Unsworth's essay

Unsworth, John. Electronic Scholarsip; or, Scholarly Publishing and the Public.

http://sites.unc.edu/viscomi/841/Electronic%20Scholarship%20Unsworth.pdf

Unsworth observes how the reactionary defenders of traditional "bookish" academia (Cooper and Simpson come to mind...), and those all too eager to mourn the fading away of Culture (capital C) in the digital era, actually "find themselves in secret collusion [...] with the enemies of intellectualism" (234). He brings forth the example of Sven Birkerts, an "unreconstructed Platonist" who sees the digital age as the terminal illness of the millenial judeo-christian quest for knowledge, and the WWW as the harbinger of the apocalypse. Unsworth interprets his sentiments as an elitist fear that scholars and teachers will no longer be needed (or, better, revered like high priests), that a "shallower" humanity will lose sight of "vertical distinctions" due to the "lateral connectedness" of information ushered in by the internet. The author believes instead that it is precisely an attitude like Birkerts' that contributes to the "marginalization of the humanities" and "clears the field for the subjugation of these new technologies to the system of power and property relations" that dominates contemporary mass media (238). But Unsworth is optimistic, and believes that the computer has the potential to actually reverse the numbing and stupefying process--which he does acknowledge-- set in action by consumer-society mass media, with its CocaCola-driven TV programmings and its "interactive" home-shopping: while television seemed to be irreversably leading us towards "a sort of Nick at Nite future--Leave it to Beaver on demand", the web allows us to "hope for something better, and we might hope that the consumer will, at will, be able to become a producer" (239). He concludes by suggesting that it is up to us, scholars and "ordinary" consumers, to take advantage of the opportunity.

P.S. In the table of contents of the journal this article was taken from, I noticed an essay ominously titled "The Electronic Text and the Death of the Critical Edition". Wonder what hat's about....