... So Please Come In and Use Our Internet!

 

The Champaign Public Library passed along this graphic today on Facebook, and it's what the kids call a self-own.  Any public library worth its salt will have Internet access and probably a computer lab, because the Internet is a vital source of information and communication.  So the best I can say about this meme is that it's ungracious.

On top of that, the image reminds me of some memes I saw more often a few years ago, of church marquees with snarky or funny pronouncements on them, that turned out to have been made from image-editing software templates. This meme might have been made with just such a tool.  The word LIBRARY in this one is a giveaway: wouldn't a real library include its name on a sign like this?

But of course, not everything in a library is true either, even if you leave the Internet out of it.  Numerous commenters pointed to fiction, and others argued that fiction is labeled as such.  Usually, yes.  But in the non-fiction section you'll find various religious scriptures and commentaries thereon, books on the paranormal (UFOs, telepathy, the occult, etc.), political polemics (my local library has plenty of Trumpian and other right-wing propaganda, which greatly outnumbers its left-wing counterparts), dubious popular science, and so on and on.  That you find something in your public library's stacks is no guarantee that it's true.  Despite some people's claims that librarians are gatekeepers, they don't and can't vet everything they acquire for truth or accuracy.

And as I keep insisting, the Internet makes it easier than it ever has been before for users to check facts.  Most people don't, but the Internet didn't create the problem.

This Is the Dawning of the Age of the Internet

Let me procrastinate a bit on another post I'm in the middle of by writing this one.  It all ties together in the end anyway.
I disagree rather strongly with a recent post by Bodhipaksa on Fake Buddha Quotes on the more general issue of misquotation in the age of the Internet.  He quoted a paper by Giovanni Gaetani, on misquotations of the philosopher Albert Camus.  Like so:

Nonetheless, we underestimate [the] Internet’s impact on literature and philosophy: ever since everyone has the power to say his personal opinion about everything, even when he is a total incompetent about the subject; ever since everyone can quote a writer without feeling the need to report the source and ever since everyone seems to not care at all about sources, believing in everything he sees on Internet, every quote has completely lost reliability.

There's a fair amount of Occidental hyperbole in this paragraph: "everyone seems to not care at all about sources," etc.  But everyone has always had the power to say his personal opinion about everything.  Before literacy became widespread, anybody could stand outside and announce that he (less often she) was filled with the Holy Spirit and you'd better listen.  Often people did.  Often they didn't.  There was always rumor, and folklore, and sources had a way of disappearing after a couple of iterations.  You could never be sure who had said something, and the same sayings were attributed to different sages.

After writing was invented, there was the problem of forgeries, or pseudepigrapha as they're more delicately known.  Who composed the Homeric poems?  No one knows, so it's convenient and not unreasonable to ascribe them to Homer.  Other poems were ascribed to the same author, though probably they were not his.  Works were written in the name of Plato and other philosophers.  You'll find that many ancient works from the Greco-Roman world were written by Pseudo-guys.

Only those who believe everything they see in print take for granted that all the books in the Bible were written by the authors tradition assigns to them.  All but the most conservative scholars believe that not all the letters ascribed to the apostle Paul in the New Testament were actually written by him, and many enterprising people wrote in the name of this or that patriarch, apostle, or hanger-on; many people took their word for it.  Some scholars will tell you that it was commonplace and accepted to write pseudepigrapha in those days, but while it was commonplace, it wasn't accepted. Many writers denounced such works.  Whoever wrote Second Thessalonians, for example, warned readers not to be fooled by letters "as though from us" (2.2), indicating that forged letters in Paul's name were already circulating in his lifetime -- which is ironic if, as many scholars believe, Second Thessalonians was not itself written by Paul.  (How better to distract attention from one's own deception than by calling someone else a deceiver?)

