When I first thought about the Terminal Reading series, I saw it as a spur to controversy. I wanted response, however argumentative. On that score I have been most gratified. Though the volume of mail has not caused the mailman any extra trips, the letters, comments, and clippings that have come in have been thoughtful and searching to a high degree. And by and large my suspicions have been confirmed: that there are a great many intelligent people who happen to find our era of electronic communications more liberating than alarming. Optimistic and visionary projections have outnumbered letters of commiseration two to one. This forum page, which I view as a kind of sampler of the range of opinion, conforms to these proportions: two pro, one con.

First, a correspondent from New Hampshire passed along an article by Jan Bruck, a professor at the University of New South Wales, Australia. The piece, from which I excerpt several paragraphs, is entitled "Writing in the Electronic Age," and makes an eloquent argument on behalf of the new modes of processing and disseminating information:

The print media were the backbone of industrial society. The electronic media are the backbone of post-industrial society. As they speak the language of the majority, they are providing a forum for most people to express their political interests. they also have the potential to remedy some of the problems which have rendered print communication less effective: breaking down the traditional authority of authorship, speeding up the process of information exchange, and giving access to broader sections of the population. In this way, they are creating a new public sphere in which the majority of people can participate. With radio and television, the traditional notion of authorship as a form of intellectual ownership is breaking down: the "deconstruction" of the author proclaimed by French post-structuralist authors like Jean Baudrillard is actually happening there. Radio and television producers are not "auteurs" in the strict sense because they usually work in a team and therefore cannot claim sole ownership of the product.

In contrast to the authority of the writer which is based on the notion of the exclusivity of knowledge, the authority of those who appear on radio or TV as presenters or stars is based on the idea of a knowledge which is shared by everyone. Since the audiovisual language of the electronic media is universally comprehensible, issues raised there are more likely to be seen as everyone’s concern, and the problems posed are for everyone to resolve.

Television is the postmodern medium par excellence: it knows few barriers and boundaries; it represents potentially every section of the community; it reflects all opinions and tastes, and it enables everyone to have equal and easy access to cultural forms which the traditional literate institutions kept apart along social lines of demarcation. Doing this it is contributing to the reversal of values which Nietzche proclaimed for modern society, a revalorization in the cultural and political spheres on an unprecedented scale.

In his book, No Sense of Place: The Impact of the Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Joshua Meyrowitz explains how the electronic media are bridging divisions which print technology deepened over the past 200 years: between adulthood and childhood, female and male genders, public and private spheres–undermining hierarchies of authority, removing taboos and changing traditional roles of social behavior. Expressions of opinion through the audiovisual media puts more pressure on governments and political leaders to consider the interests of the wider public in their decision -making. Radio and television can empower people to take politics into their own hands: the rise of resident action groups and alternative political movements in the past twenty years owes a lot to the effectiveness of the visual image to represent the political will of the people. The recent thawing of relations between East and West, the political reforms in Eastern European countries which culminated in the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, and the increased awareness of the problems facing the Third World would not have happened without television. The constant exposure to images which reveal "how the other half lives"–behind the Iron Curtain or in the killing fields of the Third World–has challenged people’s traditional ideological preconceptions. But while the Cold War between East and West is ending, the many "hot" wars which are troubling the Third World as a legacy of colonial exploitation and superpower rivalry will give the electronic media their biggest challenge yet: to aid in the decolonization of the Third World and to pave the way towards global glasnost and perestroika.

The seductions of television have to an extent focused the attentions of the great mass of Western people back onto some common themes. The limits of television programming and the need for profit have in some ways acted as the limits of space and education did in the days when traditional and elite culture dominated man’s cognition. But I think we are talking in terms of decades rather than centuries when we consider how long it will be before the electronic media are cheap and easy enough to utilize with the same freedom as we now utilize the press....

The computer not only provides freer access, but freer creation as well. Software programs increasingly allow the user to design and create things that previously could only be done by skilled professionals. The computer has become the main refuge of the American individualist (in the mythic sense). It is the largest frontier that exists in America, where one is most free to do as one pleases, and his behavior is tolerated because his results are often appreciated. As networking becomes more extensive and software more easy to use, there will be more and more opportunity for the computer user to choose his own life, to satisfy his own idiosyncrasies. In living this life of extreme individuality, he will move further and further away from a social homogenous existence, and from the existence of a culture which corresponds to and mediates this existence. The result of living one’s life through the computer screen and identification numbers is not that one just becomes an undifferentiated cipher, but that one may become differentiated to an extreme, living a personal life completely separated from the give and take of society.

I think the question is not whether the computer will threaten the prized individualism we have so recently attained, but whether or not it will take this individualism to an undesirable extreme. A world of hackers and video addicts is not a world of homogeneity, but a world of extreme isolation.

