Long before the spinning of the World Wide Web, as I read articles about digital libraries and hypertext, I hoped that these developments would bring about a new age of thought, feeling, and literacy. I was wrong. For many people, the Web has become not a college library, not a gallery and museum, but a backyard fence for gossip.
Even a fence might be fine if an endless variety of people could lean on it, to share some of the world's complexity, but instead I have noticed a relentless desire for simplification.
Whether people apply the structure of abstracted and schematized wolf packs to the complexities of human character, to end up writing about simplified "alpha males" or "beta females" as if these artificial categories could explain anything about our lives, or whether people reduce the mystery and fascination of a woman down to a mere number -- "She's an eight!" -- so much interaction on the Web has become a flight from complexity, a refusal to laugh and cry at just how beautifully messed-up we are as communities, countries, human beings.
Beyond the Web, we can find antidotes to simplification, cures that have long existed but are often disregarded in Web discussions. Personal experience is one cure, science is another, but I can think of something equally powerful.
Art is created for many reasons, often reasons hard to define, but one of its many benefits is a recognition and celebration of human complexity. Art reveals to us that human beings are bigger on the inside, more convoluted on the outside, than the Web often admits. Art can make demands on us, not through difficulty or lack of accessibility, but because art can steer us away from reduction.
In our complicated lives, art's reminders of just how much more complicated we are can be disturbing, perhaps even terrifying, but that is one of art's greatest beauties. We are not simplified diagrams; we are people, and people need art.
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