When Cyborgs Collide

Nathan Jurgenson was back at Salon last weekend with another, even more vacuous post on the power of Teh Social Media. Though he admits that OWS "is most certainly not an Internet Revolution. Much more than a 'digital' protest, the movement has been fundamentally concerned with taking over geographic space, mobilizing bodies in an area, yelling, walking, breathing, sleeping and doing what physical bodies do", he insists that the "lesson that is playing out over and over is that utilizing both physicality and digitality and the important intersection of the two can effectively mobilize massive numbers of people."

Le duh! "Digitality" is incidental to the communications media being used. Electronic media were originally analog (telegraph, radio, television, videotape), still and motion photography didn't even need electricity to function. If technology had developed in different directions, today's activists might be recording police abuse on analog visual media, or sending messages by fax or analog walkie-talkies; the 140-character parameter of Twitter is not, in itself, more significant than the size of a Post-it note. Digital technology is not key, let alone determining. (Which reminds me, "digital" is not the opposite of "physical.") Would-be technological visionaries, recognizing the limits of digital computers have speculated that the next generation of computers won't be binary or digital. If they're right, then "digitality" would turn out to be a mere phase. What is important is cheap, portable, instant communication.

Jurgenson goes on to talk about "augmented revolution," which turns out to be a link to something he wrote elsewhere, and about "the implosion of atoms and bits into an augmented reality." The technological / scientific ignorance of that phrase (which he evidently considers significant: he also uses it in his "augmented revolution" post) tells a lot about the quality of Jurgenson's thought. Atoms are, of course, everywhere; we are all composed of them, whether we're protesting or not; but they are not imploding, around the OWS protests or elsewhere. (I'm reminded of Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who is delighted and rather puffed up to discover that for forty years he has been speaking prose without knowing it; but also of Jurgenson's claim in his previous post that Twitter and e-mail are "new forms of language-production.") Ditto for bits: Jurgenson might as well say that letters of the alphabet, or Morse-code dots and dashes, are imploding into an augmented reality. It sounds cool, even meaningful, but it isn't. Calling something by a different label doesn't make it different.

Another word that Jurgenson likes is "cyborg," which has indeed been trendy among ambitious academics for a couple of decades. The term was invented in 1960, a portmanteau of "cybernetic" and "organism," with the idea that a human/computer hybrid might be able to survive and function in outer space. Wikepedia traces the concept of the man/machine combination to an 1843 story by Edgar Allan Poe, which "described a man with extensive prostheses." I haven't read it yet, but from the title, "The Man That Was Used Up," he sounds like a forerunner of L. Frank Baum's Tin Man, who as various body parts were cut off replaced them with tin prostheses, until there was no organic part of him left. [P.S. Having read it, I can say that I wasn't far off; it's more of a Mark-Twain-style tall tale than a science fiction story.] If "cyborg" is used to refer to such constructs, then Captain Ahab and Captain Hook would also be cyborgs -- especially the latter, who could have different hooks for different jobs. But then, someone with a crutch, a glass eye, a wig, or platform shoes would be a cyborg too; and if enhancement (technology that extends our capabilities beyond our normal, unaided abilities, like a bow and arrow or a crowbar) is the defining trait, then not only have human beings been cyborgs in this sense since we started making tools, but we are all cyborgs already. In protests, not just someone who uses a bullhorn to address a crowd, but someone who stands on a soapbox in order to be heard is using enhancing technology, and therefore is a cyborg. When your terminology becomes all-inclusive like that, it's not longer useful, or -- I'd argue -- meaningful.

Speaking of meaning, though, Wittgenstein admonished us not to look for the meaning of a word, but for its use. I must confess that I haven't yet read Donna Haraway's influential (or anyway oft-cited) writings on the cyborg, so let's look at how people like Jurgenson are using the concept: "Many of the well-connected protesters-turned-cyborgs can snap photos, shoot videos, organize on Facebook and tweet to the world", he writes. The link is to another webpage whose content he supplied: "Individuals and social groups have always been cyborgs because we have always existed in tandem with technology" -- just as I said earlier. "Today, with the vast proliferation and diffusion of new technologies throughout society, techno-human syntheses occur in more aspects of our lives than ever before." He goes on to speak of the "digital" and the "material" as opposite, if perhaps complementary.

Well, no. "Techno-human syntheses" occur in all aspects of our lives already; I think Jurgenson means something like "high-tech" on the techno- side, technology that looks inorganic, mechanical, artificial, electronic. That's a very narrow view of things; it's a commonplace that human technology was biological from its earliest stages, involving the domestication of animals (which was mirrored by domestication of human beings), the domestication and planned breeding of plants for food and medicines, the String Revolution (nets, cords, ropes, spinning, weaving), the construction of shelters and other buildings from a variety of materials, landscaping, and so on.

Why is inorganic, mechanical, electronic technology so glamorous, at least to a certain mindset? Part of the appeal, I think, is tied to another ancient concern: the desire to escape or "transcend" the earthbound, mortal, material, corruptible aspects of life. Historically this desire is largely associated with males, though no doubt many women share it; it's also associated with religion, though the physical (or "hard," giggle smirk) sciences have taken it on as well. If it's made of steel, or better yet plastic, it won't die or decay, so why not make people out of metal or plastic? Then you'd have enhanced, superior people! Maybe we could upload our personalities into those imperishable inorganic bodies, and we'd be immortal!

I've written before about the popularity of this fantasy in computer science circles. Since then I read an odd book by Isiah Lavender III, Race in American Science Fiction (Indiana, 2011), which takes a similar line. Lavender begins by positing "AI (artificial intelligence), cyborgs, artificial people, and posthumans" as "new racial forms", hoping to imagine "how individuals might newly conceive identity within newly technological worlds" (17). He quotes with approval another writer who claims "The fact remains that technology is rapidly making the concept of the ‘natural’ human being obsolete" (27); the "natural" human being has been "obsolete" since we learned to control fire.

My own thinking diverges here from that of posthumanist scholars in that I consider these new beings as new races. For example, would constructed humans or informational systems be privileged over their human counterparts? Is individual consciousness essential for machine races? How would this machine identity evolve? How should humanity interact with these other beings? How should race exist if the human body cannot be distinguished from a computer simulation or a cybernetic being? Certainly, sf criticism inspires a hotbed of ontological questions in regard to race and racism [27].

In construing "these new beings as new races," Lavender begs the question of what a "race" is. He also seems to take science fiction portrayals of "constructed humans" as some kind of documentary, when they are more likely allegories of differences that have already generated conflict among humanity. For example, in his discussion of Isaac Asimov's classic robot stories, he writes:

Asimov’s robots resonate with the antebellum South’s myth of a happy darkie – a primitive, childlike worker without a soul, incapable of much thought – cared for by his benevolent and wise master. This resonance is hard to ignore. As Edward James has observed in his own critique of Asimov, “The Three Laws restrain robots, just as the slave-owner expected (or hoped) that his black slaves would be restrained by custom, fear and conditioning to obey his every order” (40). Clearly, then, an otherhood reading allows us to consider the historical roots of I, Robot’s cultural bigotry [62].

In my review of Gregory J. E. Rawlins's Slaves of the Machine (MIT, 1997), I wrote about

the faith that on the other side of the next mountain there lives a "race" of natural slaves who are waiting to serve us, their natural masters. They will welcome our lash, set our boots gratefully on their necks, and interpose their bodies between us and danger, knowing that their lives are worth less than ours. Since there is no such natural slave race, the obvious solution is to build one. The question is not whether we can, as scientistic fundamentalists like to think, but whether we should. Rawlins is a bit smarter: he not only recognizes, he stresses that true machine intelligence would not be controllable. But he confidently declares that it's inevitable, which he needs to prove, not assert.

