When the Whole Earth
Catalog was founded by Stewart Brand in 1968, Americans were on the verge of a
major technological paradigm shift in American culture. Stewart Brand’s purpose
of the catalog illustrates this shift perfectly: “We are as gods and might as
well get used to it. So far, remotely done power and glory – as via government,
big business, formal education, church – has succeeded to the point where gross
obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of
intimate, personal power is developing – power of the individual to conduct his
own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share
his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are
sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog” (Dresser “Building a Smart
Society”). Americans were shifting away from technologies that embodied values
of centralization, control, and of mass society, and they were beginning to
consume technologies that embodied and empowered the values of the individual.
Specifically, the people growing up with the mainframe computer in the 1950s
and 60s were beginning to center their lives on the values of individualism,
creativity, and youth culture with the introduction of personal computing in
the 1970s, with cell phones in the 1980s, and with the rise of social media in
the early 2000s. Jimmy Carter spoke about this major shift in the values of
society when he warned Americans in his famous “Crisis of Confidence” speech in
1979 that Americans were beginning to lose confidence in institutions in a time
when Americans were most vulnerable (Dresser “Crisis of Confidence in Civil
Society”). Today, Americans, on the one hand, have turned to the Internet to
come together to face climate change, to establish online communities of social
healing, and to engage with diverse information and people who challenge their
politics about climate change. But on the other hand, social technologies filter
people into their own individual spheres of information and detach people from
the truth about the effects of climate change, a truth which climate scientists
are trying to convey. This is an important theme in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel,
Flight Behavior: as characters like
Dellarobia, Dovey, and Preston turn towards social technologies to understand
the truth about climate change and to feel more connected, they become isolated
from their local community and family. Therefore, Kingsolver’s novel, Flight Behavior, represents the concerns
that she and her readers have about technology and American culture when the
novel was written in 2012. Specifically, in this essay, I will argue that Kingsolver
uses many of the values that Stewart Brand, personal computing, and the Whole
Earth Catalog promoted and embodied to illustrate how the current social technologies and personal
computing devices she uses in her novel challenge her readers to think about
how the Internet and social technologies have shaped American culture and have
shifted American values by relocating social-healing communities in the real
world to the online world; by broadening people’s varying views about
environmental issues like climate change; and by allowing individuals to escape
the climate change crisis (thesis statement).
One way that Kingsolver illustrates
in Flight Behavior how social
technologies have shaped American culture is that she argues that these
technologies have diminished the social capital; have decreased the social self-healing
power of churches, schools, and other local communities; and in addition, these
technologies have relocated social healing in real-world communities to the
online world. When Gunnar Myrdal wrote An
American Dilemma in 1944, he argued that institutions such as schools and
churches provide “social self-healing that applies to the type of society we
call democracy” (Myrdal 80). For Myrdal, institutions produced social healing
because these institutions are locally-oriented, but they have the broader
picture in mind. Specifically, Myrdal stated that “institutional structures in
their operation show an accommodation to local and temporary interests and
prejudices . . . As institutions they
are, however, devoted to certain broad ideals” (Myrdal 80). Myrdal strongly
believed, at the time he wrote An
American Dilemma in 1944 when America was becoming more centralized and
subsumed by the mass society during World War II and the Cold War era, that it
would be better for people to come together in a large institution to collectively
decide for the social good of the community than a lone individual would decide
on their own. In Kingsolver’s novel, readers see very few instances where
characters experience social self-healing in churches and schools. For example,
school was one of the few agents of social healing for Dellarobia.
Specifically, Dellarobia was always good at English, she was encouraged to take
the ACT exam, and she was the only person who did take this exam in her school.
Thus, school gave her the confidence to talk to scientists such as Ovid Byron
and apply for the job as Byron’s assistant. School freed her from the situation
she was in to take the job. For Dellarobia, school increased the value she
placed in other people. Hence, Kingsolver and Myrdal, despite writing in two
different technological regimes, would agree that social institutions/communities
can bring people together and can increase social wealth.
However, going from the era of
mainframe computers to the era of personal computers to today’s era of
pocket-sized devices, Kingsolver would largely argue that Myrdal’s theory of
social healing is not necessarily being diminished by social technologies like
the smartphone, which allows individuals to access the Internet at any time and
at any place. But rather, personal computing is relocating social healing from
the physical world of neighborhoods, schools, and churches to virtual
communities like chat rooms, Facebook, Google, YouTube, and other virtual
spaces of connecting with others. When Kingsolver wrote this novel in 2012, Americans
were increasingly going online, civic participation was declining, and church
attendance was falling rapidly. During the Great Recession of 2008 to
2010, Princeton historian Daniel Rodgers
wrote about this decline in civic participation in his article, “Economics in
an Age of Fracture,” when he said that
the “ability to imagine spheres of collective solidarity – class, neighborhood,
or the common good-shrank…” (Rodgers 2). At a time when many Americans were
still recovering from the Great Recession,
Kingsolver wrote Flight Behavior with
many of Daniel Rodgers’ thoughts about the rise of microeconomics in mind to
argue how neighborhoods, schools, and the common good were not agents of social
healing for Dellarobia because these institutions trapped her within the trauma
of the community. For example, she was good at English, but she never did well
in math or science because she was taught by a football coach. And, although she took the ACT exam, she did
not go to college, which limited her options of escaping her rural community. In
this sense, Feathertown is a place of social trauma for Dellarobia, a place
where she has little ownership of her life and identity because of the
schooling she received.