Before the Internet came along in my own lifetime, many rumors and legends circulated: that queers wore yellow (or was it green?) on Tuesdays (or was it Thursdays?), for instance.  That Franklin Delano Roosevelt was actually a Jew, who had syphilis not polio.  At about the time I graduated from high school, the myth that Paul McCartney had died and been replaced by a lookalike began to circulate, and it persists to this day; even many people who don't believe it still think that the Beatles were responsible for the story and had put clues about it in their songs and on their album covers.  Some of these canards circulated orally, others were mimeographed or printed cheaply on offset presses.  It was often impossible to track such falsehoods to their source, and not many people cared much.  If they liked what they heard, they believed it; if not, they scoffed.   And although most people are acquainted with the concept of "urban legends," popularized by the folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand, they still readily believe them.  The people who post lists of criteria for discerning fact from deception generally fail to observe them themselves.

The Internet has increased the reach of ordinary people, and the speed with which information travels and spreads.  But the difference is one of degree, not kind.  True, anyone with Internet access can express his or her opinions, regardless of competence, but most that is posted on the Internet will never be seen by more than a few people.  No one can predict when a given posting will go viral.

Do people believe everything they see on the Internet?  Of course not; that's more Occidental hyperbole.  People believe what they want to believe, and ignore what they don't want to believe.  So, for example, my Third Right-Wing Acquaintance boasted that since she couldn't tell who was telling the truth on the Internet, she just believed what she found congenial.  Many other people do the same, but are less forthright about it.

Bodhipaksa quotes another passage from Gaetani:

During my research I have contacted many bloggers, asking them where Camus should have written/said this or that; their answer was always the same: «check it on Google». Indeed, their reasoning was simple but tremendously naïve: if a quote is reported by so many people – millions of references in some cases – the author of this quote “must” be Albert Camus.

I believe that it's much easier now, in the age of the Internet, to find out whether a given quotation is authentic or not.  It helps that there are sites like Quote Investigator and Wikiquote, to say nothing of Fake Buddha Quotes itself, where people do a lot of the necessary detective work.  But something else is going on here.  Bodhipaksa remarks, "I paraphrase this attitude as 'It must be true. I read it on the internet.'" It's true, many people believe this, or act as if they do.  But how different is it from saying, say, "It must be true, I read it in the Bible"?  Or "I heard it on the news"?  Much of the current concern about "fake news" is explicitly intended to recall people to the fold shepherded by traditional authority: print media, the three big television networks, government officials -- the right government officials, meaning those of one's favored party.  Yet these authorities have discredited themselves again and again, with no accountability, and have never been particularly reliable.  Who is competent to have an opinion?  The general answer is: the same wise, credentialed, responsible commentators your parents trusted.  But those people got us into the mess we're in now, and have no idea how to get us out of it except to proffer more of the same.

In narrow domains, where comparatively little is at stake -- Camus studies, say -- credentialed authority can be relied on much of the time.  It's fairly easy to tell whether a saying ascribed to Jesus is authentic or not, if you agree to limit authenticity to the contents of the four canonical gospels: they're not very long, they've been studied and indexed exhaustively, and it's easy enough to look up a saying you're not sure about to see if it can be found in them.  The same is true for the Buddhist scriptures, though there are more of them.  But where much is at stake  -- the national or world economy, international conflicts that could turn into war, etc. -- it's harder to know whom to trust  For one thing, the credentialed authorities disagree with each other.  As with the variety of religions in the world, they can't all be true; how can you know whose claims to believe?  For another, they often lie, and it's difficult for us ordinary schmucks to know when they're lying. These are problems that, like the poor, have always been with us and probably always will.  It's not because of the Internet that we don't know what to do about them.  I'd say, however, that anyone who blames the Internet for our difficulty in knowing what is true is probably not to be trusted.

Hey, Kids -- Leave That Noam Alone!

This article turned up on the Noam Chomsky page on Facebook today (multiple ironies there), featuring a charming episode of "Ain't It Awful."

"I get a ton of correspondence, mostly email," Chomsky said. "I’ll often get questions from high school students saying, ‘I have to write a paper Thursday on the French Revolution,’ or whatever it may be. I tell them, ‘Well here’s somebody you could look up. And the next question routinely comes back, ‘How can I find it on the internet.’ And sometimes these come from prep schools - places with good libraries, educated students[,] privileged students, I say, ‘Well walk across the street to the school library and look it up.'"

