Too, too perfect

Anthony Smith is a man not afraid to use words like haptic, oneiric and esemplastic in successive paragraphs without wondering whether his readers need to have them explained. Here, in a book based on the 1994 T. S. Eliot lectures, he applies his erudition to one of the knottiest problems posed by the arrival of new computing and communications technology: what effect these may have on the arts, and therefore on our ideas about ourselves.

When the cinema came along, it was regarded by some as a complete and objective recorder of things as they happened. Decades earlier, photography had held the same promise. Now, even the most thoughtless cinemagoers know they are seeing something partial and manufactured, even if the film does not make much use of "special effects".

But we are now entering a world in which complete perfection is possible in artistic representation, since anything that is digital can be reproduced consistently and very cheaply without error. At the same time, the universality of the computer and the telephone line means that the whole idea of "culture" as a separate category of activity may be replaced by a move to something like the divisions observed in ancient and medieval thinking. Then, knowledge of astronomy was thought of as being of the same nature as knowledge of dance or poetry.

As Smith sees it, the emergence of a wide array of new techniques of creating art and entertainment, such as printing, film, sound recording and computers, is less significant than the ever-more-accurate realism of the modern artistic product. Even the cleverest narrator of the Icelandic sagas or The Arabian Nights knows that each listener will form a different image from the words he or she hears, unlike the audience for a film.

Smith points with approval to the Russian Dziga Vertov, an early explorer of film who referred to the camera as a "cinema eye for the purpose of research into the chaos of visual phenomena filling the universe." In other words, the camera constructs reality as well as showing it to us; and each new visual technology stresses a different aspect of experience.

Smith is especially intrigued by virtual reality, because of the way in which the participant becomes, "as it were, the camera as well as the camera operator". At the moment, virtual reality has some way to go as a practical technology, but it offers to open up a vast range of forms of artistic impression. Users will be able to call up and manipulate anything that can be placed in a digital database, including pictures and sound. To remake a film with yourself in a starring role, or to alter a plot line you find irritating, will be only the start of it.

Thus a technology that started out by providing "reality" is likely to turn into a machine for producing its exact opposite. Smith cites science fiction author J. G. Ballard, who points to virtual reality as "the greatest challenge to the human race since the invention of language." The sheer perfection of the reality that can be conjured - you could be the victim in a murder mystery, hacked to death by the axeman, but able to go home afterwards - provokes questions about our identity with which we are ill equipped to cope.

Smith sympathises with anyone who, faced with these possibilities, feels bewildered. But his last chapter, based on a piece first published in The Economist, suggests that there may be a way through the gloom. While some people may choose to isolate themselves in an artificial digital world, others will use the new technology to obtain novel views of a football match, stroll through ancient Greece, or go on a walking holiday carrying a small terminal that will allow one to read any book ever published when one stops for lunch.

The debate is reminiscent of the debate about television. It is true that people spend more hours in front of the television today than anyone would have believed when it was a new medium, but they also spend more time than before in restaurants and pubs (not to mention theme parks), and visit museums more. And, despite the attractions of satellite TV, to get a ticket for any major football match is still expensive. Maybe we will survive the brave new technological future with our humanity intact.

Martin Ince is deputy editor, The THES.