We’re distracted, our attention is shot, we are under surveillance, and we don’t care! We like being linked and friended by strangers who may or may not be who they say they are. It is so easy to Google everything, highlight and paste any vaguely intelligible sentences into our research, copy and paste the Web address, and call it a citation from a reliable source. Easier still, purchase the whole essay! Or make shit up. Who cares?
Freedom of speech. Democratic rule. Power to the people. Wisdom of the crowd. Cult of the amateur.
Have you walked down the street lately? Does anyone even go outdoors, or are we all online? [Like now.] How dangerous is driving or walking city streets when most every person is under headphones and/or head down pushing at keypads? Pedestrians and drivers pay no attention as they careen around corners or jump into crosswalks, music blasting in their earbuds, tapping a text to someone in another time zone. Mindfulness practice teaches that this habit of always being elsewhere than wherever we are is counter to the primary goal, the path to enlightenment: be present, be here.
But do we need another tirade against the way technology is taking over our minds, brains, and time?
To survive the techno-future perhaps it is better to model ourselves on college students and little kids, who approach the world head-on and greet new ways-of-being with excitement rather than trepidation. Better to embrace new devices and thrive on the vast unwieldy Web. Text grows smaller as the opposable thumb grows agile and large, enabling us to type messages on teeny keypads while driving, while eating, while looking you in the eye, talking, thinking about something else entirely.
Not everyone will agree with the premise of Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today’s User-generated Media Are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values, recently out in paperback. Are you a throwback if you do? Are you a cultist if you don’t? Which is worse?
Don’t take the scary tone personally, Amateurs. Keen means all of us, and even he knows there is no going back. In the words of the olden days: The horse is out of the barn. We are living in the New Wild West, “in the midst of the greatest paradigm shift in information and communications history,” according to Christopher M. Schroeder, former CEO and publisher of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive.
Keen has been called a Luddite by techno-utopians everywhere, “The Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley” by the French newspaper Liberación, and an elitist by Internet critic John Colbert. With no gatekeepers, no standard-bearers, no editors, no fact-checkers, Keen says we’re out on a flimsy limb: on the Net without a net. “In the ideology of the collective Wikipedia experiment, the voice of a high school kid has equal value to that of an Ivy League scholar or a trained professional.”
Upper division students in my Writing for Artists class at California College of the Arts are not worried. Michael Wong says, “I think that the classic idea of ‘cultural gatekeepers’ is a racist and exclusionary idea. I think it is great that those who have historically never been able to express themselves can do that now.” Daniel McGrath says, “Experts are full of way more bullshit than the average person. I don’t need an expert to interpret for me.”
Why be afraid? It has always been a jungle out there. We trust ourselves to find our way. We don’t need no stinkin’ gatekeepers. Havana Davidson asks, “Who decides our standards? Talk about Big Brother!” Grant Squires seconds her skepticism: “We are constantly bombarded with corporate opinion in the form of ads in the real world.”
How apt is the Big Brother reference? Keen takes the reader behind the computer screen and shows us all the algorithms briskly sweeping our data, trailing behind us as we surf, pause, purchase, subscribe, connect. Invisible machinery compiles our buying habits, our lusts, our interests, and sends us, in return, links to anything we could possibly want, and so so much that we don’t. But isn’t this just the new dawn of old advertising methods like Nielsen ratings and focus groups? Isn’t it all for us, to cater to us?
“Search engines like Google know more about our habits, our interests, our desires than our friends, our loved ones, and our shrink combined,” says Keen. “But unlike in George Orwell’s 1984, this Big Brother is for real.”
CCA student Noah Brezel agrees, “Google is a little creepy. I use Gmail and the fact that the ads change based on what I’m typing weirds me out. But this is run by a computer program, not a person, and I don’t really care. Nothing that I email about or search for on the Internet is all that interesting or that private.”
