Catholic University from 2013–22. He is now Robert B. Aird Chair of Humanities at Deep Springs College-a liberal arts college on a cattle ranch in the Eastern Sierra.
Barba-Kay applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation, and reported the following:
From page 99 of A Web of Our Own Making:Learn more about A Web of Our Own Making at the Cambridge University Press website.But online communication does more than facilitate more-of-the-same. First, because there is an unstable distinction between the internet used as a supplement to offline relationships and the internet used as a substitute for them: There is an easy slope tending from the former to the latter. Reconnecting with an old friend, say, or speaking to grandchildren on Skype are extensions of existing relationships that are not primarily situated online. But even in such cases it is clear that, by allowing us to be in frequent contact at a distance, online associations make it easier to move away, to live at a distance from friends and family, to keep our neighbors at arm's length, to work from home, to spend more time entertained alone...The internet is, in this respect, a social lubricant, and therefore a social solvent.If the Page 99 Test (as formulated by Ford Madox Ford) is meant to be diagnostic of the quality of the book as a whole, then I'm satisfied that nothing here embarrasses me. The most basic form of the book's thesis--the thesis regarded from nosebleed altitude--is also present here: that digital technology is not continuous with our analogue values, practices, and relationships, but qualitatively changes all of them to such a degree as to make it almost impossible to judge whether our lives are radically improving or deteriorating.
But this is (in itself) hardly news. There is also a hint in this passage of a theme that is better developed as the chapter goes on, namely, that digital relations are scrambling and disrupting the political goods that we've long taken for granted: democracy and liberalism, as well as the very idea of the nation state. While I don't indulge in much speculation about what the future of digital politics will hold (specifically), I try to identify the main trends that inhere in new media: a high premium on the exercise of individual choices and a low one on institutional legitimacy and personal authority, among others. And this, in turn, ties into the book's larger argument that digital media are a "natural" technology: a technology that is working to erase the boundaries between human nature and human design or programming. This erasure will come at the cost of the formative influences of earlier ways in which human beings have understood their identities (as in: tradition, convention, custom--all of which look merely "constructed" or "arbitrary" once regarded through a digital lens). To simplify my point a bit: tech will replace culture.
Writing a book on this subject has been flummoxing because I've felt all along as if I were aiming for a moving target; digital technology develops faster than print can write about it. (As soon as I had submitted the final ms. to Cambridge, Chat GPT appeared...) But my approach throughout has been to try to identify the deepest principles, trends, and biases that underlie the whole revolution in the long term. I doubt that Instagram or Chat GPT will be on anyone's mind twenty years or thirty from now. But I hope that my book still will be. (Assuming people are still reading books at all then!)
--Marshal Zeringue
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