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The importance of a scientific work, as the German mathematician David Hilbert once observed, can be measured by the number of previous publications it makes superfluous to read. Scientists and technologists dare not wait for their current journals.
They must study "pre-prints" of articles and use the telephone to be sure that their work has not been made obsolete by what somebody else did this morning.
The Republic of Technology is a world of obsolescence. Our characteristic printed matter is not a deathless literary work but today's newspaper that makes yesterday's newspaper worthless. Old objects simply become secondhand—to be ripe for the next season's recycling. In this world the great library is apt to seem not so much a treasurehouse as a cemetery. A Louis Sullivan building is torn down to make way for a parking garage. Progress seems to have become quick, sudden and wholesale.
Most novel of all is our changed attitude toward change. Now nations seem to be distinguished not by their heritage or their stock of monuments (what was once called their civilization), but by their pace of change. Rapidly "developing" nations are those that are most speedily obsolescing their inheritance. While it took centuries or even millenniums to build a civilization, the transformation of an "underdeveloped" nation can be accomplished in mere decades.
THE NEW CONVERGENCE. The supreme law of the Republic of Technology is convergence, the tendency for everything to become more like everything else. Now the distinction is seldom made between nations that are "civilized" and those that are "uncivilized." Today, when we rely on the distinction between the "developed" and the "underdeveloped" or "developing" countries, we see the experience of all peoples converging. The common standard enables us to measure the rate of convergence statistically—by G.N.P., by per capita annual income and by rates of growth. Everyone, we assume, can participate in the newly shared experience. A person need not be learned, or even literate, to share the fruits of technology. While the enjoyment of printed matter is restricted to those who can read, anybody can get the message from a television screen. The converging forces of everyday experience are both sublingual and translingual. People who never could have been persuaded to read Goethe will eagerly drive a Volkswagen.
The great literature that brings some people together also builds barriers. Literary classics may nourish chauvinism and create ideologies. Wars tend to reenforce national stereotypes and to harden ideologies. When the U.S. entered World War I, its schools ceased teaching German. Beethoven and Wagner were taboo. Still, at that very moment, American military research teams were studying German technology. Today, while Indira Gandhi restricts American newsmen and American publications, she desperately tries to make the Indian technology more like the American. Technology dilutes and dissolves ideology.