Finally, writer Jascha Kessler, from Santa Monica, California, graciously permitted me to cull from his essay, "Epimetheus–or, A Reflection on the ‘Box’," which was delivered as an address at the 56th International P.E.N. Congress, held in Vienna in November of 1991. Kessler’s intent, set out in the opening paragraphs of his essay, is to speculate about the place of the self in a world of undergoing radical ideological as well as technological transformations. His concluding paragraphs, which come to focus on the place of the writer and literature, seemed to me especially the point. There is pessimism here, but it is pessimism of the most thoughtful–and necessary–kind:

IF the deliberate, totalist campaign against the Self seems to be dissipating today like the nightmare of evil it truly was, does it mean that we are out of danger? One hears the rumor of a "new world order." If there were to be such a novelty under the sun, moreover a new democratic world order envisioned as the logical creation of "market economics" (for that’s what’s currently advised by some Western leaders), is there any reason for us, as writers, to expect that it will also provide a favorable environment for the "self?" Not at all. Unhappily, there may be better reasons to fear that the future will manifest quite the contrary result. Not that Literature (with a capital "L") will not retain its inherent power to express and project imagined possibilities. As has always been true, fictions are formative for the potential Self. But–Literature is locked in a deadly contest with another "species," so to term it, of fictions: I mean, the fictions offered by the Media. Our melancholy question today is: Which fictions are, well, true? Which fictions are the real ones?

SOME psychoanalysts are aware that the danger signs are clearly visible and should be read (at least, so far as therapeutic practice is concerned). They have been learning their contemporary patients’ psychic life is predominantly composed of a pastiche of conscious and unconscious fantasy selves, derived from saturation in the Media since earliest childhood. Since we are by now quite experienced as to the nature of the universe presented by the media, it suffices to remark that, although its offerings may be far more various, phenomenologically speaking, than the forms of communication available before the advent of broadcasting seventy years ago, it is anything but traditional or systematic in its influence on the formation of an individual’s psychic architecture. It is also ubiquitously present today, radiating to everyone from hospital cradle to hospital deathbed. Furthermore, while it often includes many traditional genres of dramatization, it does so in much-reduced formats. Certainly as compared to the written word, the forms of the media are also drastically reductive. Not that any one presentation is necessarily confused; the opposite is true, since skilled technique articulates the content of every second. Nevertheless, the experiencing of the media over years is as a whole absolutely unstructured, incoherent, and, by any rational analysis of reality, all but chaotic.

From a psychoanalyst’s point of view, the consequences are profound. No longer operative, let alone meaningful, are all the identifications with those fictive persons immanent in a culture’s hoard of venerable archetypes, those long-established cultural models out of which the individual’s fantasy life was once upon a time composed. From a writer’s point of view, the consequences are profoundly unsettling. It’s not simply a matter of competition with the Media for the attention of an audience. Instead, it’s become a question if communication is possible with persons whose judgment of reality does not resemble that of people who lived before this era, people whose imaginations responded to what fictions once were. Furthermore, what sort of communication is it? Certainly what seems to have been severely decreased by television viewing is people’s imaginative cognition–although not as a result of what they have watched on the screen! What happens to children is that they usually pass from believing that everything presented by television is real to a later conviction that "nothing is real." In other words, the "world has become crowded with the fictive."

Again, from the psychoanalytic perspective, fictions are part of the process by which we invent our reality, a reality that includes other real persons. "Fictions do not stimulate life, they are a source of life." From the writer’s perspective, however, today’s question is, Whose fictions? The answer comes, the fictions of the Media, which are all entirely fictions per se, whether what is shown is drama, or simulated action, "raw and unedited" "actuality," or even non-fictional narration, like news or documentation or instruction, or a walk through an art gallery. The problem also is, what kind of fictions? The answer is: fictions incommensurate with reality, because the only "reality" viewers brought up in the television age have incorporated into their psychic life is that of the fictive reality of the Media....

WRITERS have always assumed that the audience or a reader was another "real" person with a "real" Self. In our time that "real" Self is no longer the kind of "real" Self it seems to have been in the past, certainly not that Self proposed only yesterday by Freud and his followers. Their conception of the Self was that of an autonomous, integrated, mature being. But in today’s societies, populated increasingly by people with fictive personalities, personalities formed and developed through the agency of the fictions offered them by the media, that ideal Self may well be a lost possibility. In short, it seems to me a rather tenuous proposition at best that the way towards the achievement of Self is now cleared and open. Even our new-found political and economic freedoms do not offer grounds for any such revived expectation. The Media that have so influenced the Twentieth Century are only commencing to extend their domination of the coming century.