Katherine Mosca
01 November 2001
Summary #2
For me, Holding On to Reality, by Albert Borgmann, does just that: grabs on to the realest, most relatable ideas about the Information Age, and refuses to let go. I have had a difficult time talking and writing about Borgmann. For our class listserv responses, I felt like I had nothing to comment on. In our class discussions, I had a hard time figuring out what everyone was talking about. Borgmann’s writing style (and diction and even content) is clear and straightforward, and it leaves me at a loss for anything to interpret or explicate. Borgmann writes sentences like “Social critics and information theorists are divided on whether information is the devil or the Second Coming” and “Information through the power of technology steps forward as a rival of reality” (6, 2). And I cannot see how there is anything more to say.
So, I would like to write about those of Borgmann’s ideas (in this book) that I find most striking. First, it is interesting to note that Borgmann utilizes many of the ideas articulated by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By.
If we think of information as a relation—intelligence provided, a person is informed by a sign about some thing in a certain context—we can hardly fail to notice that in a hypertrophically informed society like ours the sign looms large….We are so used to the mass and sophistication of our vehicles and containers of information that a society without them seems primitive and incomplete. (38)
Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphoric containers, used so often in speech, writing, and conceptualization of abstract concepts, carry over into Borgmann’s world of information. Borgmann’s information signs are his containers. In the oral culture that Borgmann writes about in Chapter Four, humans are the containers for the information; the fallibility and inconsistency that accompany human memory are exactly what makes oral culture appear so primitive and frightening. Without our literal, physical, written signs, where would we be? Without information to point us, would we know where to go?
Another point of Borgmann’s, which is perhaps controversial, but maybe just not as clear, was discussed to some extent in our class. But we never came to any conclusion about the misunderstanding.
Writing and drawing convert information into a material that writers, composers, or builders can use to articulate their conceptions at leisure and at length. Thus, cultural information raises to a much higher level a distinctively human ability—to think before one acts. On paper we can try out and spell out in endless variation and detail what in an oral society needs to be risked or left untried. (85)
The question that seems confusing is whether oral culture is equivalent to physical action. This passage seemed most easily interpreted as writing about something versus actually doing something. But I would argue that there is more (or, I suppose, less) to it than that. It seems, rather than a question of writing about versus doing, a question of writing about versus saying, or acting out, or proclaiming. There does not seem to be any clear physical action implied in what Borgmann writes, and it seems logical that if something is not written culture, it is oral culture, whether it is thought, said, or done.
Another passage our class found troublesome deals with authorial intention:
…a text can be more than a catalyst of emotional reaction. When we read a good story intelligently, we follow the author’s instruction in the construction of an imaginary world. The author gives us the blueprint, but we must supply the materials and situate the structure. The materials are our experiences as well as our aspirations. (92)
This passage can be, and was, interpreted as assuming a definite authorial intention. But that interpretation is slightly skewed. Borgmann is outlining the process of reading a text. Readers gather all the information an author has given them, and by attaching their own life experiences and understandings to the abstracted experiences and concepts the author is describing, the readers build the text as their own. For example, if I read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and bring to my reading my personal understanding of fiction writing and my life experiences to date, I might decide that Plath has created a brilliant work of fiction that should be meticulously picked apart, diagrammed, dissected, and combed for meaning. But, if some other woman read The Bell Jar, bringing to her reading a limited knowledge of fiction writing, but a deeply personal understanding of depression, suicide, and mental illness, she might decide that Plath’s work is a misconstructed, misrepresentative, and even offensive piece of literature. What the author creates is a guide, an outline, and even an imagining; the reader may imagine or conceptualize the author’s text in an entirely different way. So, whether authors have definite intentions or not, it is unrealistic that their texts will produce only one interpretation.
In Borgmann’s conclusion, he presents an idea that I find central to our class and its discussion of the role of the Internet and the Information Age in our lives. He writes, “Information is about to overflow and suffocate reality” (213). With the invention or development of new technological devices or advances every day, this suffocation seems imminent. With the Palm Pilot, the DVD player, with cellular phones that check e-mail and computers that play movies, with all the newer technologies with which I am not yet even familiar, the world seems almost scary. With all of these avenues for accessing, transmitting, and generating information, the pace and the amount of information sent will steadily increase until we, as mere humans, are overloaded. Borgmann makes me aware of the frightening possibility that these signs we rely on to orient and direct us in everyday life will soon become so many that they will begin to contradict one another. Where will that leave us?