Youth in Humanity's Fourth Information Age

I spent the first part of my career as a social historian of technology whose original research was on the Constitutional-era and the role of mass printing, mass education, circulating libraries, and the new popular form of the novel in the creation of American democracy and American publics and especially unhappy counter-publics, many of which were despised and feared by the Founding Fathers. That era, roughly 1789 to 1820, was one in which the world was changing rapidly too as print was being democratized. Whereas in the earlier eighteenth century the typical middle-class or working class family owned only one book, the Bible, suddenly cheap books were available in record numbers. Ordinary people were buying them, sharing them around with their friends (a "reader" was assigned to read, typically from a novel, as women quilted, spun, or even, later, worked the spindles in textile mills). Because of the new institution of the circulating library, even the working poor were borrowing novels and using them to work their way toward literacy.

(How do we know? Extant copies of books show marginalia and chart increasing literacy; diaries by elites talk about reading along with their servants who retrieved them from libraries; clothes were made with special pockets in which you could conceal a cheap duodecimo. On and on. All that . . . it was a phenomenon! Enough so that any imaginable book got renamed a "novel" to take advantage of the incredible passion/fad/interest in novels at the time, among a new demographic that spread print, literacy, and the advertisings in books to a new consumer public: if you want to know more, you gotta read the book, by moi, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, it's called. And it was published--really--before the Internet was commercialized. I wrote the last chapter on my first computer. Really. It was republished by Oxford U Press about three years ago with an expanded new introduction, practically its own book, that makes a lot of connections between the 18th c and the present. End of totally shameless although not entirely gratuitous plug: this is a history lesson, after all.)

Back to the main story: The popular novel was the form that spurred a range of technological, social, educational, and institutional changes that, in turn, made the spread of the novel possible. You need both. No one strand can be separated from another in the co-evolution of inventions and innovations in mass printing, innovations in the production and manufacture of cheap paper and cheap ink, the opening of public libraries, public schooling, increased literacy, and democracy.

All of this was fuelled intensely by a public’s seemingly insatiable desire for a new cultural form called “the novel” in which everyday men and women competed and sometimes survived and even (more occasionally) thrived, often against the will of elite, aristocratic men. The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy was published the same month and by the same printer, Isaiah Thomas of Boston, as the Preamble to the Constitution. The Power of Sympathy came with its own Preamble, dedicated to the “Young Ladies of United Columbia,” and was a roman a clef. Its villain—a vile seducer—was one of Boston’s ruling elite; the novel also was an anti-slavery tract that championed an underclass as well as young women, its main focus and audience.

The novel was the blog and the video game and the social network—all of those in different ways—of the post-Revolutionary era in America. As with the Internet today, youth—especially late adolescents—were the single greatest demography of consumers and were also the most typical heroes and heroines of popular novels. This isn’t surprising; the contemporary entertainment, fashion, and many other consumer industries are specifically targeted at the 18-25 demographic. That was also the demographic of the popular, mass-printed novel at the time of the Founding Fathers.

Every bit as much as blogs, social networks, and video games today, the novel was vilified. The novel was accused (I’m not making this up) of leading to solitariness, promiscuity, vulnerability to predators, laziness, hostility, mental distraction, psychological overload, and obsession. It would lead to anarchy, rebellion, and also (yes this is contradictory) hermit-like withdrawal from responsible democratic participation. It would lead to disrespect for parents and authority figures. It would prevent one from full maturity and deter one's entrance into adulthood as either a respectable wife and mother or a fully responsible worker, breadwinner, and citizen (women, of course, couldn't vote then so citizenship was "moral," raising patriotic sons to vote and fight to defend their country). Novels, it was thought, impeded all that was good, ethical, and productive. The novel lead youth ASTRAY. (Novels didn't use emoticoms but did use lots of ALL CAPS, italics, and exclamation points, all of which, elitists said, showed how illiterate they were.)

Sound familiar?

In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, historian and Director of the Harvard Libraries Robert Darnton has designated four great Information Ages in human history. The first is the development of writing in around 4000 BC. The second is the printing press (10th century China and 15th century Europe). The third is the democratization of print in the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century. The fourth is now. As humanity’s third great Information Age, the democratization of print media (and the reactionary response to it), helps us to frame what are recurrent fears about the current Information Age. That history also helps us to see which features of the current era are distinctive, which areas of social, economic, technological, cultural, and cognitive change demand our attention and deserve not punditry but real, serious research.

We are in a cataclysmic, paradigmatic, epistemic moment of global historical change. And, as with the past Information Age, youth have performed a powerful leadership role in the creation of demand, the customization of cultural products, the distribution of interest, and the rather fearless plunging in of a new human episteme. Darnton notes that the current Information Age is both much faster and far more global than any of the others. We cannot underestimate the extent of the changes on all levels social, political, cognitive, psychological, affective, technological, economic, educational (the slowest, sadly: but we're trying to change that, aren't we, HASTAC'ers??).

Last week I posted a description of one of the courses I'll be teaching in the Spring, "This Is Your Brain on the Internet."   http://www.hastac.org/node/1629 A version of the above is a rough description of the graduate course I'm teaching next Spring. It's called "The Early American Novel and Other Fictions" but maybe a better title would be "This Is Your Brain in the Information Age(s)."