While I was working through Race in American Science Fiction, I reread Asimov's I, Robot, and I think Lavender misrepresents what Asimov was doing. First, his robots are not docile; some are even rebellious. But they're based not on science or technology but on something more like magic: the "positronic brain" which gives them a range of action and response far more complex than anything we can build even now -- and remember that these stories were written between 1940 and 1950, when computers in the real-world were still mainly glorified adding machines. Asimov's robots can form personal loyalties (and enmities), they can Haz a Sad when separated from a beloved owner, they can construct mythologies about their own creation. True, Asimov used tropes from sentimental fiction to make his readers sympathize with them. But they're still machines, not persons.

It's interesting that Lavender (and Edward James) want to see them as people, thinking of them in terms of American racialism, but that means reading them backwards. If the Three Laws of Robotics “restrain robots,” then brakes and steering wheels restrain automobiles – isn’t that slavery? Lavender wants robots to be able to “program themselves” – does he want his own computer to do that? Does he read 2001 as the story of a slave revolt in which HAL fights back against his human masters? Does he want to think of the computer he used to write Race in Science Fiction, or the presses that printed it, as slaves?

When Lavender gets to Artificial Intelligence later in the book, he casts aside all restraint.

Humanity is the beginning for AI. Computers and computer programs are created in the pursuit of knowledge to make the acquisition and retention of information easier ... Additionally, the cognitive capacity of computers continually improves as humanity builds faster, more powerful microchips. The time computers can think, in fact, is upon us. In sf, machines have achieved a state of consciousness, a state in which the computer knows that it is aware and can make judgments through its own experience. This is an ominous scenario to say the least.

Any machine that demonstrates a sense of independent awareness, something that may be perceived as a nascent humanity, causes anxiety in most humans because it is an alien experience akin to the racial one – a white person fearing a black person and vice versa. We think of machines, like the computer, as being simple tools designed to help us in numerous circumstances. Yet, a computer may be a form of artificial intelligence, so the idea is not so simple [193-4].

Along with so much else that is wrong with this book, Lavender begs the question by assuming the personhood / humanity of computers. The "time computers can think" is not, in fact, upon us: it isn't even on the horizon. It's mildly alarming that Lavender confuses what has happened in sf -- that is, in fiction -- with what has happened in the real world. Nor is this a lapse. When he discusses clones on Battlestar Galactica, for example, he writes,

There is strong circumstantial evidence that suggests Cylons possess extrasensory powers such as being prescient, telepathic, or having the gift of astral projection. The cloned copies of one individual that are manufactured and raised together may think alike, thus speeding up communication through some kind of internal wiring that allows for thought projection and ultimately personality trasnsference upon the death of a particular copy. Perhaps the worst [?] consequences of cloning involve the death of any member of a clone group because individual clone personalities are downloaded into new bodies, reintegrated into Cylon society, and no longer have a sense of individual uniqueness ... Regardless, their displays of individual identity, passion, and emotion throughout the story indicate the presence of a soul, something thought to be absent in clones [206-7].

I thought a sense of individual uniqueness was one of those nasty human traits that we’re going to transcend in the posthuman. But notice that Lavender talks about the Cylons as if they actually existed, or represent the real-world results of cloning. There's no reason to believe that cloned human beings would be prescient, telepathic, or have the "gift of astral projection." Nor is there any reason to believe that clones would have different nature than other human beings, any more than identical twins do. And "the presence of a soul, something thought to be absent in clones"? "Thought" by whom, and why do they think something so foolish?

The problems raised by technological "enhancement" of human bodies, or of sufficiently advanced and complex computer "intelligence" seem overrated to me in one sense. (The notion of these changes as "enhancements" is problematic, of course: it echoes the rhetoric of twentieth-century eugenics, which postulated the possibility of producing a superior species or "race" of human beings, on the assumption that Darwinian evolution involves progressive improvement of species.) In another sense, they may turn out to be real, but they won't be novel: human beings have had trouble recognizing the common humanity with other human beings all through history -- not just based on "race" but on sex, class, language, custom, and so on. Some enthusiasts talk as if those conflicts have been resolved, but robots will suddenly present us with new conflicts. Lavender, by contrast, appears to worry that old "racial" conflicts will simply be transferred to the new "races." I'd say we should cross that bridge when we come to it, and work harder on resolving the conflicts we already have.

And it occurs to me: how odd that neither Jurgenson nor Lavender worries about -- or even notices -- an already existent form of artificial life that is widely hated and derided: the corporation.

When Cyborgs Collide

Nathan Jurgenson was back at Salon last weekend with another, even more vacuous post on the power of Teh Social Media. Though he admits that OWS "is most certainly not an Internet Revolution. Much more than a 'digital' protest, the movement has been fundamentally concerned with taking over geographic space, mobilizing bodies in an area, yelling, walking, breathing, sleeping and doing what physical bodies do", he insists that the "lesson that is playing out over and over is that utilizing both physicality and digitality and the important intersection of the two can effectively mobilize massive numbers of people."

Le duh! "Digitality" is incidental to the communications media being used. Electronic media were originally analog (telegraph, radio, television, videotape), still and motion photography didn't even need electricity to function. If technology had developed in different directions, today's activists might be recording police abuse on analog visual media, or sending messages by fax or analog walkie-talkies; the 140-character parameter of Twitter is not, in itself, more significant than the size of a Post-it note. Digital technology is not key, let alone determining. (Which reminds me, "digital" is not the opposite of "physical.") Would-be technological visionaries, recognizing the limits of digital computers have speculated that the next generation of computers won't be binary or digital. If they're right, then "digitality" would turn out to be a mere phase. What is important is cheap, portable, instant communication.

Jurgenson goes on to talk about "augmented revolution," which turns out to be a link to something he wrote elsewhere, and about "the implosion of atoms and bits into an augmented reality." The technological / scientific ignorance of that phrase (which he evidently considers significant: he also uses it in his "augmented revolution" post) tells a lot about the quality of Jurgenson's thought. Atoms are, of course, everywhere; we are all composed of them, whether we're protesting or not; but they are not imploding, around the OWS protests or elsewhere. (I'm reminded of Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who is delighted and rather puffed up to discover that for forty years he has been speaking prose without knowing it; but also of Jurgenson's claim in his previous post that Twitter and e-mail are "new forms of language-production.") Ditto for bits: Jurgenson might as well say that letters of the alphabet, or Morse-code dots and dashes, are imploding into an augmented reality. It sounds cool, even meaningful, but it isn't. Calling something by a different label doesn't make it different.

Another word that Jurgenson likes is "cyborg," which has indeed been trendy among ambitious academics for a couple of decades. The term was invented in 1960, a portmanteau of "cybernetic" and "organism," with the idea that a human/computer hybrid might be able to survive and function in outer space. Wikepedia traces the concept of the man/machine combination to an 1843 story by Edgar Allan Poe, which "described a man with extensive prostheses." I haven't read it yet, but from the title, "The Man That Was Used Up," he sounds like a forerunner of L. Frank Baum's Tin Man, who as various body parts were cut off replaced them with tin prostheses, until there was no organic part of him left. [P.S. Having read it, I can say that I wasn't far off; it's more of a Mark-Twain-style tall tale than a science fiction story.] If "cyborg" is used to refer to such constructs, then Captain Ahab and Captain Hook would also be cyborgs -- especially the latter, who could have different hooks for different jobs. But then, someone with a crutch, a glass eye, a wig, or platform shoes would be a cyborg too; and if enhancement (technology that extends our capabilities beyond our normal, unaided abilities, like a bow and arrow or a crowbar) is the defining trait, then not only have human beings been cyborgs in this sense since we started making tools, but we are all cyborgs already. In protests, not just someone who uses a bullhorn to address a crowd, but someone who stands on a soapbox in order to be heard is using enhancing technology, and therefore is a cyborg. When your terminology becomes all-inclusive like that, it's not longer useful, or -- I'd argue -- meaningful.

Speaking of meaning, though, Wittgenstein admonished us not to look for the meaning of a word, but for its use. I must confess that I haven't yet read Donna Haraway's influential (or anyway oft-cited) writings on the cyborg, so let's look at how people like Jurgenson are using the concept: "Many of the well-connected protesters-turned-cyborgs can snap photos, shoot videos, organize on Facebook and tweet to the world", he writes. The link is to another webpage whose content he supplied: "Individuals and social groups have always been cyborgs because we have always existed in tandem with technology" -- just as I said earlier. "Today, with the vast proliferation and diffusion of new technologies throughout society, techno-human syntheses occur in more aspects of our lives than ever before." He goes on to speak of the "digital" and the "material" as opposite, if perhaps complementary.

