Light mists. The wind churns up the water and after a time it calms down. In the rises and falls I hear sources, the tide’s beat, the waves speaking. The Ursound, the sound of our origins, before books, before technology. And beyond that? The crackle of stellar pulses. And behind that, music that escapes the ear, a message outside the realm of articulate comprehension. [Bruce Powe, 1995. Outage. Toronto: Random House of Canada: 320.]
Welcome back! After ten days in the dark, the Imagining Toronto website is back online, thanks to a salvaged database, backed up files, new security measures and a great new host. Things may look a little rough for the next few days as content comes back online. The Imagining Toronto Library (with its inventory of Literary Works, books and articles about Local History and Culture and thematic guide to Toronto’s Literary Neighbourhoods) is online, however, and in the next day or so I’ll upload materials from the Imagining Toronto course, including the syllabus, lecture schedule, handouts and slides. I’ll also restore the list of literary links to the right sidebar, and bring back various other ancillary bits and pieces. If you notice anything missing or garbled, or any broken links, let me know and I’ll add or fix it up.
Perhaps appropriately, during this period I had occasion to re-read Bruce Powe’s Toronto novel, Outage. Set in Toronto in the late 1980s, shortly after the stock market crash, Outage explores the consequences of excessive technological dependency, not only for individuals but an entire city, even an entire culture. Published in 1995, at a time when everyday users were just beginning to discover the internet, the novel is remarkably prescient in its predictions about what happens to people when the technology they rely on spins out of control. The book offers a fantastic combination of speculative fiction and existential commentary, and it’s definitely worth a read if you are at all interested in the cultural impacts of technology.
As a person who does not use a cell phone and who lives much of her private life in digitally unmediated spaces (or did, until picking up, for the first time ever, a laptop computer a few months ago), it’s a curious, and revealing, read. I’m personally inclined to agree with German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who argued in The Question Concerning Technology that our dependency on contemporary technology reduces us to “standing reserve,” waiting to be “challenged forth.”
The trick, as always, is to manage some kind of balance. Heidegger invokes the classical Greek language of “techne” which meant, “the bringing forth of the true into the beautiful.” In my view, this means that technology must add to, rather than destroy, the beauty of craft and art — and literature.
As the Imagining Toronto project comes back online, I’ll be happy to spend more time dealing with techne rather than technology.