In reviewing Jonathan Zittrain’s book The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop It) for The New Republic Online, Tim Wu offers a bit of history. “Both radio and film were, in their early days, much like the Internet is today: new, unreliable, and full of content that was not ready for prime time. These were easy industries to get into, like dot-coms in the 1990s or Web 2.0 in the 2000s.” Zittrain describes how the wild freedom of these media was soon usurped by corporate control. Wu says, “In the early 1920s, AT&T invented the ancestor of what we now know as CBS, Fox, and the rest…. Both NBC on radio and Paramount in film took advantage of the same economic principles: massive scale, integration, and centralization. They borrowed the industrial methods of Standard Oil, Ford, and other great corporations of the day, and applied them to the new media. The result was a system stable enough to last from the late 1920s until the 1990s, and in the case of Hollywood, a system that is still roughly in place today.”
The issue today isn’t consolidation, Keen argues, but the degradation of expertise. “MySpace and Facebook are creating a youth culture of digital narcissism; open-source knowledge-sharing sites like Wikipedia are undermining the authority of teachers in the classroom; the YouTube generation are more interested in self-expression than in learning about the outside world; the cacophony of anonymous blogs and user-generated content are deafening today’s youth [sic] to the voice of informed experts and professional journalists; today’s kids are so busy self-broadcasting on social networks that they no longer consume the creative work of professional musicians, novelists, or filmmakers.”
Harry Haller, the suicidal bourgeois protagonist of Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf (set in the 1920s), was in mourning over the state of the world; he hated war and industrialization, and suffered over the coming of radio and what it implied for a cultured man like himself who appreciated the classical pleasures of live music. As with radio, CCA student Kolle Kahle-Riggs understands that YouTube does not represent the end of the civilized world either: “The Baby Boomer generation survived ‘rock and roll music.’ This generation will survive the Internet… Successful artists will transcend the digital world. We can use the Internet as a tool and still succeed in the real world. YouTube is a way to see if we like an artist or not but it is not a replacement for live music. YouTube is not high quality and is obviously not a substitute for the real thing.”
The danger to intellectual property rights is another of Keen’s concerns. “In addition to stealing music or movies, they are stealing articles, photographs, letters, research, videos, jingles, characters, and just about anything else that can be digitized and copied electronically… The digital revolution is creating a generation of cut-and-paste burglars who view all content on the Internet as common property… The widespread acceptance of such behavior threatens to undermine a society that has been built upon hard work, innovation, and the intellectual achievement of our writers, scientists, artists, composers, musicians, journalists, pundits, and moviemakers.” [Editor’s note: I stole every image on this page.]
Appropriation is what we call this in art school. “Have you ever heard the term ‘remix’? This means responding to art by borrowing from it and changing it. It’s legal – or should be!” claims CCA student Daniel McGrath. In this, he agrees with a number of prominent figures, including Lawrence Lessig, who sees “legal sharing” and “re-use” of intellectual property as a social benefit.
“In a twisted kind of Alice in Wonderland, down-the-rabbit-hole logic, Silicon Valley visionaries such as Stanford law professor and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig and cyberpunk William Gibson laud the appropriation of intellectual property,” Keen writes.
Yes, it is a new paradigm and everyone is excited because we are creating it! CCA student Lain Kay says, “A generation growing up on the Internet sees it as an open and free way to usurp authority, which is often a natural inclination for teens. The Internet allows us to declare ourselves with pretty much no oversight.”
“Every opinion counts, every account should be heard,” says Lauren Scott. “If it is immature or unreliable, the educated and/or intelligent individuals will know… Many times experts cannot see with fresh eyes. Expert or not, everyone is biased and can be accused of promoting a selfish agenda. (It’s called politics.)”
This is our medium! Don’t kill the messenger! It is a tool. We’ll just have to figure out how to control it as we go along—like the wheel, or nuclear power. There is a dark side to everything. The moon. The day.
And there is no going back. Train’s left the station. All aboard! We trust that we will find our way blindly through the maze. Guided by our friends: Hey, check out this musician. Check it out: a lion hugging a man. Instead of being told what to listen to, read, pay for, and do by some anonymous corporate entity, now we listen to each other.
And we talk to each other, we say anything to each other. But should we? There’s a reason why girls’ diaries came with a lock and key: some things are private. “What happens when all our queries and postings and casual comments become open to public consumption, and the Web becomes a permanent repository of the details of our lives?” Keen asks.
To which CCA student Kevin Whiteley says, “I never post my personal life on the Internet. Fools will be fools.”