I love Chomsky, but he must surely know that this isn't a product of the Internet.   Long before the Internet, writers I know were complaining about students who wrote to them asking them to do their research for them.  Writing in about 1981, for example, the science-fiction writer and professor of English Joanna Russ recalled:

Years ago a very young (junior-high-school age) woman asked me to send her copies of all my work and the answers to three pages of questions about it for a paper her teacher had suggested; I wrote her, explaining that writers hadn't the time to fill such requests and referred her to her teacher, who ought to be teaching her how to do research.  Her older sister then wrote me, stating that she was going to expose me in Ms., that because of my bad behavior her sister, who had hoped to be a writer, had given up all such ambitions. *

So such demands have nothing to do with the Internet, computers, or social media.  And to be fair, Chomsky admits:

But, as laughable as it is, who in America hasn't felt that way before?

“I’m not offering this as a critique of the internet, but there’s a lot of factors involved," Chomsky explained.

So why bring it up in the context of a discussion of social media and the Internet?  Alternet certainly packaged Chomsky's remarks as a "critique of the Internet" -- disseminated on the Internet, no less.

I think this kind of behavior has more to do with adolescence, and probably with the very privilege Chomsky refers to.  Of course privileged kids expect someone else to do their work for them!  What else are other people for?  But it also has something to do with a capability that language and human consciousness give us: to construct fantasies about people we've never met, so that we believe we know them and they know us.  It's also a product of writing and literacy.  If your encounter with stories and ideas takes place in face-to-face interactions, it's true that you are being addressed (though not individually) by the storyteller or the preacher.  People often feel that a written text speaks to them personally and individually, and may write to the author expressing that belief.  (Or they want a celebrity in sports or show business to grant them a wish.)  That's as much an illusion as thinking that a distant professor will do your homework for you.

* In Russ, Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts (Firebrand Books, 1985), p. 53.

Service Advisory

I'm back in Korea after a four-year absence, and I spent the first week just running around, readusting, getting settled in.  (I'll be here till mid-November.)  I'm still trying to find out how to score free wifi, which is supposed to be available all over Seoul, but is hard to combine with a place that has an outlet for my laptop.  Even if I had a smartphone, which is probably what most Seoulites do with wireless, I wouldn't want to try to write a blog post on it.  So I'm back in the Internet cafes, the PC rooms.

I have a bunch of ideas, but for right now I'm just checking in.  I'll try to do some writing later today.

A Friend of a Friend of a Friend Told Me!

The first question is whether Tyson actually said this.  I still haven't found a real source, as opposed to the blizzard of memes and reposts and reblogs and retweets that come up from a search.

For a moment I thought I had it, in a link to a National Public Radio story on two "anonymous art students ... who have been creating gorgeous hand-lettered and illustrated chalkboards featuring inspiring quotes from literary and public figures," illustrated with a photo of their chalkboard of the supposed Tyson quotation.  The same page has a link to the quotation, which leads to an interview with Tyson on Fresh Air promoting his remake of the Cosmos TV series.  The text teaser doesn't include the quotation in question, and I don't really feel like listening to the whole program right now.  Maybe later.  The excerpts provided are annoying enough, like this:

If you are one of those people who don't like thinking about astronomy because it makes them feel small, Tyson suggests looking at it a different way: "Our molecules are traceable to stars that exploded and spread these elements across the galaxy," he explains. If you "see the universe as something you participate in — as this great unfolding of a cosmic story — that, I think should make you feel large, not small. ... Any astrophysicist does not feel small looking up in the universe; we feel large."

I think this is apologetic invention, but I say bullshit anyway.  One of the pillars of scientific triumphalism has always been that Man is a worm, that Science puts him in his place, decentering the earth from the center of the universe, toppling Homo sapiens from the crown of creation, and so on.  He confuses the emotional issue, too.  I'm supposed to feel big because I'm an extra in "this great unfolding of a cosmic story"?  I don't believe that people who are concerned about feeling small are going to get much comfort from this.  And greater scientists than Tyson have seen things differently:

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

But c'mon, Tyson is an astrophysicist, not a philosopher!

Tyson also told NPR:

You will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective ... leading nations into battle. No, that doesn't happen. When you have a cosmic perspective there's this little speck called Earth and you say, "You're going to what? You're on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what? Oh, to pull oil out of the ground, what? WHAT?" ... Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing.

