My colleague, David Franke, has asked me to visit his class on the “Evolution of Writing” to discuss the question of whether new media can be a site of “serious” discourse. The class has recently finished reading Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which argues the opposing position–that new media can entertain but cannot replace “serious” discourse. I suppose the first impulse is to take the bait and argue to the contrary: “of course new media can be ‘serious.’” But this is really the wrong answer to the wrong question. The first question is “what is meant by ‘serious?’” The following question is “what is the value of ‘seriousness?’ What does it acheive?”

In the case of the students posing the question, as I understand it, seriousness is opposed to entertainment, but more specifically it indicates a commitment to logical, rational argument. I appreciate the question, as it demonstrates that these students have gotten to the heart of the matter here. They are confronting a fundametnal question of contemporary philosophy and rhetoric. To begin, we cannot imagine that the value of “being serious” exists beyond the borders of culture and ideology. To judge someone as “not serious” is not unlike claiming they are “insane.” It is a means by which we allow ourselves to ignore the discourse of “others” because they do not speak “our” discourse. Women are irrational; blacks are irrational. Seriousness and rationality go hand in hand. This is an ideological judgment, and when Postman makes this argument, he is extending a cultural conservative argument that endorses the silencing of those whose discourse operates beyond the limits of mainstream acceptablity. As this course has been investigating, our concepts of logic and rationality, indeed our concept of the concept, is predicated upon a particular philosophical articulation of writing, which defines it as linear and univocal.

But what if writing is always already nonlinear and poly-vocal? Such has been suggested by feminist and postcolonial critique, by experimental poetics and postmodern philosophy. If such is the case, new media does not create a revolution as much as uncover the occluded history of rhetoric and poetics. Regardless of how one answers these questions, they reflect the seriousness of the debate. Indeed, one could argue that one cannot get much more serious than new media. New media, along with its antecendents in mechanical media over the past century, presents us with the fundamental philosophical challenge of our lives, a challenge to cultural symbolic behaviors that have existed for thousands of years. Is new media serious? One might as well ask if cinema is serious. Deleuze famously viewed cinema as a revolutionary mode of philosophical discourse. But all of this ignores the fundamental question. If “seriousness” means rationality and logic, why do we place such a value upon it? Why insist that new media be rational or logical in order to value it?

Even if we are to value the logical as the gift of Plato and Aristotle and the rational as the gift of Bacon and Descartes, even if we acknowledge these philosophical acheivements for the radical cognitive inventions that they were, can we not accept the possibility of moving beyond such modes of thought? Or must we, like the Postmans of Socrates’ time, insist on the drinking of the hemlock. or like the Postmans of Galileo’s time, insist, upon pain of death, on a recanting of the heliocentric model of the solar system? Undoubtedly, there are cultural and material dangers associated with new media: social and material inequities on a global scale, the environmental threats of the postindustrial world, the ideological power of media, and so on. Postman identifies such issues, and they should not be ignored. But, at the same time, we should not forget that such dangers are the product of emminently logical and rational ideological processes. We should not expect that “seriousness” will solve our problems. On the other hand, perhaps new media points toward new ways of thinking about knowledge and information, about human identity and community, that might lead us beyond the limits of rational, logical societies just as rationality and logic lead us beyond the Dark Ages.