ABSTRACT

Imagine a dark, decaying city in which you encounter a woman so desiccated and apathetic she cannot summon the energy to brush an insect from her cheek. Now, cut to an image of a two-story white house in a pastoral setting. The birds are singing. The sun is shining. God seems to be in his heaven and all’s right with the world. These scenes are not part of a grim, postapocalyptic science fiction film but are from a recent television commercial touting the benefits of a certain brand of home computer. If you buy this computer, then one assumes that you can do all your work at home and avoid personal interaction with the denizens of that dreadful city. A consistent theme of the computer age seems to celebrate an ability to communicate with each other from a distance, even to the extent that we isolate ourselves and avoid all human contact. As students of rhetoric, we should be asking the following question: Have we created the new communications technology in order to contact and keep in touch with people who are very distant from us, or has the new communications technology developed in response to an increasing desire to keep our distance from one another? In other words, to mix some of President Clinton’s favorite metaphors, is the information superhighway a bridge or a moat?