Maybe you won't find "people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective ... leading nations into battle", but you will find them building weapons of mass destruction that could wipe out life on the planet.  And Tyson isn't unaware of that; he told a blogger from Scientific American who questioned him about it:

Lastly, you speak as though all War is bad. I tend to agree with you on a personal level. But I know as a matter of political awareness that not all wars are unjust and some wars are, in fact, worth fighting. Many scientists who serve military interests do so because they believe deeply in the value of their work to the security of our country.

It's probably not too surprising that Tyson prefers not to address the politics of these matters; that would be, how you say, bad for business.  And maybe he's learned, as people do, what is safe to say on controversial issues and what isn't.  For example, here's his take on the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Look at how we reacted to September 11, 2001: about three thousand Americans died that day, and, that’s more than who died in the attack on Pearl Harbor. So, one of the most devastating days in American history since the Civil War. Understood, people are pissed off. We want blood. So, we go into Afghanistan, and we would later go into Iraq, and war would be conducted – I remember people kept track of when American servicemen died, and there was the date where more American servicemen died, than who died on September 11, and that was kind of an interesting milestone, to compare, but we just pushed on, and so now many more Americans died in those wars than have died – and countless others died, local citizens. But apart from that, count thirty days from September 11. Thirty days after – by then, in those thirty days, more Americans had died on the highways in car accidents than who died on September 11. Not only that, that number keeps dying every month. So, there’s no outcry for people dying on highways – there is locally, we fixed our drunk driving laws, and there’s enforcement [that’s] very high and taken very seriously in all our public consciousness, but if deaths of Americans is what you care about and protecting the lives of people is what you care about, and you rank all ways Americans die, then terrorist attacks is not high on that list. It’s high on the list because we fear them, because it’s a terror factor, but because of the actual numbers.

Tyson focuses on whether "deaths of Americans is what you care about and protecting the lives of people is what you care about," but as he seems to realize, that's not the real reason for the wars in which the US mired itself starting in 2001.  (Though the roots of the conflicts go much further back.)  Even on his reasoning, it would seem that World War II wasn't worth fighting, because far fewer Americans died at Pearl Harbor than on September 11, 2001 -- but judging from his response to the Scientific American blogger, he considers World War II one of the good wars.  (Or maybe not; he's kind of coy about it.)  It's all very well to have a "cosmic perspective," but from a cosmic perspective, not much that happens on earth -- nuclear war, global warming, the destruction of the rain forests, etc. -- matters very much.  So other values have to be taken into account, and Tyson either doesn't understand that or prefers not to go there.

Writing to the Scientific American blogger, Tyson took the easy way out, blaming the electorate for voting for politicians who make scientists do bad things: "I can scream at lawmakers without limit, but their duty is to serve their constituents. And so it’s the electorate that I, as a scientist and educator, will always target for my messages."  Do lawmakers serve their constituents?  That's open to some dispute.  It's also debatable whether the massive government subsidy of high-tech research and development was the work of lawmakers.  David F. Noble showed, in his book Forces of Production, that the reality was complex and tangled.  Scientists, engineers, corporate interests, the American military, political appointees, and Congress were all involved, and their interests didn't necessarily agree.  The taxpayers, the electorate, had little idea what their tax dollars were paying for, as usual, but the need for the US to be what Tyson calls "an innovation nation" was part of the sell.

Like many scientists, Tyson is ambivalent about the hoi polloi.   He was a lightning rod for the reclassification of Pluto as an unplanet, and the criticism he drew obviously nettled him: "So astrophysicists should be under no obligation to poll the public. I don't care how deeply affectionate you felt for these objects that we had talked about. Now that's not arrogance, that's just simple common sense about what it is to move a frontier and the sensitivities you need on that frontier to classify or not."  I sympathize, and agree to a point, but notice the irony here.  Tyson is very big on educating the public on science, but a major part of his approach is an appeal to emotion.  He wants to get kids excited about science in the same way it was done in the 1950s and 1960s, with carefully-managed spectacles involving rockets thrusting into the unknown, heroic astronauts, the lure of adventure, and competition with other superpowers to Get There First.  This may be effective in motivating people, but it has nothing to do with what science is supposed to be about: the quest for knowledge and truth and shit.  (As far as I listened in the Fresh Air interview, his take on SETI is conventionally emotional, based on whether it makes sense to think we're Alone.)  The people who objected to Pluto's 'demotion' were people who'd been fossicked up by just such an approach: science for them was a spectator sport, with teams to root for and a personalization of all issues: if Pluto stopped being a planet, its feelings would be hurt, the scientists were just being meanies, and people had to stand up for the underdog.  That's what happens when you personalize issues that have nothing to do with people.  But if you don't use that approach, how are you going to get the voters to pressure their lawmakers to fund a manned mission to Mars?  Mars is waiting for us; it's so lonely, all alone out there, and it's so stupid that it should be alone.

