I'm not saying things were better before, but things were better before
How our relationship to knowledge has changed
I was overtaken by a bout of nostalgia the other day. I remembered how difficult it was to access information, and the incredible feeling you would get when you stumbled upon a nugget of wisdom.
I went to college in the mid-‘90s, before internet was a thing. Actually, even cellphones weren’t a thing: they were brick phones you had to carry in your hand, since you couldn’t store them anywhere.
When you wanted a book, the best way to get it if you were in Venezuela was going to the library. There were few bookshops with specialized texts, so we’d spend hours scourging the file cabinets of our library. You had to learn how to find a book, how to read the cryptic filing system that was used, and then copy the details on a paper slip. Then, you browsed through corridors of thick tomes, trying to figure out where 12.B/Hum/76/Freud was.
We even had a special room for rare and valuable texts. Only 8 or 10 people were allowed in here at a time. You’d hand the paper slip with the reference to the librarian, and they’d probably tell you to come back later because the room was full. Finally, when you were accepted into this sanctum of knowledge, the librarian would tell you not to damage the book and not to leave the room with the text. If you wanted photocopies, you’d jot the pages down on another slip and the librarian would handle that for you. The process took two or three hours.
I understand how archaic this must all seem, nowadays. But there was something beautiful about the effort we’d put in to access these texts. The feeling of unearthing an important yet forgotten book was like opening the lost Ark. We were like characters in an Umberto Eco novel.
We were young students. The books you read, the music you listened to and the films you liked formed the core of your personality. We had Nietzsche-heads, for example, and I was part of a group obsessed with postmodern philosophy, or “cultural studies”. If you were in college in the ‘90s, you had some sort of intellectual badge. Even the kids who didn’t read treatises or experimental papers walked around with novels by Sabato, Cortazar or Saramago. You could tell who the posers were because they’d walk around with a poetry book by Neruda or Benedetti, trying to chat up girls.
This system worked as a giant socio-semiological structure,
bellied by exchanges mimicking the capitalist nature of our society.
Charles Sanders Pierce, the father of modern semiology, laid a case for language and behavior built around what he called “tokens”. To put it briefly, for Pierce a sign is the fundamental unit of meaning. Signs are Qualisigns, meaning they make you feel a certain way, Sinsigns which refers to the fact or thing in itself, and legisigns, when they tie to an idea or concept.
If you see a hammer and a sickle:
It will make you feel a certain way, while being constituted of the two objects, and will be tied to communism or at least the Russian Revolution in your head. Pierce retooled all of logic, and paved the way for the analytical philosophy school, using this ground-breaking framework.
I bring this up because this semiological structure has been completely done away with by technology. When we walked around with a copy of Zarathustra under our arm, sporting a Pearl Jam T-Shirt, we were sending signs about who we thought we were. These signs then competed in the marketplace of structural ideas. We formed relationships based on our books and music albums, and the gregarious nature of human beings created social reinforcement incentives based on these choices. Would I have read Derrida’s Dissemination if I’d been alone? Probably not. The fact that our group was pouring over these texts gave it intrinsic meaning and value to all of us.
This dynamic has been lost. I know it sounds nostalgic to say this system was “better” than the decentralized, technology-driven exchanges we have today. But anyone who lived through the ‘90s will tell you the same thing: getting together with friends to discuss Radiohead’s OK Computer was immensely more rewarding than posting your opinion on a Reddit thread. Of course, I understand the advantage of having absolutely everything Thom Yorke et al. ever recorded on my phone. I know all the interviews are there, too. Yet the feeling of appropriating the music, of going to a store and buying one album, not the whole Radiohead catalog, was more fulfilling.
When we talk about the loss of meaning in contemporary society, the destruction of Pierce’s cultural semiology is at the center of it all. Taking a picture of the book you’re reading and posting it to a horrible social media site is not, at all, the same. The acceleration of exchanges and the obligation to produce tokens permanently to reaffirm your personality is completely psychotic. We’re constantly pursuing the next big thing, with little interest in the depth or the quality of said thing. Whether you post a photo of Crime and punishment or some horrible youth fiction novel, it’s all the same to the culture as long as you get likes and follows. Since we’ve subcontracted quality and aesthetics to social media, the only criterium is how many people like the book or album. If everyone is listening to K-Pop it must undoubtedly be good, right? Who are you to say the contrary?
I miss the depth of these relationships and exchanges. I miss seeing the gleam in a girl’s eye when you explained something interesting out of the book you’re reading. I know I can sleep with about ten people within a 1-mile radius right NOW if I download a dating app, but can we read Camus together instead?
We’ll keep on exploring meaning-creation in the contemporary world in upcoming posts. For now, stop reading this and pick up a book!
Thé future was better before 🤷🏻♂️