Well, no. "Techno-human syntheses" occur in all aspects of our lives already; I think Jurgenson means something like "high-tech" on the techno- side, technology that looks inorganic, mechanical, artificial, electronic. That's a very narrow view of things; it's a commonplace that human technology was biological from its earliest stages, involving the domestication of animals (which was mirrored by domestication of human beings), the domestication and planned breeding of plants for food and medicines, the String Revolution (nets, cords, ropes, spinning, weaving), the construction of shelters and other buildings from a variety of materials, landscaping, and so on.

Why is inorganic, mechanical, electronic technology so glamorous, at least to a certain mindset? Part of the appeal, I think, is tied to another ancient concern: the desire to escape or "transcend" the earthbound, mortal, material, corruptible aspects of life. Historically this desire is largely associated with males, though no doubt many women share it; it's also associated with religion, though the physical (or "hard," giggle smirk) sciences have taken it on as well. If it's made of steel, or better yet plastic, it won't die or decay, so why not make people out of metal or plastic? Then you'd have enhanced, superior people! Maybe we could upload our personalities into those imperishable inorganic bodies, and we'd be immortal!

I've written before about the popularity of this fantasy in computer science circles. Since then I read an odd book by Isiah Lavender III, Race in American Science Fiction (Indiana, 2011), which takes a similar line. Lavender begins by positing "AI (artificial intelligence), cyborgs, artificial people, and posthumans" as "new racial forms", hoping to imagine "how individuals might newly conceive identity within newly technological worlds" (17). He quotes with approval another writer who claims "The fact remains that technology is rapidly making the concept of the ‘natural’ human being obsolete" (27); the "natural" human being has been "obsolete" since we learned to control fire.

My own thinking diverges here from that of posthumanist scholars in that I consider these new beings as new races. For example, would constructed humans or informational systems be privileged over their human counterparts? Is individual consciousness essential for machine races? How would this machine identity evolve? How should humanity interact with these other beings? How should race exist if the human body cannot be distinguished from a computer simulation or a cybernetic being? Certainly, sf criticism inspires a hotbed of ontological questions in regard to race and racism [27].

In construing "these new beings as new races," Lavender begs the question of what a "race" is. He also seems to take science fiction portrayals of "constructed humans" as some kind of documentary, when they are more likely allegories of differences that have already generated conflict among humanity. For example, in his discussion of Isaac Asimov's classic robot stories, he writes:

Asimov’s robots resonate with the antebellum South’s myth of a happy darkie – a primitive, childlike worker without a soul, incapable of much thought – cared for by his benevolent and wise master. This resonance is hard to ignore. As Edward James has observed in his own critique of Asimov, “The Three Laws restrain robots, just as the slave-owner expected (or hoped) that his black slaves would be restrained by custom, fear and conditioning to obey his every order” (40). Clearly, then, an otherhood reading allows us to consider the historical roots of I, Robot’s cultural bigotry [62].

In my review of Gregory J. E. Rawlins's Slaves of the Machine (MIT, 1997), I wrote about

the faith that on the other side of the next mountain there lives a "race" of natural slaves who are waiting to serve us, their natural masters. They will welcome our lash, set our boots gratefully on their necks, and interpose their bodies between us and danger, knowing that their lives are worth less than ours. Since there is no such natural slave race, the obvious solution is to build one. The question is not whether we can, as scientistic fundamentalists like to think, but whether we should. Rawlins is a bit smarter: he not only recognizes, he stresses that true machine intelligence would not be controllable. But he confidently declares that it's inevitable, which he needs to prove, not assert.

While I was working through Race in American Science Fiction, I reread Asimov's I, Robot, and I think Lavender misrepresents what Asimov was doing. First, his robots are not docile; some are even rebellious. But they're based not on science or technology but on something more like magic: the "positronic brain" which gives them a range of action and response far more complex than anything we can build even now -- and remember that these stories were written between 1940 and 1950, when computers in the real-world were still mainly glorified adding machines. Asimov's robots can form personal loyalties (and enmities), they can Haz a Sad when separated from a beloved owner, they can construct mythologies about their own creation. True, Asimov used tropes from sentimental fiction to make his readers sympathize with them. But they're still machines, not persons.

It's interesting that Lavender (and Edward James) want to see them as people, thinking of them in terms of American racialism, but that means reading them backwards. If the Three Laws of Robotics “restrain robots,” then brakes and steering wheels restrain automobiles – isn’t that slavery? Lavender wants robots to be able to “program themselves” – does he want his own computer to do that? Does he read 2001 as the story of a slave revolt in which HAL fights back against his human masters? Does he want to think of the computer he used to write Race in Science Fiction, or the presses that printed it, as slaves?

When Lavender gets to Artificial Intelligence later in the book, he casts aside all restraint.

Humanity is the beginning for AI. Computers and computer programs are created in the pursuit of knowledge to make the acquisition and retention of information easier ... Additionally, the cognitive capacity of computers continually improves as humanity builds faster, more powerful microchips. The time computers can think, in fact, is upon us. In sf, machines have achieved a state of consciousness, a state in which the computer knows that it is aware and can make judgments through its own experience. This is an ominous scenario to say the least.

Any machine that demonstrates a sense of independent awareness, something that may be perceived as a nascent humanity, causes anxiety in most humans because it is an alien experience akin to the racial one – a white person fearing a black person and vice versa. We think of machines, like the computer, as being simple tools designed to help us in numerous circumstances. Yet, a computer may be a form of artificial intelligence, so the idea is not so simple [193-4].

Along with so much else that is wrong with this book, Lavender begs the question by assuming the personhood / humanity of computers. The "time computers can think" is not, in fact, upon us: it isn't even on the horizon. It's mildly alarming that Lavender confuses what has happened in sf -- that is, in fiction -- with what has happened in the real world. Nor is this a lapse. When he discusses clones on Battlestar Galactica, for example, he writes,

There is strong circumstantial evidence that suggests Cylons possess extrasensory powers such as being prescient, telepathic, or having the gift of astral projection. The cloned copies of one individual that are manufactured and raised together may think alike, thus speeding up communication through some kind of internal wiring that allows for thought projection and ultimately personality trasnsference upon the death of a particular copy. Perhaps the worst [?] consequences of cloning involve the death of any member of a clone group because individual clone personalities are downloaded into new bodies, reintegrated into Cylon society, and no longer have a sense of individual uniqueness ... Regardless, their displays of individual identity, passion, and emotion throughout the story indicate the presence of a soul, something thought to be absent in clones [206-7].

I thought a sense of individual uniqueness was one of those nasty human traits that we’re going to transcend in the posthuman. But notice that Lavender talks about the Cylons as if they actually existed, or represent the real-world results of cloning. There's no reason to believe that cloned human beings would be prescient, telepathic, or have the "gift of astral projection." Nor is there any reason to believe that clones would have different nature than other human beings, any more than identical twins do. And "the presence of a soul, something thought to be absent in clones"? "Thought" by whom, and why do they think something so foolish?

The problems raised by technological "enhancement" of human bodies, or of sufficiently advanced and complex computer "intelligence" seem overrated to me in one sense. (The notion of these changes as "enhancements" is problematic, of course: it echoes the rhetoric of twentieth-century eugenics, which postulated the possibility of producing a superior species or "race" of human beings, on the assumption that Darwinian evolution involves progressive improvement of species.) In another sense, they may turn out to be real, but they won't be novel: human beings have had trouble recognizing the common humanity with other human beings all through history -- not just based on "race" but on sex, class, language, custom, and so on. Some enthusiasts talk as if those conflicts have been resolved, but robots will suddenly present us with new conflicts. Lavender, by contrast, appears to worry that old "racial" conflicts will simply be transferred to the new "races." I'd say we should cross that bridge when we come to it, and work harder on resolving the conflicts we already have.

