The new target of professional dyspeptics has become the consolidation of the book industry, a concern that actually presupposes the vitality of literacy and the importance of publishing. Large publishers have indeed been consolidating, but that is because technology and changes in retailing have been a boon to small houses at the expense of the old dinosaurs. The course of publishing may have taken Postman, Birkerts, and other pessimists by surprise, but their own views would have shocked self-appointed cultural stewards of the past. From the rise of the popular book in the late 18th century until the advent of TV, the concern of the intelligentsia was not that too few people were reading too few books. It was that too many people had learned how to read, books had become too affordable, and a mass reading public with bad taste was destroying the quality of cultural life.
Publishing is technology.
Indeed, it is a threat, though not to society, creativity, or the individual. It's a threat to the closed class of cultural stewards, who correctly perceive that every publishing advance undermines their power. For philosopher Manuel De Landa, such technology is serving humanism, because it is obviously a catalyst for community. Yet last December, a linguistics professor named John L. Locke issued an apocalyptic warning. In his book, Awash in All These Words , Locke claimed that e-mail is making us inarticulate, and worse.