*If everybody has to get online in order to ‘participate,“ that
removes the classics from our civic discourse. That means that we can no longer derive advantage from the wisdom of dead people. Because the dead don’t "participate.”
*When I’m reading D’Israeli’s CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE, (as many before me have done for two centuries), I’m not consulted in the editorial choices there. I have no Comments section where I can decry the book’s unfortunate fondness for boring Scholastic theology. If it were up to me as a participant in the D’Israeli discourse, I’d vote-down all the Latin and Ancient Greek tags.
*But there’s something impertinent, blinkered and pathetic about that attitude. One does not read a 200-year-old work because it suits the modern milieu. You read it because it doesn’t.
*I don’t wanna get all Nicholas Carr here and claim that Google warps our brains. It’s because of Google that I’ve got myself a scanned copy of Isaac D’Israeli. But it’s very valuable to share a written experience that people have had for two centuries. That gives you a way to measure yourself against events and judge the tenor of cultural change.
*D’Israeli’s analog method of discourse can’t suit the algorithms of Facebook. That’s a feature, it’s not a bug. Zuckerberg, he’s an ambitious geek, and I’m okay about him, but his frail, goofy platform should not become some ultimate arbiter of civilized discourse. It isn’t, and Zuckerberg himself wouldn’t claim that. It’s platform-centric critics who are trying to totally remodel our culture around software and online business models – that’s who is off the road and rather out in the briars.