Anyway, back to the meme in question.  Whether or not Tyson said it, it's an odd thing for a scientist to say.  In the NPR interview he says, "If you're a scientist and you have to have an answer, even in the absence of data, you're not going to be a good scientist."  There are a lot of bad scientists running around, then.  But that's as close as I can find to a sentiment like the one attributed to Tyson in this meme, and it's not very close.  It's an article of faith among scientists that the universe does make sense, if you study it hard enough and interpret the data correctly -- which is basically what fundamentalists believe about their scriptures.  I say "an article of faith" because it's an animating premise of the scientific quest, not a conclusion based on a coldly rational evaluation of all the data.  I think it's a fine article of faith as such things go, but for me it's a presumption, a starting point which can be proven false.

Even more, the statement in the meme is one that many religious believers would agree with, at least as far as lip service: they'd just substitute "God" for "the Universe."  The practice, for the spiritual as for the devotee of science, is more ambivalent: on one hand we are nothing, mere dust in the cosmic perspective; on the other, we have been granted insight and knowledge by the Most High.  The religiosity of the sentiment doesn't prove that Tyson didn't say it, of course, but that a scientist said it doesn't make it true either.

One Cannot Go Against the Word of the Internet

Getting away from religion isn't as easy as many of my fellow atheists like to think, though, mainly because religion isn't a discrete entity that has nothing in common with other human cultural inventions.  Culture isn't made up of discrete entities, though: everything overlaps.  Sometimes you can find clear cases, but they're only part of the picture; the boundaries between the categories aren't clearly defined.  (Even putting it that way assumes that the categories have clear cases at the center, with those pesky permeable boundaries at the edges -- but this picture can only be drawn after a lot of sorting and organization of the instances.)

When I call some idea "religious" in a dismissive and derogatory way, I'm guilty of the same failing: I mean (and should probably say instead) that the idea is woolly, irrational, emotionally derived, etc.  I've often called the geek debates over the virtues of Macintoshes vs. Microsoft "theological," for example, to suggest that they are like the supposed medieval debates over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (though those debates were probably more rational than Mac vs. PC: the Scholastics were smarter and more rational than today's computer fanatics).  It's convenient to use "religious" or "theological" this way because they've acquired such connotations.  It would be just as accurate to to call anthropomorphizing and teleological thinking "scientific," because these tendencies are just as common among scientists as they are among the conventionally religious, without being universal in either group -- but if I did, how many people would recognize that I was being derisive?  Calling something "scientific" is supposed to be praise.

I'd do better to stick to terms like "anthropomorphic" and "teleological" in such cases.  Anthropomorphizing is what's mainly on my mind today, anyway: speaking of "Nature" or "Science" or "Religion" or "Natural Selection" or "Globalization" or "the Internet" as though they were conscious agents, instead of impersonal abstractions.  I recently read a fascinating new book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov, published this year by PublicAffairs.  Both his critics and his fans notice how much he's read, though I don't believe he's any more learned than, say, Mike Davis or any number of other scholars who write for an educated general audience.  I've already noted several books he refers to that I'd like to read, though -- just what I don't need.  Anyway, it looks to me like Morozov has done a normal and reasonable amount of reading for a book about a big subject; those who marvel at his erudition may not have been aware that there were all these relevant tomes out there -- unless, like some of Noam Chomsky's critics, they're indulging in anti-intellectualism: why does he have to include all those footnotes, and use all those big words?  It's so inappropriate and unnecessary.

