When in doubt, most cultural conservatives and like-minded folk blame technology (and rappers) for a lot of things. (So I guess hip hop blogs like Nah Right? must drive them particularly craaaazy.) Sometimes, as much I hate to admit it, they have a point. But not with the current anti-Internet tidal wave most recently found in an article written by Nicholas Carr of the Atlantic called “Is Google making us stupid?” and a new series of articles in the New York Times called “The Future of Reading” described on their site as “a series of articles that will look at how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read.” If you were wondering, we can end the questioning right now: NO, the Internet is not making your stupider, but it’s not making you smarter either. Though I obviously think that the Internet has made profound changes in everyday life and beyond for most of the world, I still think a smart/stupid mutually exclusive dichotomy is a missing the point. (And didn’t they read Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil in college? The key word being: BEYOND.)
This wave of reactionary thinking regarding the Internet, specifically what people call the Web 2.0, echoes the arguments of a book that came out a little while ago called The Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting our Economy by Andrew Keen, in which the Internet is credited for ruining the modern imagination, critical thinking and also culture at-large. Funny, because these are kind of the reasons why I love it. Well, let me qualify that…I think that Keen and Carr, and others like them, are very much guilty of a slew of things, only one of which is their age, and generational mis-understanding. More than that, which you can’t really fault them for, they are guilty of holding a rather crude, though widespread view of the relation of technologies to humans, though it’s not the most disdainful, in my opinion, of the views of technology.
That honor goes to the following:
It is a view that simultaneously gives too much of the wrong type of credit to technology and, in turn, doesn’t give enough of the right type of credit to it. Martin Heidegger, the philosopher, calls this view the anthropological view, by which he meant that technologies are seen as merely tools. It is also sometimes referred to as an instrumental view of technology. Either way, they both maintain that the human-technology relation is characterized by the human with leather boots and whip (dominant) and technology, blinded on all fours with a ball gagging its mouth (dominated). It assumes that technology ultimately is a product of humans, and thus limited to its use by humans.
Fortunately, this very old-school view of technology is not entirely the one adopted by Carr, Keen and others, but they demonstrate another view, which has some elements of the instrumental view. They are not so much critics of that technology holds power over us in toto. In other words, one could argue that Carr, Keen et al. view technology as a monster, more specifically as Frankenstein. As may recall, Frankenstein is the brain child of Dr. Frankenstein that runs wild and wreaks havoc on all of those around, the classic irony in the story of course being: what man makes he cannot control and turns against him. It is this tragedy that has pervaded the most recent reactionary critics of new media.
For them, the Internet, from its pre-Google, -MySpace and -Facebook days, has turned into a monster of unforgivable proportion. Instead of being good little technologies, they decided to run amok and actually affect their creators–humans. Bad bad technology. (Really, what were they expecting? Were they naive enough to the point of replicating the attitude of the two kids from the movie Weird Science, who create a gorgeous woman who would fulfill their teenage sexual appetites and also become their best friend?) Now, it has ruined the upward progress of human civilization by turning everyone into celebrity gossip whores and so-called “citizen journalists.”
Let’s continue with the journalism theme to illustrate the point, since Carr and Keen (he’s not really a journalist, but he writes for The Weekly Standard sometimes, which in my book makes him less of a journalist and more of a terrible person). It is undoubtedly the case that the traditional print news industry has been most-affected by the Internet and the explosion of bloggers that are now doing their jobs for much cheaper (sometimes for free) and faster than they ever can, thought sometimes not as well. The response from the newspaper industry was to engage in a war of cultural values, which, as some of them are now finding out, was hyper-defensive and ineffective. The blogs, they deemed, were untouchable, unquotable and unprofessional. It wasn’t journalism, as far as they were concerned. I remember in high school, every teacher reminding us: “There’s a lot of false information out there on the Internet. Be mindful of what you use.” At the time, it was sound advice. But today, newspapers cannot with clear conscience expect their readers to not read blogs supplementally. (Isn’t that kind of what newspapers were for–to spark interest in events?) What scares Keen and Carr the most is the de-professionalization and de-specialization of various jobs, most especially theirs–journalism. But they would never admit such a thing–that their positions on Google and the Web 2.0 are responses to the crises of their own. Instead, they argue that the Internet threatens broader, social principles, ones which, if ignored, could be detrimental to the world. In the end, reactionary new media critics, though raising very good points, are presenting views of new media that are apologies for market capitalism. They are upset that a good bit of information is flowing freely, that is, without being monetized and they have, among others, made a claim that this would ruin humans by making them lazier and stupider.
You know what other media they said that about? Cinema, television, and also one of the most influential forms of media in the past two centuries–the novel.