And it occurs to me: how odd that neither Jurgenson nor Lavender worries about -- or even notices -- an already existent form of artificial life that is widely hated and derided: the corporation.

The Production of Ignorance

I'm almost caught up on topics I've wanted to write about, though some have just slid away and been forgotten. This one will almost bring me up to date. For this week.

Last Sunday one Nathan Jurgenson published an article on Salon claiming that Noam Chomsky is "wrong about Twitter." His chief source was an interview Chomsky gave to a fanboy blogger last March, though he did link to a 1997 article by Chomsky on the mainstream media and to the Wikipedia page covering Manufacturing Consent, which Chomsky coauthored with the economist and media analyst Ed Herman. A lot of people tend to forget Herman's contribution. (My ghod, Herman is three years older than Chomsky; for some reason I took it for granted that he was the younger of the two.)

So, what does Chomsky get wrong about Twitter? Quoth Jurgenson,

“Text messaging, Twitter, that sort of thing […] is extremely rapid, very shallow communication,” he said to interviewer Jeff Jetton. Chomsky said. “[I] think it erodes normal human relations. It makes them more superficial, shallow, evanescent.” Chomsky expanded on this point in another interview last December with Figure/Ground Communication, a site devoted to technology and society.

“Well, let’s take, say, Twitter,” he said. “It requires a very brief, concise form of thought and so on that tends toward superficiality and draws people away from real serious communication […] It is not a medium of a serious interchange.”

Maybe I should not read too much into these statements, but “off-the-cuff” remarks often reveal much more than we might assume. They illuminate Chomsky’s larger view of media and, most importantly, highlight the larger trend of established first-world intellectuals dismissing digital communications as less deep or worthwhile than the means of communication that they prefer.

A number of commenters, including me, jumped all over Jurgenson's claims. Some appealed to authority (How dare a young upstart like you criticize an honored thinker like Chomsky?); others bitched about "relativism" and the decline of punctuation in our post-modern society. Several pointed to other "off-the-cuff remarks" Chomsky made in another interview Jurgenson cited: "... in the existing society – which has very high concentrations of power – then access to social media can be a positive force. It has negative aspects too in my opinion, but in general it is fairly positive." Chomsky's well aware of the uses of the Internet generally and of social media in particular; he's been talking about them for years in connection with political organizing, as far back as the 90s if I remember right.

Nothing Jurgenson says really answers, let alone refutes, Chomsky's negative remarks about Twitter. He cites claims that "nonwhites are much more likely to connect to the Web, communicate and create content on mobile phones than are whites." Maybe so, but this says nothing about the quality of nonwhites' communication using that technology, unless Jurgenson is assuming that nonwhites are naturally, automatically deeper than whites. But even that is dignifying him too much; Jurgenson is mainly concerned to show that Chomsky is old and white, so he couldn't possibly understand what the cool young people are doing with the new media. And Tahrir Square! The Arab Spring!

In fact, in the debate about whether rapid and social media really are inherently less deep than other media, there are compelling arguments for and against. Yes, any individual tweet might be superficial, but a stream of tweets from a political confrontation like Tahrir Square, a war zone like Gaza or a list of carefully-selected thinkers makes for a collection of expression that is anything but shallow. Social media is like radio: It all depends on how you tune it.

"In fact," Chomsky did not say that "rapid and social media are inherently less deep than other media." He explicitly said that they have positive uses. Nor does Jurgenson offer any evidence that "a stream of tweets from a political confrontation like Tahrir Square" would be deep. He seems to assume that they must be, because Tahrir Square was like, world-historic and fateful and people-of-colorful. I suppose that the tweets that came from Tahrir Square were on the order of "Mom, I'm safe, I'll be home by midnight," "The police are coming from over there, so we're all moving over here," "Where are you?" "We need more people to help fight against Mubarak's thugs." Such communication is valuable, human, moving, important, but it isn't deep. How much discussion of aims and goals and methods in the Arab Spring has taken place via Twitter, and how much was done face to face in the crowds? If social media were so world-changingly effective, there would have been no need to gather in Tahrir Square at all -- the revolution could have been virtual. Jurgenson not only misunderstands Chomsky, he misunderstands social media.

I have my own doubts about some of Chomsky's remarks. He does, as I've noticed before, have little appreciation for popular culture, which has more to do with his science-nerd temperament than anything else. But from what I've read, most human use of language isn't deep, even when it's face to face. But again, that doesn't make it less valuable. We use language as a form of grooming; that may be how it first evolved. "Hi! How are you? I'm so glad to see you! What's new? Have you heard from your daughter? I love you, mommy! Are you there? Yes, I'm here," and so on. Probably very little language use, comparatively speaking, has been for the purpose of writing philosophy or science or great literature. If most text messages and tweets are this sort of grooming, that doesn't count against them.

A more serious criticism of electronic communication media, and from what Chomsky says I think it's what really concerns him, is that it's a tool for the atomization of the populace, separating us from each other, which is what the rulers want. (He refers in the interview to the value of the local post office as a community gathering place, though the gathering was probably as much for mutual grooming, in the sense I just mentioned, as for exchanging information. Once more: that doesn't mean it wasn't important.) I've argued before that individualism, far from producing bold nonconformists who will stand up to authority, produces isolates who are easily beaten back into line. It's those 'primitive' collectivist societies that produce people who overthrow dictatorships and stand up to water cannons. Occupy Wall Street, for all that it uses electronic communication media, is built on collective, face-to-face interaction, and if it succeeds, it will be because of that, not because of Twitter. (Like many people, Jurgenson seems to think that electronic / digital / instant communication is the point of activism; but for activists such communication is a medium -- not an end but a means for bringing people together face-to-face.)

I've also noticed that most of the young computer-savvy people I've known aren't really that computer-savvy at all. Yes, they grew up with the damn things, so they're comfortable with them, but that's not a sign of greater intelligence or advanced consciousness. (There's a lot of essentialism in the celebration of the various computer generations.) But they learned only what they needed to know: how to work a game controller, how to log in to Facebook or Myspace, how to compose a message in textspeak. As a result they are stunned when they find out that their Facebook page or e-mail or text messages aren't private. (Wait a minute, isn't it totally a federal crime to open someone's e-mail, just like snailmail? That is so gay.) They know how to upload a memory card full of blurred party photos to Facebook, but it never occurs to them to edit them, let alone that the picture of them deepthroating a beerbong might be seen by their Mom or a potential employer. They know how to Google themselves and Rick Santorum (giggle), but not how to check the authenticity of that awesome Ghandi [sic] quotation they saw the other day. Just about everybody I worked with, regardless of their age, was amazed when I closed the timecard program's window with Alt-F4 instead of using the mouse. Keyboard equivalents? Who knew? Only us old farts, I guess.

Jurgenson, who incidentally is "a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Maryland", concludes:

Chomsky, a politically progressive linguist, should know better than to dismiss new forms of language-production that he does not understand as “shallow.” This argument, whether voiced by him or others, risks reducing those who primarily communicate in this way as an “other,” one who is less fully human and capable. This was Foucault’s point: Any claim to knowledge is always a claim to power. We might ask Chomsky today, when digital communications are disqualified as less deep, who benefits?

First of all, Twitter and e-mail are not "new forms of language-production": they're media for transmitting language that has already been produced. Jurgenson is just waving around technical sounding jargon he doesn't understand. Second and more important, Chomsky hasn't "disqualified" anything. Certainly he hasn't said that the messages that can be sent with these media are unimportant, let alone that the people who send those messages aren't important or shouldn't be taken seriously.

One commenter on Jurgenson's piece essayed a backhanded defense of Chomsky thusly:

Well, okay, granted, Chomsky didn't know in March that the Arab Spring and OWS were going to happen. But couldn't a man with his understanding of communications have foreseen uses like that for Twitter and texting?

