Steven Johnson's latest post (taking on a piece in the NYT) is one more example of why it's becoming more and more difficult for me to read the mainstream "news" about new media. He explains:
I find this whole "the web is fragmenting society" argument completely infuriating. (I've been railing against it for almost a decade now, but I just can't help myself.) In this latest piece, it's just entirely taken as a given that the web is dropping us all into echo chambers where we can only hear like-minded voices. There are people quoted who disagree about what should be done with this phenomenon, but the underlying trend isn't questioned.
Don't know that I'd necessarily question the "underlying trend" per se, but I'd qualify it by saying that it has very little to do with the web. We seek out people who are like us, and we always have; it's just that now, we have unprecedented ability to do so. Maybe the web makes it a little more visible, but the jump from that to the notion that it's "caused" by the web is indeed infuriating. This is David Brooks, in a Sept article from the Atlantic, on the ideal of diversity:
We don't really care about diversity all that much in America, even though we talk about it a great deal. Maybe somewhere in this country there is a truly diverse neighborhood in which a black Pentecostal minister lives next to a white anti-globalization activist, who lives next to an Asian short-order cook, who lives next to a professional golfer, who lives next to a postmodern-literature professor and a cardiovascular surgeon. But I have never been to or heard of that neighborhood. Instead, what I have seen all around the country is people making strenuous efforts to group themselves with people who are basically like themselves.
Doesn't sound all that different from the phenomenon that Harmon describes in the NYT piece Steven is railing against, does it? In Brooks' article, as well as Harmon's, there's a conflict between pragmatism and idealism. Ideally, we want a diverse society; pragmatically, we seek out people like ourselves. Ideally, the Web would be a place where all sorts of democracy and debate might occur; pragmatically,
"I concluded it was almost impossible to try to use the Internet as the place where these great discussions would take place," David Anderson, [Youth04's] executive director, said.
Maybe I'm sensitive to this because I'm working on an essay that takes on one element of this "conventional wisdom," and I find it absurd. Why would the Internet be that kind of "place" for Anderson? Or rather, why would people behave differently there than they would otherwise?
The prob, methinks is this, from Harmon: "the Web allows users to tailor the information they consume more than any other medium." Her emphasis seems to be on the "tailoring," but I'd shift to the word "users." Isn't that the complaint here? Those damn end users, using the Web to find the "narrow subjects" they want to think about, to find the people they want to spend time with, to "steal" the one song they want to hear (instead of paying $17 for the other 11 songs at the same time), etc etc.
Bruce Bimber, in Harmon's piece, explains that "Democracy has been defined as a process of discussion," which, in addition to being a lovely example of a passively-voiced, vacant assertion, completely ignores the point of the conflict that Brooks raises. Democracy, writ ideally, is indeed a process of discussion, but from the perspective of the individual end-user voter, democracy is a choice among candidates. It would be super if everyone maintained an open mind, and rationally weighed the good and bad about each candidate, but that's little more than a fantasy. There can't be more than a tiny, tiny fraction of the voters who genuinely engage in the "process of discussion." If we are to care about our votes, and about democracy, we do so by making choices, not by attempting to embody some intellectualized ideal of democracy.
One more note, and I'm done. I find it really, really disingenuous for the NYT or any other mainstream news outlet to run stuff like this, when their bread and butter is precisely the kind of thinking that this article decries. Wouldn't have made for much of a story had the IA caucus results been 2% Kerry, 2% Edwards, 1% Dean, and 93% Undecided, now would it?
Leave a comment