The Millennials have no fear. They trust themselves. Trust collective wisdom. Facebook visits are like phone calls were in the old days. Or a visit to a neighbor. Instead of sitting on the porch in rockers, we are walking and texting on iPhones, listening to MP3s, being elsewhere and being in touch. There have always been dangers, always will be. We are negotiating new territory. New Pioneers! Brave New Worlders. Evolving. Becoming our machines? Becoming silicon chips? So what? Fine with me! Silicon is part of nature. Cyberspace may appear to be just like the real world but most of us know the difference.
Keen wonders where it goes. “How can we channel the Web 2.0 revolution constructively so that it enriches our economy, culture, and values?”
CCA student Philip Frank answers, “By not taking the Internet so seriously and remembering what remains important to the human spirit and soul of our society: relationships, food, love, joy, sadness, and staying present. Technology may make some things harder but people still have ethics and love.”
12 responses
Excellent and worth some thought. I’m mid-50’s and recently joined facebook and can hardly believe how much fun – and frickin time! – I spend on it. I contantly dance between responding and refraining because it still doesn’t feel natural to me. I’m on the train and out of the barn and over the hill. But hey, count me in!
Rogoff presents a great argument – and at a perfect tempo! More from Marianne please!
The internet isn’r ruining our lives. Its become our lives.
What I see is the degradation of the concept of “information.” Yes, in the technical sense, twitter and rss feeds and myspace posts are information, but they aren’t informative. It’s wonderful that We the People are free to express ourselves without the permission of the gatekeepers. But what about actual, useful information? Is it true that my opinion is just as valuable, useful, or informative as anyone else’s? Don’t experience and expertise still matter?
Bravo! CCA students. You, the new adventurers, are some of the first who have recognized that the Zen here-and-now is done and gone, mostly, and as as long as fools will be fools [I can clip and paste too!] we might as well appreciate, enjoy and embrace the new face of our culture. Keep Marianne writing, ’tis a joy.
The internet hasn’t ruined our lives….YET. It will take a considerable amount of time, but it will happen. The disconnected youth now have something to blame their absence of pride, ethics, respect, core values etc., etc., etc. on. Sure we can all find plenty of people and examples that have prospered from the internet, but that doesn’t compare to the number of sincere, honest and compassionate people WE have LOST.
Anyone who falls for this ubiquitous “the internet is cutting us off from human connection” argument his dating himself. The internet is a fantastic tool that my generation (I’m 22) has learned to put to work. If not for the internet, Barack Obama might not be President–his campaign brilliantly utilized email and social networking sites to get young people involved and then built on that momentum, giving us hope that we might actually have a voice in politics after all! I personally used Obama’s campaign website to easily make calls during the primaries and the general election, both from my home and from local campaign offices where I could share my excitement with other volunteers. His campaign emails informed me of where I could go to connect with other people who share my political views and we worked together towards a common goal.
The internet isn’t replacing cultural events. It’s facilitating them. Using my iphone, I can make restaurant reservations, buy concert tickets, find out when my favorite artists are coming to my city, see what exhibits are currently at the Pompidou, or invite my friends to a play I’m appearing in. Facebook allows me to stay in touch with people it would be too expensive to call because they’re studying or living abroad. Skype allowed me to see my boyfriend when I was studying in Paris for three months.
I wish Keen would do his due diligence, and stop vilifying wikipedia. Everyone knows that it’s not necessarily the most reliable news resource, but there are people hired by wikipedia to verify claims posted by users, and anything that isn’t yet verified is marked as such, and can be removed by the site monitors. How is it a bad thing to have that much shared knowledge at your fingertips? We are already channeling the web revolution to enrich our lives, it’s simply time for Keen and the other non-believers to learn how to harness the internet’s great promise.
You have really shed light on the tendancy many people have to worry about “what will happen because of….(fill in the blank)” The truth is that what these people worry about is rarely the outcome. I can imagine a world where people are not interested in using their energy to worry about what might happen, but instead, begin to tune themselves into each moment and its pure, vitalizing essence. Appreciate the gifts of the internet as its platform brings information into the open (where it belongs). Yes we can be present, on-line or not, as long as we are not wasting our moments in the devitalization of worry.