Chomsky didn't have to foresee such uses. The people who are out of touch are those who think that the use of cellphones and texting to coordinate demonstrations was invented in Egypt in January 2011. As I noted above, Chomsky has been fielding questions about the uses of the Internet for political organizing for at least a decade. Not that that has anything to do with anyone's "understanding of communications," which is something else: it has to do with knowledge of current and recent events. (Chomsky's linguistic work has little to do with the theory of communication anyway, it's a different area of the field.) The smartalecks who are putting down Chomsky here are not nearly as smart as they like to think; but that's usually true of self-appointed elites. With friends like this commenter, who needs enemas?

Foregoing the shift key for some reason or other, Jurgenson made at least one reply to the comments:

as i stated in the article, and something the vast of the commentators missed, i'm not really debating if digital communications are shallow, but instead using the claim to dismiss them as a lesser form of communications. so, i think we agree. but, as we both know, these claims of depthlessness are so often coupled with viewing the "shallow" form as lesser. and all i am pointing out is that claim to knowledge is a claim to power.

The writer Nick Carr answered wryly:

Hmm. What are you saying here - that the bottom-up horde of commenters lacks the depth to read you correctly? That sounds like you're making a top-down claim to knowledge, and hence to power. Or am I misreading your comment?

Jurgenson didn't answer that one, but Carr is right: Jurgenson is playing games that have more to do with power struggles in academia and 'disqualifying' one's opponents and competitors than with serious discourse. He cites Foucault in his article, but I suspect it's a safe bet he's never read Gayatri Spivak's ovarian essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?", which among other things catches Foucault in his own colonialist toils. I mean, honestly, Nate, Foucault is like so Seventies -- Eighties, if you can't read him in French.

Jurgenson also linked to his fellow blogger and "cyborg" (?) P.J. Rey, who's even more fatuous than he. Rey wrote a defense of Jurgenson's claim to knowledge and power by accusing others of making claims to knowledge and power:

Jurgenson offered an epistemological critique of Chomsky, arguing that Chomsky’s dismissal of social media as superficial fits a long-standing pattern of affluent white academics maintaining their privileged position in society by rejecting media that is accessible to non-experts. Jurgenson pointedly asks “who benefits when what you call “normal” human relationships get to be considered more “deep” and meaningful?” Chomsky is seemingly ignorant to the use of Twitter and other networks in shaping the Arab Spring and the #Occupy movement; or the fact that young people are voraciously sharing and consuming important news stories through these same networks; or that Blacks and Hispanics were early adopters of smartphones; or that gay men have been pioneers in geo-locative communication. In many cases, historically-disadvantaged groups have used social media technology to find opportunities previously foreclosed to them. For these folks, social media is hardly trivial.

An epistemological critique? Whoa, the demons also believe, and tremble! Since everything Rey writes here is irrelevant at best and false at worst, as I've already shown, there's no need to rebut it at length. Of course Chomsky "is seemingly ignorant of the use of Twitter and other networks in shaping the Arab Spring and the #Occupy movement," because he's totally old and gnarly and disqualifies the struggles of the young and hip -- which is why he's often spoken about them. "... or that gay men have been pioneers in geo-locative communication"; given Chomsky's temperamental aversion to discourse on sexuality, I think he can be spared a Powerpoint presentation on Grindr for finding hot man2man Action. Once again, Rey exhibits the worst of the academic tendency to mistake jargon for substance, and the medium for the message. (Isn't McLuhan passe by now? I seem to recall Raymond Williams demolishing him somewhere; I'll have to check.) With fearless epistemological critics like Jurgenson and Rey, Wall Street and the Corporate Consensus can rest easy. Luckily, they're irrelevant.

The Production of Ignorance

I'm almost caught up on topics I've wanted to write about, though some have just slid away and been forgotten. This one will almost bring me up to date. For this week.

Last Sunday one Nathan Jurgenson published an article on Salon claiming that Noam Chomsky is "wrong about Twitter." His chief source was an interview Chomsky gave to a fanboy blogger last March, though he did link to a 1997 article by Chomsky on the mainstream media and to the Wikipedia page covering Manufacturing Consent, which Chomsky coauthored with the economist and media analyst Ed Herman. A lot of people tend to forget Herman's contribution. (My ghod, Herman is three years older than Chomsky; for some reason I took it for granted that he was the younger of the two.)

So, what does Chomsky get wrong about Twitter? Quoth Jurgenson,

“Text messaging, Twitter, that sort of thing […] is extremely rapid, very shallow communication,” he said to interviewer Jeff Jetton. Chomsky said. “[I] think it erodes normal human relations. It makes them more superficial, shallow, evanescent.” Chomsky expanded on this point in another interview last December with Figure/Ground Communication, a site devoted to technology and society.

“Well, let’s take, say, Twitter,” he said. “It requires a very brief, concise form of thought and so on that tends toward superficiality and draws people away from real serious communication […] It is not a medium of a serious interchange.”

Maybe I should not read too much into these statements, but “off-the-cuff” remarks often reveal much more than we might assume. They illuminate Chomsky’s larger view of media and, most importantly, highlight the larger trend of established first-world intellectuals dismissing digital communications as less deep or worthwhile than the means of communication that they prefer.

A number of commenters, including me, jumped all over Jurgenson's claims. Some appealed to authority (How dare a young upstart like you criticize an honored thinker like Chomsky?); others bitched about "relativism" and the decline of punctuation in our post-modern society. Several pointed to other "off-the-cuff remarks" Chomsky made in another interview Jurgenson cited: "... in the existing society – which has very high concentrations of power – then access to social media can be a positive force. It has negative aspects too in my opinion, but in general it is fairly positive." Chomsky's well aware of the uses of the Internet generally and of social media in particular; he's been talking about them for years in connection with political organizing, as far back as the 90s if I remember right.

Nothing Jurgenson says really answers, let alone refutes, Chomsky's negative remarks about Twitter. He cites claims that "nonwhites are much more likely to connect to the Web, communicate and create content on mobile phones than are whites." Maybe so, but this says nothing about the quality of nonwhites' communication using that technology, unless Jurgenson is assuming that nonwhites are naturally, automatically deeper than whites. But even that is dignifying him too much; Jurgenson is mainly concerned to show that Chomsky is old and white, so he couldn't possibly understand what the cool young people are doing with the new media. And Tahrir Square! The Arab Spring!

In fact, in the debate about whether rapid and social media really are inherently less deep than other media, there are compelling arguments for and against. Yes, any individual tweet might be superficial, but a stream of tweets from a political confrontation like Tahrir Square, a war zone like Gaza or a list of carefully-selected thinkers makes for a collection of expression that is anything but shallow. Social media is like radio: It all depends on how you tune it.

"In fact," Chomsky did not say that "rapid and social media are inherently less deep than other media." He explicitly said that they have positive uses. Nor does Jurgenson offer any evidence that "a stream of tweets from a political confrontation like Tahrir Square" would be deep. He seems to assume that they must be, because Tahrir Square was like, world-historic and fateful and people-of-colorful. I suppose that the tweets that came from Tahrir Square were on the order of "Mom, I'm safe, I'll be home by midnight," "The police are coming from over there, so we're all moving over here," "Where are you?" "We need more people to help fight against Mubarak's thugs." Such communication is valuable, human, moving, important, but it isn't deep. How much discussion of aims and goals and methods in the Arab Spring has taken place via Twitter, and how much was done face to face in the crowds? If social media were so world-changingly effective, there would have been no need to gather in Tahrir Square at all -- the revolution could have been virtual. Jurgenson not only misunderstands Chomsky, he misunderstands social media.

I have my own doubts about some of Chomsky's remarks. He does, as I've noticed before, have little appreciation for popular culture, which has more to do with his science-nerd temperament than anything else. But from what I've read, most human use of language isn't deep, even when it's face to face. But again, that doesn't make it less valuable. We use language as a form of grooming; that may be how it first evolved. "Hi! How are you? I'm so glad to see you! What's new? Have you heard from your daughter? I love you, mommy! Are you there? Yes, I'm here," and so on. Probably very little language use, comparatively speaking, has been for the purpose of writing philosophy or science or great literature. If most text messages and tweets are this sort of grooming, that doesn't count against them.

