeding medium to record and transmit information, but neither can we ignore the disintegration of human immediacy these media sanction and facilitate. Communication media thrive on separation, fueling social isolation while appearing to bridge it. The more powerful the medium, the greater the contradiction between its facilitation of separation on the one hand, and its apparent capacity to convey intimacy on the other.
But it is not the latest technologies themselves that are the problem — it is their promiscuity. I am thankful that hospitals can now be electronically linked to one another for rapid consultation and transmission of data, and I by no means discount the value E-mail messages may have for far-flung friends and family members, but I am dismayed by the growing use of such technologies as gratuitous substitutes for human contact.
Writing is, after all, so convenient. My wife once admonished me for sending a "thank you" through the mail when it would have been just as easy to deliver it in person or over the phone. How inconvenient an admonition. Underlying the many justifications I could offer for expressing my gratitude in writing, wasn't the most compelling motive the assurance that I was thereby freed of responsibility for actually speaking to the other person? But stripped of the encumbrance of actual human presence, written words are "easy in" and "easy out" — even, we must suspect, when they are collected in learned journals.
The advent of the computer video screen marks a milestone in this respect. Even when a screen is full it is essentially empty. Word after word disappears without a trace, perfectly separated from the human presence that formed them. The new communication technologies have this in common: they all permit the user to throttle the human presence behind the message. When the message is troubling or inconvenient you can simply make it disappear, and call this forgetting "memory" in the bargain. Thus we move in degrees from the human presence. From the spoken (or signed) word to the handwritten message — "You see these big letters? I am now writing to you in my own hand" (Galatians 6:1); then the uniformity of the typewriter, finally, the instantaneously transitory electronic screen.
I have little doubt that before long a resilient human spirit will move many to reconsider the price the latest electronic communication technologies are extracting from our desire and ability to simply be with one another as friends, families, and neighbors. However, given the impressive power of these technologies to record and transmit — a power which can be put to very good use when applied judiciously — and the enormous profits made by those who successfully justify its injudicious proliferation, second thoughts may sooner come as regret than foresight.
In the meantime, my family may well get a computer and start using E-mail one of these days. One of these days, but not today. The next time my friend has something he wants to tell me maybe we can meet in the bookstore again, near where they keep their copies of Plato.