If we don’t like the internet and what it’s doing, we don’t like the world. It is simply a reflection of everything we do and don’t like about ourselves, individually and societally. Sometimes I love that it takes me about 10 seconds to buy a novel I’d never heard of until 30 seconds ago. Sometimes I hate that I have become unable to accept a moment’s delay in my gratification. I force myself to stay off social networking sites precisely because I dislike the narcissism that I used to display. At the same time, I miss the recognition and validation I received from ‘friends’ on MySpaz.
Like a lot of things, we often like what it does for us but hate what it does for others.
But why do I find myself afraid that the ‘democratisation’ of information, social contact and culture is gradually trivialising life itself? Perhaps I need to reinvigorate my love of the web by clicking ‘Buy now with 1 click’ on Keen’s book. Maybe he’ll shame me into not putting my frankly amateur music on YouTube.
God it’s all so complicated.
Lifeis measuredin time-everyone knows that-the future of the world a couple in bed each with alaptop spenidng 3 hours going over their emails-than akiss- no time for sexonly 4 hours to get up to go to work tied and maybe if you have bad luck you crash you car because you are tired. Life expectancy will shrink-obesity and atrophy will be pandemic. i am waing for someone to go beyond Keen and write How the worldwide web took away our lives and made geek billionaires help destoy civilzation as we knew it. iti s now impossible for jewsus to ever come back so the ned for christianity is over. no need to go to church masive global wo9rld wide unemplyment is coming as hundreds of millions of people will be outsourced by the internet- brave New wrold is tame compared to geekworld -where the mantra is be a geek or die
My computer got a virus and was down for 2 whole weeks. I didn’t realize it until i got working and got back on it again, that it was nice to not have used it for 2 weeks. It seems to me that if i didn’t watch as much television, or play as many video games, or spent less time on the internet that i could spend that time focusing on my real life.
Yes. The Internet is destroying decency in the world. Today’s children are tomorrow’s adults. By then us grown-ups will be dead and gone. Those “children” will not have known what it was like to live in a world where people cared for one another and focused more on the psychological benefits of working, rather than the financial profit of it all. The Internet has become the primary tool (or weapon) for converting “normal” people into walking personas. As addictive and popular as Facebook is, it is a “place” where people become “personas”. It is as if everyone is trying to impress one another. A social club. Back in the 90s, before many knew about the Internet, socialites and other groups were divided. One group rarely knew about the other. But now, everything is melting together. This is causing an implosion. Honest people are becoming theives by stealing software and MP3s. This isn’t limited to techs or geeks. Even churches and businesses are relying on “free” stuff. Slowly our world is becoming crooked and selfish as hell. I could go on and on to give examples as to why the Internet is destroying the world. But, the bottom line is this. Imagine how your life would be different if you disconnected yourself from it. I personally have experienced the benefits of this. I completely banned my family from having anything more to do with it. And the only reason I am on here now is because I am trapped in college at the moment. Once I graduate I will be tossing the computer into the garbage can once and for all. Certain things in this world were meant to remain unknown or divided. Centuries of time have proven this to be true. The Internet is one large contradiction of the Truth, even if it offers “truth” at the same time. I don’t need it. You don’t need it. Nobody needs it. The world was just fine before it came along.
If you don’t get how soft and slovenly this world has become since the internet came about then you are 1. young and you know no better. Still confused? then you 2. Have never gave a shit about anything other than your own life throughout the 60s 70s 80s 90s 2000s+
Humanity didn’t need the internet! Music, something we all sought out to get our individual kicks is now nullified and meaningless . . . so called fans of artists upload songs and albums on you tube whist personally disclaiming any copyright infringement through mere ignorance. Hey, what a great way to support that hard working muso that you idolize and steal their income! The same applies to film/ documentaries/series as well. Most blogs are useless shit, and the mighty Wikipedia is worthless on the most basic academic level, yet everyone goes there for facts. Facebook connects you with friends . . . friends are people who you would give anything for . . its not a term that encompasses people you haven’t seen for 10+ years and who you never desired to entertain back then. I could go on, but i won’t, because i’ll be surprised if I can post this without giving someone my phone number, email or shoe size. Fuck the internet, get out there and support real life not virtual shit!
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