I've been thinking a lot about what kind of relationship Howard Roark, the main character of Rand's The Fountainhead, would have had with modern digital media. On one hand, I guess the Internet could have really helped him all those times when he is looking for clientele and trying to make his work more publicly known so that he could build more buildings, but on the other hand, Howard represents one of the most solitary and cold personalities of just about any book that I've ever read, so I have to wonder how much he would have cared for the social aspect involved in modern digital media. He was never one to really care about what other people thought of him or his work, and he was never one to think much about others or their work, so the idea of "Likes" and +1's and views would likely come off as superficial and pathetic to him. I noticed as I was reading that all of Roark's problematic clients insisted upon big, fancy facades, with useless collonades and superfluous ornamentation, and I feel like Facebook pages and profiles and all that would be, to Roark, simply a digital extension of the ostentatious facades proliferated in Classical architecture. Roark is about the real and the now, the stone beneath his fingers, the grass beneath his feet, the eyes that turn away from his unvarying gaze, and it seems to me that the Internet would be, for him, too immaterial, too fickle, too false.
Rand, on the other hand, would have likely utilized digital media as a way to disseminate her ideas. Leonard Peikoff, the leading Randian philosopher and founder of the Ayn Rand Institute, uses all sorts of modern media to teach about Objectivism: he has online lectures, podcasts, videos, etc., and he encourage those with questions to email him. I actually emailed Peikoff asking him about his thoughts on digital media and The Fountainhead, and though I haven't heard back yet, I'll be interested to see what his thoughts are on the matter... What about you? What do you think?
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