ariana’s Reviews > The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich > Status Update

“During the 1980s Illich also became more and more aware of the transformation in people’s self perception that was taking place in the shadow of new information technologies. ‘The book,’ he wrote, ‘has ceased to be the root metaphor of the age; the screen has taken its place.’ He saw the evidence all around him. People were spending more and more time in virtual, or non-local spaces. Words were losing their depth and becoming plastic elements in a communications code… text was… set a drift on the vast sea of information… [not just in the computer but also] in the genetic text of which many people now assume themselves to be the dictation, and in the myriad other codes — identifiers, barcodes, entry codes, passwords, and so on — that now record and manage people’s comings and goings. Illich became convinced that he was witnessing an historical rupture that went deeper than even his direst predictions…” p. 26