There are exactly two media for thought which we know we can use well: oral culture and writing. Writing is better: more permanent, more adaptable, richer, deeper, subtler, with a longer memory. Written culture is continuous across the five thousand years that separate us from Egypt and Sumer; because of writing we remember Egypt and Sumer, something no oral culture could ever do. Like everyone in my family - starting from a grand-uncle universally called Munshi sahib, ``Master Scribe'' - I was raised to be part of the written culture, a citizen of the Commonwealth of Letters.

Unfortunately, both oral and written culture are dying. They are being driven out, in a brute, vulgar-Darwinist manner, by the electronic cultures. Both are failing to reproduce: like some inverse cuckoo, the electronic cultures steal their young.

Perhaps in a few thousand years there will be ``something worth watching,'' something which could stand with mathematics or the Illiad or even an honest ballad without blushing. Humans are clever and a thousand years is a long time. In the meanwhile the electronic media will remain utterly passive experiences, replacing imagination and intellect with the ability to swallow other people's illusions raw. In the meanwhile, we suckle at, in the words of the poet, the glass teat. In the meanwhile, there are no more citizens, no more poets, no more nomads, but only drones, tools, schemers. In the meanwhile, there is a culture - that is, there are people - without history or foresight, coherence or continuity, spontaneity or judgement. In the meanwhile,

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness, and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

The only exceptions to this that I can see are computers, more especially computer networks. Unlike movies or TV or radio or whatnot, they do seem to let you use genuinely human talents - like imagination and intellect. Perhaps, as an enthusiast has written, that the real mind-expanders to come out of the 1960s were not drugs but personal computers. The gods know drugs aren't. The net has the rudiments of a culture already - silly, yes; boneheadedly stupid, sometimes; polluted with the excreta of the other electronic cultures, alas yes. But here, at least, the vision of Possibility is widespread, and perhaps even justified, and those alone would be worth supporting.

It would be a shame if the net left behind the treasures of the written culture. A disaster, in fact, and possibly a tragedy. In my own small way I'm trying to keep this from happening.