Therefore, a key theme in
Kingsolver’s novel is that the reason why many people today are not able to
cope with the aftermath of the Great Recession and disasters like Hurricane
Katrina or Hurricane Sandy despite years of technological advancement is that
social-healing institutions are envisioning solutions for a collective society.
But in reality, personal computing and the Internet have further isolated
individuals into their own private spheres of information just like Stewart
Brand envisioned. In the novel, Dellarobia flocks to the Internet to find
social healing and to learn the facts of climate change. For Dellarobia, the
Internet opens up new sources of information that schooling was not able to
provide. For the people of Feathertown, before social media and the Internet,
there was no way to escape the social trauma in a local community because just
as Kathryn Marie Dudley wrote in Debt and
Dispossession, social trauma “is part and parcel of a culture in which
members of the community are empowered to ignore – and profit from – the
suffering of their neighbor, even when that suffering is no secret and right
next door” (Dudley 131). But, as Kingsolver illustrated in her novel, the
Internet has allowed individuals to connect better with each other at the
expense of ignoring the collective society and the social trauma that Dudley
argues people experience in real-world communities. For example, when
Dellarobia met Preston’s classmate, Josefina, and her family, Dellarobia “felt
abashed for the huge things she didn’t know. Mountains collapsing on people.
Tonight she and Preston would go over to Hester’s and get on the computer
together . . . . Which, to be honest, was what the daily news amounted to. You
could feel more decent watching it when the victims weren’t sitting on your
sofa” (Kingsolver 102-103). Rather than getting information about the monarch
butterflies from the school or directly from Josefina’s family, Dellarobia
found it more comforting and less traumatic to seek knowledge and news about
the butterflies from Google. This is one example of how Kingsolver shows her
readers how people today are relocating social-healing communities online. That
is, when Kingsolver wrote this book in 2012, she expressed her concern that as
people become more connected to their technologies like the Internet, to their androids and blackberries, and to
tools like Google, they become less engaged and empathetic in face-to-face
conversations with actual people to receive information and stories about
climate change. As more people go online to escape the social trauma of the collective
society that Dudley described and filter their information through
individualized searches via Google, the more distant they become from the
effects of climate change and from the people directly around them.
Although Kingsolver warns her
readers that personal, social technologies are causing people to lose their confidence
in people for social healing and for retrieving information about climate
change, Kingsolver also uses social technologies in a positive way to show how
these tools have shaped American culture in the 21st century by
broadening people’s perspectives on environmental issues and by challenging
people to rethink their own politics and attitudes about climate change. In
Kingsolver’s novel, the best example of how the Internet has helped broaden
Americans’ attitudes towards science is when Dr. Ovid Byron arrives in
Feathertown to observe the butterflies. When Byron first arrived in
Feathertown, “there were two worlds here, behaving as if their own was all that
mattered. With such to reluctance to converse, one with the other. Practically
without a common language (Kingsolver 152). This is one of the most important
quotes in the entire novel to understand because it represents why people,
especially in rural areas, have been so resistant to acting on climate change. Specifically,
how Kingsolver describes the people of Feathertown, the scientists in the
novel, and their views of each other illustrates to her readers how scientists
throughout history have generally lacked the communication ability to speak
with the general public and how the general public usually does not listen to
the scientists who communicate to them. Despite this distrust of science and
scientists that has developed over time and because of the famous “Climategate”
incident in November 2009 in Copenhagen that solidified people’s distrust in
climate scientists, social media tools like YouTube have made it easier for
scientists to broaden the conversation on climate change (Dresser “Learning
from Volcanoes, Bombs, and Computers”). Specifically, Kingsolver uses Ovid
Byron’s YouTube interview with news reporter, Tina, to challenge her readers to
break free from their own opinions about climate change just as Dellarobia
broke free from the politics and conservative values of Feathertown. Just like
how Ovid Byron’s YouTube rant engaged Dellarobia and Feathertown with Byron’s politics, Kingsolver’s novel shows
how Stewart Brand’s promotion of personal computing technologies in the late 20th
century and social technologies in the 21st century have shaped
American culture by making the culture of information retrieving more
individualistic in the age of the Internet. But at the same time, the Internet
is allowing people to be open to diverse ideas, even if those ideas seem to go
against their own values, beliefs, and attitudes towards science.