A more serious criticism of electronic communication media, and from what Chomsky says I think it's what really concerns him, is that it's a tool for the atomization of the populace, separating us from each other, which is what the rulers want. (He refers in the interview to the value of the local post office as a community gathering place, though the gathering was probably as much for mutual grooming, in the sense I just mentioned, as for exchanging information. Once more: that doesn't mean it wasn't important.) I've argued before that individualism, far from producing bold nonconformists who will stand up to authority, produces isolates who are easily beaten back into line. It's those 'primitive' collectivist societies that produce people who overthrow dictatorships and stand up to water cannons. Occupy Wall Street, for all that it uses electronic communication media, is built on collective, face-to-face interaction, and if it succeeds, it will be because of that, not because of Twitter. (Like many people, Jurgenson seems to think that electronic / digital / instant communication is the point of activism; but for activists such communication is a medium -- not an end but a means for bringing people together face-to-face.)

I've also noticed that most of the young computer-savvy people I've known aren't really that computer-savvy at all. Yes, they grew up with the damn things, so they're comfortable with them, but that's not a sign of greater intelligence or advanced consciousness. (There's a lot of essentialism in the celebration of the various computer generations.) But they learned only what they needed to know: how to work a game controller, how to log in to Facebook or Myspace, how to compose a message in textspeak. As a result they are stunned when they find out that their Facebook page or e-mail or text messages aren't private. (Wait a minute, isn't it totally a federal crime to open someone's e-mail, just like snailmail? That is so gay.) They know how to upload a memory card full of blurred party photos to Facebook, but it never occurs to them to edit them, let alone that the picture of them deepthroating a beerbong might be seen by their Mom or a potential employer. They know how to Google themselves and Rick Santorum (giggle), but not how to check the authenticity of that awesome Ghandi [sic] quotation they saw the other day. Just about everybody I worked with, regardless of their age, was amazed when I closed the timecard program's window with Alt-F4 instead of using the mouse. Keyboard equivalents? Who knew? Only us old farts, I guess.

Jurgenson, who incidentally is "a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Maryland", concludes:

Chomsky, a politically progressive linguist, should know better than to dismiss new forms of language-production that he does not understand as “shallow.” This argument, whether voiced by him or others, risks reducing those who primarily communicate in this way as an “other,” one who is less fully human and capable. This was Foucault’s point: Any claim to knowledge is always a claim to power. We might ask Chomsky today, when digital communications are disqualified as less deep, who benefits?

First of all, Twitter and e-mail are not "new forms of language-production": they're media for transmitting language that has already been produced. Jurgenson is just waving around technical sounding jargon he doesn't understand. Second and more important, Chomsky hasn't "disqualified" anything. Certainly he hasn't said that the messages that can be sent with these media are unimportant, let alone that the people who send those messages aren't important or shouldn't be taken seriously.

One commenter on Jurgenson's piece essayed a backhanded defense of Chomsky thusly:

Well, okay, granted, Chomsky didn't know in March that the Arab Spring and OWS were going to happen. But couldn't a man with his understanding of communications have foreseen uses like that for Twitter and texting?

Chomsky didn't have to foresee such uses. The people who are out of touch are those who think that the use of cellphones and texting to coordinate demonstrations was invented in Egypt in January 2011. As I noted above, Chomsky has been fielding questions about the uses of the Internet for political organizing for at least a decade. Not that that has anything to do with anyone's "understanding of communications," which is something else: it has to do with knowledge of current and recent events. (Chomsky's linguistic work has little to do with the theory of communication anyway, it's a different area of the field.) The smartalecks who are putting down Chomsky here are not nearly as smart as they like to think; but that's usually true of self-appointed elites. With friends like this commenter, who needs enemas?

Foregoing the shift key for some reason or other, Jurgenson made at least one reply to the comments:

as i stated in the article, and something the vast of the commentators missed, i'm not really debating if digital communications are shallow, but instead using the claim to dismiss them as a lesser form of communications. so, i think we agree. but, as we both know, these claims of depthlessness are so often coupled with viewing the "shallow" form as lesser. and all i am pointing out is that claim to knowledge is a claim to power.

The writer Nick Carr answered wryly:

Hmm. What are you saying here - that the bottom-up horde of commenters lacks the depth to read you correctly? That sounds like you're making a top-down claim to knowledge, and hence to power. Or am I misreading your comment?

Jurgenson didn't answer that one, but Carr is right: Jurgenson is playing games that have more to do with power struggles in academia and 'disqualifying' one's opponents and competitors than with serious discourse. He cites Foucault in his article, but I suspect it's a safe bet he's never read Gayatri Spivak's ovarian essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?", which among other things catches Foucault in his own colonialist toils. I mean, honestly, Nate, Foucault is like so Seventies -- Eighties, if you can't read him in French.

Jurgenson also linked to his fellow blogger and "cyborg" (?) P.J. Rey, who's even more fatuous than he. Rey wrote a defense of Jurgenson's claim to knowledge and power by accusing others of making claims to knowledge and power:

Jurgenson offered an epistemological critique of Chomsky, arguing that Chomsky’s dismissal of social media as superficial fits a long-standing pattern of affluent white academics maintaining their privileged position in society by rejecting media that is accessible to non-experts. Jurgenson pointedly asks “who benefits when what you call “normal” human relationships get to be considered more “deep” and meaningful?” Chomsky is seemingly ignorant to the use of Twitter and other networks in shaping the Arab Spring and the #Occupy movement; or the fact that young people are voraciously sharing and consuming important news stories through these same networks; or that Blacks and Hispanics were early adopters of smartphones; or that gay men have been pioneers in geo-locative communication. In many cases, historically-disadvantaged groups have used social media technology to find opportunities previously foreclosed to them. For these folks, social media is hardly trivial.

An epistemological critique? Whoa, the demons also believe, and tremble! Since everything Rey writes here is irrelevant at best and false at worst, as I've already shown, there's no need to rebut it at length. Of course Chomsky "is seemingly ignorant of the use of Twitter and other networks in shaping the Arab Spring and the #Occupy movement," because he's totally old and gnarly and disqualifies the struggles of the young and hip -- which is why he's often spoken about them. "... or that gay men have been pioneers in geo-locative communication"; given Chomsky's temperamental aversion to discourse on sexuality, I think he can be spared a Powerpoint presentation on Grindr for finding hot man2man Action. Once again, Rey exhibits the worst of the academic tendency to mistake jargon for substance, and the medium for the message. (Isn't McLuhan passe by now? I seem to recall Raymond Williams demolishing him somewhere; I'll have to check.) With fearless epistemological critics like Jurgenson and Rey, Wall Street and the Corporate Consensus can rest easy. Luckily, they're irrelevant.

Who Does the Internet Belong To?

(There's nothing new under the sun ...)

Roy Edroso of alicublog has been writing for the Village Voice for about a year now, I think. He's a good writer, and I mostly respect him even when I disagree with him, as I often do. He's a very valuable chronicler of the right wing of the blogosphere -- I'm very glad he reads Ann Althouse, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, and the like so I don't have to. His latest piece, "Social Media Ruined the Internet", is a bit of a departure from his Voice writings and even from his cultural posts at alicublog. He sums it up with some irony:

In brief, the tech revolution has brought us some clear benefits (e.g., LOLcats, free porn), but when it comes to thinking and communicating, it's been a net loss. (Hoists snifter) Perhaps you disagree?

Well, yes and no. In the column itself he writes that the Internet

has evolved to the point where it can't do much more for you. Which is to say, it isn't going to get any better: it will add features, but will basically remain the same tool: a super TV that you can talk back to.

Ah, talking back -- now, there was an innovation: Social Media, the last significant piece in the internet evolution, and beginning of the end of the dream.

I should mention that I -- like a lot of people, I think -- use "the Internet" rather loosely, to refer not only to the World Wide Web, which is the text/image/audio/video interface of today, but to early incarnations that were generally text-only, like Usenet, Fidonet, Compuserve, and America Online, but which enabled people to connect from their homes, over telephone lines at first, and interact with people elsewhere: potentially with everyone who had access to those networks. I'm talking here about the mid-1980s, when I bought my first Commodore 64 and, soon after, a 300-baud modem.

