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Has the Internet Transformed Us? Yes and No.

February 28, 2011 by Wes Alwan 7 Comments

This Piece by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker is very good and suitably conflicted concerning complaints about the social effects of technology:

The odd thing is that this complaint, though deeply felt by our contemporary Better-Nevers, is identical to Baudelaire’s perception about modern Paris in 1855, or Walter Benjamin’s about Berlin in 1930, or Marshall McLuhan’s in the face of three-channel television (and Canadian television, at that) in 1965. When department stores had Christmas windows with clockwork puppets, the world was going to pieces; when the city streets were filled with horse-drawn carriages running by bright-colored posters, you could no longer tell the real from the simulated; when people were listening to shellac 78s and looking at color newspaper supplements, the world had become a kaleidoscope of disassociated imagery; and when the broadcast air was filled with droning black-and-white images of men in suits reading news, all of life had become indistinguishable from your fantasies of it. It was Marx, not Steve Jobs, who said that the character of modern life is that everything falls apart.

On the other hand:

What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. The things that have usually lived in the darker recesses or mad corners of our mind—sexual obsessions and conspiracy theories, paranoid fixations and fetishes—are now out there: you click once and you can read about the Kennedy autopsy or the Nazi salute or hog-tied Swedish flight attendants. But things that were once external and subject to the social rules of caution and embarrassment—above all, our interactions with other people—are now easily internalized, made to feel like mere workings of the id left on its own. (I’ve felt this myself, writing anonymously on hockey forums: it is easy to say vile things about Gary Bettman, the commissioner of the N.H.L., with a feeling of glee rather than with a sober sense that what you’re saying should be tempered by a little truth and reflection.) Thus the limitless malice of Internet commenting: it’s not newly unleashed anger but what we all think in the first order, and have always in the past socially restrained if only thanks to the look on the listener’s face—the monstrous music that runs through our minds is now played out loud.

And finally:

For the Internet screen has always been like the palantír in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”—the “seeing stone” that lets the wizards see the entire world. Its gift is great; the wizard can see it all. Its risk is real: evil things will register more vividly than the great mass of dull good. The peril isn’t that users lose their knowledge of the world. It’s that they can lose all sense of proportion. You can come to think that the armies of Mordor are not just vast and scary, which they are, but limitless and undefeatable, which they aren’t.

-- Wes

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Filed Under: Web Detritus Tagged With: philosophy blog, philosophy of technology, philosophy podcast

Comments

  1. Geoff says

    February 28, 2011 at 8:57 pm

    Thanks for the link Wes. I enjoyed that.

    Reply
  2. Wes Alwan says

    March 1, 2011 at 1:19 am

    You’re welcome!

    Reply
  3. Vertical says

    March 1, 2011 at 5:26 am

    I have one objection. He writes that everything in the back of our minds comes to light, as if hidden truths about human nature are being revealed. But that explanation clashes with the obviously hypnotizing effect of the mass-media and Internet, we see what is being shown or read what is being written, we imitate it, and that’s what we crave for by imitation. It’s a big question how these “themes” came around to be widespread, probably they were the themes interested only for the dominant group\class, which means these are not truths about human nature.

    E.g. why high sexualization of our society is the truth hidden before, while Muslim modesty or modest medieval customs in that regard are fishy and there’s something “suppressed” along with them? Why can’t be both artificially created by culturally inducing those patterns of behavior since birth? Changes in culture happen, they happened many times before, and nobody knows which change was truth-revealing. Etc.

    Reply
  4. Ethan Gach says

    March 1, 2011 at 12:38 pm

    Nice find Wes.

    “The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t.”

    This is one thing that people bemoaning the unseating of these mediums never mention: that the relative scarcity and increasing strangness of these forms will probably yeild a new premium. If anything, the mainstreaming of the internet will probably lead to a BETTER appreciation for all the ways in which magazines or books, as disconnected entities (private spaces) allow for forms of intimacy and unfettered imagination not possible for something as interconnected as the Web.

    And I have to agree with Vertical, for all the talk of fracturing and decentralization, the internet seems to have focused our attentions ever more so on listening to, watching, and imitating those at the center. People care more about the President then the Congress, and more about Congress then their state or local legislatures. Who has the most followers on twitter? Or friends on Facebook? Even bloggers, with regard to a given subject, have a lose heirarchy. A handful of prominent bloggers set the tone each day as the rest either reflect on what they’ve written or write thier own ideas in hopes of emulating and imitating their success.

