Industrial Man’s opinion of Homo Conexus is reminiscent of the typical way elder generations have always spoken of the young.
Here’s the main theme: “What’s wrong with these brats, anyway?
There was far more respect, better values, more control of things in the old days.”
It seems to have always been thus. Even Socrates (469 B.C – 399 B.C.), who, by the way, is not known to have ever written anything, is quoted as saying:
“Today’s children love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the
Since the notion of “The Teenager” was invented in the 1950s, this Socrates quote has often been used to underscore the fact that the rebellious nature of teens has been present throughout history.The only problem: there’s no convincing evidence that Socrates ever said this. There are many verifiable Socrates quotes, some dealing with youth issues (for instance, in Plato’s The State). But none probes the depths that the above quote does. The internet is bubbling with discussions about where that quote may have originated.
One possible source is Personality and Adjustment (1953) by William L. Patty and Louise S. Johnson. This psychology book was written just as youth began defining itself as a “culture” in the 1950s. Another source is said to be Gijsbert van Hall, mayor of Amsterdam from 1957 to 1967, who, in an article printed in The New York Times on April 3rd, 1966, reacted to a
demonstration with the same quote, which he also attributed to Socrates. (You can find the article on the newspaper’s website by searching for his name and the date at www.nyt.com.) Later on the quote was included in an editorial by Malcolm S.
Forbes (1919-1990), the founder of the financial magazine that carries his surname. His researchers tried – as did many after them – to find the quote among Socrates’ statements, but to no avail. They ended up calling Gijsbert van Hall to ask where he had gotten the quote. He didn’t remember, but he believed he had read it in a Dutch book once.
The Socrates quote seems to be more like something people need to hear, than a certified historical fact. Almost like an “urban legend” from ancient times, that takes on a life of its own. A
pre-internet viral campaign. The Greek thinker and poet Hesiod, who lived about 300 years before Socrates, is alleged to have said something similar, but this is equally hard to confirm. But it’s the content, not the author, that matters here. Give some thought to what went on inside of you when you read that quote. Did it make you feel at ease? To feel like laughing at how parental generations have always thought their children were spoiled – how everything was “better in the old days”?
Or did it make you curious? Did you feel like Googling the quote to see what else Socrates had said, or find out where the quote came from?
If the first instance is the case, then your acceptance of traditional authority is probably intact. The reasoning: well, if it says so in a relatively serious, well laid-out book like this one, it’s most likely true. This is a classic feature of Industrial Man. But if you were curious – if the quote sparked your critical sense when it comes to what the media serves up – then you probably have much more in common with Homo Conexus.
The difference is that Homo Conexus, through his entire upbringing, has had access to a wide variety of sources of information, who all thought they alone had the truth. How do you assess which one is the most reliable? You don’t.
To Homo Conexus all media platforms are equal.
Whether something is true or false is up to the individual, and not authorized by a specific medium. This kind of social
constructivism, based on equally important media input, is typical to Homo Conexus – but not to Industrial Man, who typically prefers certain media to others. The baby-boomer cohort – those born just after World War II – would often rather believe news that comes from the radio or the newspaper than from TV. Their children find the news on TV more credible than their parents do.
Homo Conexus doesn’t think one medium is any more credible than another. But just as the network generation isn’t ripe with technical wizards just because they grew up in a time with an abundance of technology, Homo Conexus isn’t better at source criticism just because they consider all media equally credible. It
is still a highly personal issue whether one is suspicious of media input or not.
The difference is that a book, like the one in your hand right now, is not necessarily any more credible to Homo Conexus because it is a book – whereas Industrial Man, who grew up with books as his primary source of knowledge in school, in college and at work, has a tendency to think that it is.
How can you as a reader be sure that the Socrates story is valid? Well, you really can’t – and I’d rather not let on that I hold the definitive truth. But the story of the Socrates quote shows us two things that have changed with the transition to the network society, things that affect Homo Conexus’s way of being human.
Maybe you already know of Socrates’s 2,300-year-old skeptical portrait of youth, using arguments that resemble the ones you heard from your own parents. Maybe you heard the quote from friends, or read about it somewhere. Quotes that resonate with the public generally survive the test of time, even when they aren’t founded on truth.
As I mentioned, that quote was dismissed as attributable to Socrates as early as the 1960s. But even so, we still talk about it today, 40 years later. The quote hasn’t lost its appeal even though it has been “debunked.” That’s partly because it’s a useful quote, but also because it wasn’t easy for everybody to see its “unveiling” until recently.
Until the breakthrough of the internet it was an exceptionally time consuming matter to research such a subject. You’d have to go to the library and sift through Plato’s writings about Socrates to look for the quote.
And, sitting among the stacks of some high-ceilinged, genteel old library in San Francisco, Buenos Aires or Copenhagen, how would you have found the connection to the mayor of
Amsterdam mentioned in The New York Times in 1966? And would Patty and Johnson’s book, not to mention Malcolm
Forbes’s editorial, have been likely to pop up in your research? It would take days, even weeks, to have tracked those items down.
But thanks to internet search engines, it took me around 10 minutes to find the information I have passed on here – including fact confirmation from three different sources. I even found a searchable online version of Plato’s The State. Then it was only a question of cross-searching for “youth” in order to find out whether the quote was actually a part of the antique scripture.
Now we know it wasn’t.
Another issue which has changed with the coming of the network society, and which affects Homo Conexus’s way of being, is the greatly enhanced ability to draw on other people’s experiences.
It’s one thing that it was possible to find information about Socrates’ quote – or lack of it – relatively fast, because search engines are our primary gateways to information on the internet today. It’s another matter that a lot of the information we do find is the result of other people’s info searches.
Example: I didn’t find out that Malcolm Forbes’s team of researchers had called the mayor of Amsterdam, Gijsbert van Hall, to learn where he found Socrates’s quote. That research was relayed by a guy in a discussion forum about quotes, which turned up when I Googled the quote. And if you go to this web address:
http://www.qis.net/~jschmitz/afu/youth.htm
…you can even read an exchange of information between scholars and public librarians about this particular quote.
It reveals, among other things, that Forbes used the quote, but that his researchers couldn’t find the source. One librarian went through the magazine database – physical, paper magazines, that is – to find this fact, then replied to an e-mail, which came up again in an online discussion forum in August of 2000.
Because this information, this dialogue and these experiences are flowing freely on the internet, they are all accessible by search engines. This shows how fast the spread of knowledge
has accelerated since the popular breakthrough of the internet in the mid-1990s. It’s also an example of how reality’s complexity can no longer be hidden.
While Industrial Man could make do with only a few sources of information, Homo Conexus insists on being informed from as many sources as possible – preferably all the time. The world is complex; it always was. But it used to be simplified for us by the limited number of media we used. If you were a blue collar worker in the 1950s, you got virtually all your information from working class media, probably morning or evening daily newspapers, supplemented by the news on the radio.
Clearly more rarified information was available to the upper classes via higher-toned media (specialty magazines; learnèd periodicals; documentaries; even lecture series and seminars).
But in general, Industrial Man consumed media that
corresponded with the values and the identity of the working man, and which served to preserve those values and that
identity. Industrial Man’s choice of media both fit and shaped the identity of Industrial Man. It isn’t like that anymore.
Due to the dizzyingly rapid spread of knowledge, and the consequent equalization of the authority of different media, the information landscape is now a complex mass of
info-bombardment. And this is the world Homo Conexus has grown up in, and has learned to navigate from the very beginning. The ability to absorb and process huge quantities of information quickly, sifting through a vast array of sources, is one of the abilities Homo Conexus has – but which Industrial Man doesn’t have.