Far fewer people in those days had computers, and the computers they had were slower and smaller in terms of memory and storage, but it was tremendously exciting to exchange messages, even chat in real time, with people on the American coasts, and occasionally on the other side of the world. I had a Compuserve account for a while, but dropped it when I got my first $90 bill for a month's activity. I never got onto America Online, but I later met people who did, and learned from gay men that AOL and its competitors were very handy cruising and socializing sites. So I'm confused by Roy Edroso's claim that social networking is a recent, even the latest Internet development. It's been there for over two decades.

Edroso is also critical of blogs, somewhat ironic for a blogger, as he admits. Which doesn't mean he's wrong.

It turned out that the internet wasn't an advanced, processing brain, after all, nor an agent of meaningful change. In the political realm, it has revealed only had one enduring value: as a propaganda tool.

This really baffles me. No one who knew anything about computers or their potential could have believed that the Internet was "an advanced, processing brain", could they? Actually, I guess they did; and for most citizens, including early personal-computer users, their notion of the potential of computers came mainly from the Terminator movies. The fantasy that Artificial Intelligence is just around the corner, followed closely by the Obsolescence of Homo Sapiens, is still with us, like predictions of the Rapture. But it's every bit as bogus: the Internet, let alone any individual computer, is not an agent of anything.

A few people have become better informed about national issues because of it, but far more have been made to know to a certainly that the Congressional health care plan includes "death panels," that Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya who will turn America socialist, and that his wife is Marie Antoinette. We admit our own part in this, for we would rather focus on the latest batshit crazy thing Michele Bachmann said than on the details of the East Anglia email scandal (which has proved for many that "global warming is a fraud").

But is this really new, or specific to the Internet? True, the Net enables people to disseminate their writings more widely and quickly and cheaply than print or broadcasting did, but the US has a long colorful history of batshit crazy commentators talking over the radio, spitting out cheaply printed or mimeographed broadsides (that very word embodies a long history of printed political ranting) whose content spread widely. As one commenter at the Voice pointed out, "the Federalists didn't have e-mail in 1800, but their attacks on Jefferson were every bit as scurrilous and widespread as the right's smears."

Churches were also good vehicles for influencing communities. In the 1970s and 1980s I worked with Pentecostals who passed around photocopied tracts about how the communist World Council of Churches was scheming to impose a One World Government that would take all references to the saving Blood of Jesus Christ from all Bibles, and make everyone wear the Mark of the Beast or they wouldn't be allowed to buy or sell. Some of this was recycled from Hal Lindsey's infamous The Late Great Planet Earth, but Lindsey was recycling material he'd picked up from other writers and preachers. Word of mouth has killed more than a few people in this country and elsewhere, stirring up lynch mobs without a microchip or a fiber optic involved. "Thanks to blogs," Edroso wrote, "our political discourse now reads like Red Channels mixed with an Andrew Breitbart monologue." I seem to remember it was always like that. Maybe the Net has made things bigger, faster, and worser, but I still think the difference is one of degree, not of kind.

I've long noticed a strain of snobbism in the ambivalence many educated people (including me) feel about the spread of computers to Joe Sixpack, the Unwashed Masses, and the Housewife.

The non-news Top Twitter Trending Topics of the year include Michael Jackson, Harry Potter, and American Idol. Perhaps you feel as if you became better informed on these subjects because of Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Digg. More likely, you were just more inundated with them; you got more video and audio clips, saw more trailers and red-carpet photos, and read more gossip and reiterations of the same bare facts about them. What did social media teach you about Michael Jackson, besides how big a deal it was that he was dead?

And as for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc, we can hardly tell you anything you haven't discovered yourself. You have XXX friends; you have XX invitations; so-and-so likes this; view all X comments. These are wonderful tools for shut-ins, of which they have made us all.

Well, yeah, but again the difference is at most one of degree. Supermarket tabloids, the Sports section, Hollywood publicity magazines and entertainment infomercials have long been with us, and many Americans have always paid more attention to the doings of the stars than to politics. The Black Sox scandal of 1919 disillusioned many ("Say it ain't so, Joe!"), but was it more important than the Red Scare and the plight of World War I veterans? I know I have just uttered blasphemy and sacrilege, but I'm an all-purpose infidel and I'm used to it. As for Facebook et al., as I mentioned earlier they are new mainly by comparison to the telephone and the telegraph.

Edroso sums up:

The real force behind blogs, Twitter, and all other social media is its users, which is to say, practically everyone of the internet. And this is the saddest part of the demise of the internet as anything other than a microwave for the mind: we are the ones who killed it. And no matter how feverishly we click and scroll and friend and block, nothing we do can bring it back to life.

I think that reports of the Internet's death are somewhat exaggerated. As I commented,

As I recall the early cheerleading for the Internet, it was like most cheerleading for new or "new" technology: partly corporate marketing blather (part of the point was to convince people that every American must not only have their own computer, but a superfast, superadvanced computer on which to file recipes and write e-mail) and partly technogeek masturbation (technology will save the world! or at least I need to have a personal superconducting supercomputer to write code and play Myst on, which will change the world and give every American a faster, more powerful computer to file recipes and write e-mail on, and that will save the world). And there's always been an uneasy feeling among the geek elites that they didn't want to share this wonderful new technology with housewives and couch potatoes who would just waste it on e-mail, filing recipes and analyzing sports stats instead of inventing new computer languages and more advanced role playing games, as God intended. We should also remember America Online, Compuserve, and the like, which also functioned as social sites and provided conduits for netlore that previously had been lower-tech Xeroxlore and low-tech handcopied folklore.

And I disagree with [another commenter]. The dumbification of, say, movie criticism predates the Internet. It is connected to the corporatization of journalism, but then movie reviewing originated as part of Hollywood marketing, and remains so to this day. See Jonathan Rosenbaum's Movie Wars (yeah, it's like totally a print publication, so no link) on the way that, as a serious film critic/reviewer moves up the prestige chain in print media, the space he or she is allotted shrinks. This has to do more with conscious strategies of keeping it simple, by the upper echelons who think of their markets as stupid and uninterested in thinking, whether their markets fit the image, than with any inherent limitation of print. And while yeah, Sturgeon's Law applies to Internet content as much as anywhere else, the Internet also makes it possible for writers to stretch out with less concern about space limitations or what the Advertisers (like the movie companies) will think. The problem is just finding the good stuff, but then it's always been true. "Of the writing of books there is no end." "Another d----d fat square book! Scribble scribble scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?"

Just about everyone, it seems, complains about how much junk there is on the Internet. The fault is always the fault of someone else -- Them, the Dumb Ones, and so on. I confess I often feel that way when I'm on Myspace with its "pimped" profiles, so overloaded with graphics and music that they are literally unreadable, and utterly tacky and devoid of all taste. Still, all that gives their users and proprietors as much pleasure as customizing their personal copies of Emacs gives many computer programmers. (Or used to give -- I'm out of touch.) And if it weren't for the Great Unwashed out there with their Nascar obsessions, what would the elite wannabe's have to play Ain't It Awful over? It doesn't hurt me, or stop me from writing and posting what I want to write and post. Nor does it stop anyone else. If it were decided to bar Teh Stupid from the Net, who would be the gatekeepers? Who would watch the watchers?

Who Does the Internet Belong To?

(There's nothing new under the sun ...)

Roy Edroso of alicublog has been writing for the Village Voice for about a year now, I think. He's a good writer, and I mostly respect him even when I disagree with him, as I often do. He's a very valuable chronicler of the right wing of the blogosphere -- I'm very glad he reads Ann Althouse, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, and the like so I don't have to. His latest piece, "Social Media Ruined the Internet", is a bit of a departure from his Voice writings and even from his cultural posts at alicublog. He sums it up with some irony:

In brief, the tech revolution has brought us some clear benefits (e.g., LOLcats, free porn), but when it comes to thinking and communicating, it's been a net loss. (Hoists snifter) Perhaps you disagree?