    Reply
  5. Geoff says

    March 1, 2011 at 5:26 pm

    Ethan Gach :
    And I have to agree with Vertical, for all the talk of fracturing and decentralization, the internet seems to have focused our attentions ever more so on listening to, watching, and imitating those at the center. People care more about the President then the Congress, and more about Congress then their state or local legislatures. Who has the most followers on twitter? Or friends on Facebook? Even bloggers, with regard to a given subject, have a lose heirarchy. A handful of prominent bloggers set the tone each day as the rest either reflect on what they’ve written or write thier own ideas in hopes of emulating and imitating their success.

    Ethan,

    Has it not always been the way that most focus goes to the centre? Is the primary difference, perhaps, that in earlier times there were multiple centres? People lived more *locally*, thought more *locally* because of the very real strictures placed on them by their technology and environment. But within their locallity there was still a centre on which to focus. Pharaoh, Priest, King, Lord, Bishop et cetera.

    I think your notion of a Blogger heirachy suggests this. If we think of a community not in terms of space but ideas, then the heirarchy within a subject of interest is a form of that localised focus on the centre. For example, I might know who the influential and central figures are in scepticism, but be totally unaware of who the central figures are within Health and Lifestyle.

    Reply
  6. Ethan Gach says

    March 1, 2011 at 6:18 pm

    I think you’re right, that focus has always been on the center. In that light, the fundamental shift made possible by the internet is to dissolve barriers to those centers.

    Rather than an elite/unwashed breakdown, with those on the inside and outside, there seems to be more of a continuum of steps leading up to the pinnacle of any one of these centers. Rather than just magazines or newspapers, we now have free media (bloggers) who fill all of the imaginable gaps between opinion leaders and everyone else. Youtube videos are a great illustration of this. Something I make with my friends (or more likely my cats) will get uploaded, have the potential to get linked to, re-posted, shared, until it makes its way onto popular blogs, and from their gain visibility and make the leap to costlier outlets like television.

    Now where is this probably more amazing than with regard to academia. Not only do many scholars find it more lucrative to publish their research into more digestible best sellers (where the quality is sometimes, though not always watered down), but it’s becoming easier to access the studies/articles from journals themselves (Google Scholar, JSTOR, etc.)

    Some one blogging over at the Atlantic, I forget who, recently noted that the old economics of Academic Journals no longer make sense. Where as in the past, many of the costs might have been associated with production, it is now easier and more practical to distribute articles digitally to kindles and the like. In addition, while peer-review is still important, I’m at a loss to think of why every unpublished paper wouldn’t eventually makes it way online.

    I’m not familiar with the politics of academia and publication, so I’m sure there is still a hierarchy and much pressure exerted to adhere to certain traditions, it seems inevitable that at the same time as there are more people to spread the information (through links and commentary) there will also be more of it to spread.

    “For example, I might know who the influential and central figures are in scepticism, but be totally unaware of who the central figures are within Health and Lifestyle.”

    That is still true for sure. So while I might be a political junkie, that doesn’t mean I’ll know who’s who in the world of fashion, fitness, etc. At the same time, if I wanted to, I could find this information out very easily by doing some searches and making a couple of bookmarks.

    I guess my main thought is just that there are many more roads leading to Rome than away. So that it’s increasingly hard to hit upon an obscure site and have to backtrack, rather than following it through a series of links to someone with more status/expertise/prestige. For every lateral link (one to a site of comparable visibility) and backward link (to a site of lesser visibility), there are 4 or 5 links to a higher visibility one.

    I’d be interested to see a picture of the internet positioned like a 3D web that showed all of the linkages at a given moment. I’m imagining the hubble telescope like image of a galaxy with trillions of lines running from one star to another, with some stars much larger than others, and perhaps even a few singularities.

    I’ve rambled on and off topic, but anyone know of anything that theorizes about the internet in that kind of metaphor, i.e. comparing data quantity to mass and hyperlink density to gravity?

    Reply
  7. Geoff says

    March 1, 2011 at 7:08 pm

    Ethan Gach :
    I guess my main thought is just that there are many more roads leading to Rome than away. So that it’s increasingly hard to hit upon an obscure site and have to backtrack, rather than following it through a series of links to someone with more status/expertise/prestige. For every lateral link (one to a site of comparable visibility) and backward link (to a site of lesser visibility), there are 4 or 5 links to a higher visibility one.

    That is an important point. For the *newb* in many of these communities there is a funneling process towards the central figures. Interaction is determined to a large extent by established heiracrchies. There is a community orthodoxy which makes it difficult to discover and assess alternative points of view. Very few on the internet seem to be brave enough to link to criticisms or alternatives to their own position other than when it is to lampoon or discredit.

    Often where dissent exists, it is simply argument for the sake of it. Neither side is genuinely interested in discovering the alternative view-point. It is simply competing orthodoxies battling it out like rutting Rhinos.

    Reply

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