Skepsis gegenüber neuen Kommunikationstechniken hat Tradition

Skepsis gegenüber neuen Kommunikationstechniken hat Tradition

Über das, was da kommt, wurde schon immer gern geklagt. Ein Klassiker:

Unsere Jugend ist heruntergekommen und zuchtlos. Die jungen Leute hören nicht mehr auf ihre Eltern. Das Ende der Welt ist nahe.
(Keilschrifttext aus Ur, Chaldäa, um 2000 vor Christus)

Auch in der Medienwelt und allgemein bezogen auf Kommunikationstechniken herrschte zu jeder Zeit große Skepsis gegenüber Neuerungen. Das unterstreichen folgende Äußerungen von Dennis Baron, Autor des Buches A Better Pencil:

I start with Plato’s critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They’re not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down — the ultimate irony.

We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won’t have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there’s no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant — it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of “this is going to revolutionize everything” versus “this is going to destroy everything.”

Da passt es also gut ins Bild, wie bekannte Journalisten hierzulande über Plattformen wie Twitter reden.

via: Techdirt
Bildquelle: striatic (CC-Lizenz)

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