Well, yes and no. In the column itself he writes that the Internet

has evolved to the point where it can't do much more for you. Which is to say, it isn't going to get any better: it will add features, but will basically remain the same tool: a super TV that you can talk back to.

Ah, talking back -- now, there was an innovation: Social Media, the last significant piece in the internet evolution, and beginning of the end of the dream.

I should mention that I -- like a lot of people, I think -- use "the Internet" rather loosely, to refer not only to the World Wide Web, which is the text/image/audio/video interface of today, but to early incarnations that were generally text-only, like Usenet, Fidonet, Compuserve, and America Online, but which enabled people to connect from their homes, over telephone lines at first, and interact with people elsewhere: potentially with everyone who had access to those networks. I'm talking here about the mid-1980s, when I bought my first Commodore 64 and, soon after, a 300-baud modem.

Far fewer people in those days had computers, and the computers they had were slower and smaller in terms of memory and storage, but it was tremendously exciting to exchange messages, even chat in real time, with people on the American coasts, and occasionally on the other side of the world. I had a Compuserve account for a while, but dropped it when I got my first $90 bill for a month's activity. I never got onto America Online, but I later met people who did, and learned from gay men that AOL and its competitors were very handy cruising and socializing sites. So I'm confused by Roy Edroso's claim that social networking is a recent, even the latest Internet development. It's been there for over two decades.

Edroso is also critical of blogs, somewhat ironic for a blogger, as he admits. Which doesn't mean he's wrong.

It turned out that the internet wasn't an advanced, processing brain, after all, nor an agent of meaningful change. In the political realm, it has revealed only had one enduring value: as a propaganda tool.

This really baffles me. No one who knew anything about computers or their potential could have believed that the Internet was "an advanced, processing brain", could they? Actually, I guess they did; and for most citizens, including early personal-computer users, their notion of the potential of computers came mainly from the Terminator movies. The fantasy that Artificial Intelligence is just around the corner, followed closely by the Obsolescence of Homo Sapiens, is still with us, like predictions of the Rapture. But it's every bit as bogus: the Internet, let alone any individual computer, is not an agent of anything.

A few people have become better informed about national issues because of it, but far more have been made to know to a certainly that the Congressional health care plan includes "death panels," that Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya who will turn America socialist, and that his wife is Marie Antoinette. We admit our own part in this, for we would rather focus on the latest batshit crazy thing Michele Bachmann said than on the details of the East Anglia email scandal (which has proved for many that "global warming is a fraud").

But is this really new, or specific to the Internet? True, the Net enables people to disseminate their writings more widely and quickly and cheaply than print or broadcasting did, but the US has a long colorful history of batshit crazy commentators talking over the radio, spitting out cheaply printed or mimeographed broadsides (that very word embodies a long history of printed political ranting) whose content spread widely. As one commenter at the Voice pointed out, "the Federalists didn't have e-mail in 1800, but their attacks on Jefferson were every bit as scurrilous and widespread as the right's smears."

Churches were also good vehicles for influencing communities. In the 1970s and 1980s I worked with Pentecostals who passed around photocopied tracts about how the communist World Council of Churches was scheming to impose a One World Government that would take all references to the saving Blood of Jesus Christ from all Bibles, and make everyone wear the Mark of the Beast or they wouldn't be allowed to buy or sell. Some of this was recycled from Hal Lindsey's infamous The Late Great Planet Earth, but Lindsey was recycling material he'd picked up from other writers and preachers. Word of mouth has killed more than a few people in this country and elsewhere, stirring up lynch mobs without a microchip or a fiber optic involved. "Thanks to blogs," Edroso wrote, "our political discourse now reads like Red Channels mixed with an Andrew Breitbart monologue." I seem to remember it was always like that. Maybe the Net has made things bigger, faster, and worser, but I still think the difference is one of degree, not of kind.

I've long noticed a strain of snobbism in the ambivalence many educated people (including me) feel about the spread of computers to Joe Sixpack, the Unwashed Masses, and the Housewife.

The non-news Top Twitter Trending Topics of the year include Michael Jackson, Harry Potter, and American Idol. Perhaps you feel as if you became better informed on these subjects because of Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Digg. More likely, you were just more inundated with them; you got more video and audio clips, saw more trailers and red-carpet photos, and read more gossip and reiterations of the same bare facts about them. What did social media teach you about Michael Jackson, besides how big a deal it was that he was dead?

And as for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc, we can hardly tell you anything you haven't discovered yourself. You have XXX friends; you have XX invitations; so-and-so likes this; view all X comments. These are wonderful tools for shut-ins, of which they have made us all.

Well, yeah, but again the difference is at most one of degree. Supermarket tabloids, the Sports section, Hollywood publicity magazines and entertainment infomercials have long been with us, and many Americans have always paid more attention to the doings of the stars than to politics. The Black Sox scandal of 1919 disillusioned many ("Say it ain't so, Joe!"), but was it more important than the Red Scare and the plight of World War I veterans? I know I have just uttered blasphemy and sacrilege, but I'm an all-purpose infidel and I'm used to it. As for Facebook et al., as I mentioned earlier they are new mainly by comparison to the telephone and the telegraph.

Edroso sums up:

The real force behind blogs, Twitter, and all other social media is its users, which is to say, practically everyone of the internet. And this is the saddest part of the demise of the internet as anything other than a microwave for the mind: we are the ones who killed it. And no matter how feverishly we click and scroll and friend and block, nothing we do can bring it back to life.

I think that reports of the Internet's death are somewhat exaggerated. As I commented,

As I recall the early cheerleading for the Internet, it was like most cheerleading for new or "new" technology: partly corporate marketing blather (part of the point was to convince people that every American must not only have their own computer, but a superfast, superadvanced computer on which to file recipes and write e-mail) and partly technogeek masturbation (technology will save the world! or at least I need to have a personal superconducting supercomputer to write code and play Myst on, which will change the world and give every American a faster, more powerful computer to file recipes and write e-mail on, and that will save the world). And there's always been an uneasy feeling among the geek elites that they didn't want to share this wonderful new technology with housewives and couch potatoes who would just waste it on e-mail, filing recipes and analyzing sports stats instead of inventing new computer languages and more advanced role playing games, as God intended. We should also remember America Online, Compuserve, and the like, which also functioned as social sites and provided conduits for netlore that previously had been lower-tech Xeroxlore and low-tech handcopied folklore.

And I disagree with [another commenter]. The dumbification of, say, movie criticism predates the Internet. It is connected to the corporatization of journalism, but then movie reviewing originated as part of Hollywood marketing, and remains so to this day. See Jonathan Rosenbaum's Movie Wars (yeah, it's like totally a print publication, so no link) on the way that, as a serious film critic/reviewer moves up the prestige chain in print media, the space he or she is allotted shrinks. This has to do more with conscious strategies of keeping it simple, by the upper echelons who think of their markets as stupid and uninterested in thinking, whether their markets fit the image, than with any inherent limitation of print. And while yeah, Sturgeon's Law applies to Internet content as much as anywhere else, the Internet also makes it possible for writers to stretch out with less concern about space limitations or what the Advertisers (like the movie companies) will think. The problem is just finding the good stuff, but then it's always been true. "Of the writing of books there is no end." "Another d----d fat square book! Scribble scribble scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?"

Just about everyone, it seems, complains about how much junk there is on the Internet. The fault is always the fault of someone else -- Them, the Dumb Ones, and so on. I confess I often feel that way when I'm on Myspace with its "pimped" profiles, so overloaded with graphics and music that they are literally unreadable, and utterly tacky and devoid of all taste. Still, all that gives their users and proprietors as much pleasure as customizing their personal copies of Emacs gives many computer programmers. (Or used to give -- I'm out of touch.) And if it weren't for the Great Unwashed out there with their Nascar obsessions, what would the elite wannabe's have to play Ain't It Awful over? It doesn't hurt me, or stop me from writing and posting what I want to write and post. Nor does it stop anyone else. If it were decided to bar Teh Stupid from the Net, who would be the gatekeepers? Who would watch the watchers?