So, just as Kingsolver expresses grave concern
over the individualistic aspects of the Internet and how they can filter an
individual’s search for information to reflect that individual’s own beliefs
about climate change, Kingsolver challenges her readers to look at social
technologies for the benefit of the global community. For example, after the Byron-Tina video was
uploaded to YouTube, “Dovey had texted hourly updates on the number of views:
hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands. Whatever qualms people had about
scientists, they were thrilled to watch one rip into an ice-queen newscaster of
some repute . . . This is what science looks like” (Kingsolver 374-375). That
is, Dellarobia and the people of Feathertown were divided on whether or not
climate change was actually taking place. Kingsolver uses the character of Ovid
Byron to argue that this debate in traditional media is not science because
scientists, over time, have developed a consensus on climate change that the
earth is indeed getting warmer and that humans are the main contributor
(Dresser “Learning from Volcanoes, Bombs, and Computers”). In the novel, Ovid Byron states that “we have sorted
ourselves as the calm, educated science believers and the scrappy, hotheaded
climate deniers” (Kingsolver 321). This is an important point because where
traditional media have divided individuals into two sides to debate climate
change’s existence, the Internet has become a space of multiple viewpoints,
stories, and informational sources for not debating the issue, but rather, has
become a space for sites like 350.org
that are organizing global movements to figure out how to solve the climate
problem. In other words, if there are enough people using social technologies
to fight the challenges of climate change, then behaviors and attitudes towards
this issue will change in society.
Kingsolver warned her readers in 2012 that now is not the time to “debate the
existence of the falls,” but it is time to connect with one another to
understand what should be done (Kingsolver 367). Dellarobia found it difficult
to change Feathertown’s attitudes and behaviors towards climate change, but social
technologies help facilitate these changes at the individual level and help
individuals feel connected to a global society.
Towards the end of Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver
stated that “information is all we have . . . . Everyone chooses . . . . A
person can face up to a difficult truth, or run away from it” (Kingsolver 322).
This quote is very significant because it represents the technological age
people are living in today and at the time Kingsolver wrote this book in 2012.
When Stewart Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, the catalog was an
alternative information source that embodied values of the individual decision
maker, of the young people, and that broke away from the values of the Great
Society (Dresser “Building a Smart Society”)
Stewart Brand’s vision of the Whole Earth Catalog of empowering the
individual with individual technologies so that individual Americans can shape
their own behaviors, cultural values, and environment is a major theme in
Kingsolver’s novel and is a vision that is still alive today with the limitless
information on the Internet. Brand’s vision in the Whole Earth Catalog can be
summed up with one final scene from Flight
Behavior. The scene is when Dellarobia pulled out a smartphone from her
coat pocket and gave it to Preston. Preston “pulled off a glove with his teeth
immediately revealed a knowledge of things…: how to turn it on, touch the tiny
icons, brush the screen to move the pictures around. How to reach into the
river of all knowledge and pull out your own darn fish” (Kingsolver 424-425).
This quote illustrates the major technological paradigm shift that has taken
place since the 1970s with Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech and with the
introduction of personal computing. That is, the technological advancements
since the 1970s like “bus architecture,” “MS-DOS,” personal computers, cell
phones, the Internet, social media, and other media technologies have given
Americans social solidarity and freedom to decide and shape their own culture,
shape their own identities, shape their own truths about climate change, and
shape their own individual lives (Dresser “Building a Smart Society”). But at
the same time, the movement of groups to the Internet allows Americans to
escape the climate crisis faced by society as individuals live in their own
hyperlinked information spheres filtered by their individual search choices.
Therefore, it is significant to point out the underlying message that
Kingsolver has for her readers about how personal computing, the Internet, and
social technologies influence American culture: when we reach into our pockets
to access a world of information on the Internet, we are connected with a world
defined by risk and feel less lonely in a world made more vulnerable because of
events like Hurricane Sandy in 2012. However, the deep irony of climate change
is that since the 1970s, Americans, on the one hand, have built a technological
regime where even individuals in rural communities can free themselves from the
drudgery of society. But on the other hand, individuals have become more
reliant on social technologies for retrieving facts, information, and truths
about climate change and ignore the information, warnings, and stories from
actual people, like Dellarobia, and actual scientists, like Dr. Byron, who come
and go into their waking lives.
References
Dresser, Todd.
“Building a Smart Society.” Department of History of Science and Technology.
University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis. 3 May 2013. Lecture.
Dresser, Todd.
“Crisis of Confidence in Civil Society.” Department of History of Science and
Technology. University of
Minnesota, Minneapolis. 15 April 2013. Lecture.
Dresser, Todd.
“Learning from Volcanoes, Bombs, and Computers.” Department of History of
Science and Technology.
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 22 April 2013. Lecture.
Dudley, Kathryn
Marie. Debt and Dispossession: Farm Loss
in America’s Heartland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Print.
Kingsolver,
Barbara. Flight Behavior. New York:
HarperCollins, 2012. Print.
Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and
Modern Democracy. New York: Harper & Row,
1944. Print.
Rodgers, Daniel.
“Economics in an Age of Fracture.” The
Chronicle of Higher Education 9 January 2011: n. pag. Print.