To Save Everything, Click Here is about the cult of "the Internet," about the assumption that the Internet is an entity, and in particular that it's a new one.  Morozov quotes numerous evangelists of the Internet who personify it, such as Jeff Jarvis: "I’m a befuddled [sic] over the roots of the curmudgeons’ one-sided debate. Why do they so object to tools being given credit? Are they really objecting, instead, to technology as an agent of change, shifting power from incumbents to insurgents? Why should I care about their complaints? I am confident that these tools have been used by the revolutionaries and have a role. What’s more interesting is to ask what that role is, what that impact is" (Morozov, 56).

Technology, or a given tool, can't be an agent: they can be used by agents, but that's not the same thing.  (Notice too Jarvis's reference to "tools being given credit.")  A word like "medium" would work better than "agent" here.  Much of Morozov's argument is directed against the notion that "the Internet" is an agent in this sense: something autonomous, goal-directed, with its own determining "logic" driving social change in the direction it chooses, before which we must humble ourselves and submit.

One of the best features of To Save Everything, Click Here is Morosov's account of the history of technology and its reception, demolishing the Internet evangelists' claims that the Internet is totally unprecedented.

The debates over electricity were, in fact, as dramatic and bizarre as the debates we are currently having about “the Internet,” its democratic potential, and its effect on our brains.  How else to explain the publication of a book like The Silent Revolution, or the Future Effects of Steam and Electricity upon the Condition of Mankind – in 1852! – which promised “social harmony of humanity” on the basis of a “perfect network of electric filaments.”  Or what to make of the fact that Patrick Geddes, Petr Kropotkin, and other nineteenth-century thinkers believed that electricity would usher in a brand-new age of neotechnics, where, to quote French historian Armand Mattelar, “town and country, work and leisure, brain and hand” would be reconciled?  Or what to do with Nazi engineers like Franz Lawaczeck, a founding father of the National Socialist engineers’ association, who believed that the Third Reich could promote small farms and businesses, thus encouraging a decentralization of society, by generating an abundance of cheap electricity?  This is not to mention the complex and controversial history, itself full of protracted battles and rancorous debates, over the physical infrastructure that made electricity widely available.  Only by papering over and suppressing such history can we see “the Internet” as unique and exotic [44-5].

Morosov also confirms a long-held suspicion of mine about the thinness of young people's technological competence:

Several studies show that, of all age groups, young people tend to be least informed about many aspects of digital culture.  For example, a 2010 study that investigated what users know about online privacy found that “among all age groups, higher proportions of the eighteen--twenty-four-year-olds had the poorest understanding of the privacy policy label and the right of companies to sell or share their data with other firms.”  As one of the study’s authors put it, “The online savvy many attribute to younger individuals (so-called digital natives) doesn’t appear to translate to privacy knowledge.”  In other words, it’s not that young people don’t care about privacy – they do – they just don’t have the digital savvy that Tapscott and Williams attribute to them.  These conclusions are echoed in a recent study from the European Commission that also found young people lacking in many digital competencies.  A 2009 empirical study of students at five British universities found that “it is far too simplistic to describe young first-year students born after 1983 as a single generation …. [They are] not homogenous in [their] use and appreciation of new technologies and … there are significant variations amongst students that lie within the Net generation age band.”  But conducting such studies, of course, is not as sexy as musing on “the digital revolution that is changing every institution in society.”  The latter probably pays better, too [46].

Or again, "technology pundit Kevin Kelly"

notes that “the Protestant Reformation makes for good allegory because it separates power from control; it draws on stories of catechism and ritual, alphabets, pamphlets and liturgies, indulgences and self-help in order to give geeks a way to make sense of the distinction between power and control, and how it relates to the technical and political economy they occupy.”  This is why, in many a geek debate, the state is recast as the monarchy, large corporations as the Catholic Church, startups and programmers as Protestant reformers, and the laity as “lusers” and “sheeple.”  Kelly believes that such stories are popular with geeks because they “explain a political, technical, legal situation that does not have ready-to-narrate stories” [52].

But they also explain that situation in terms that flatter the geeks' inflated sense of elite status and entitlement.

I'm not totally enamored of Morosov; I started to read his previous book, The Net Delusion, and was turned off right away by some dubious statements.  But To Save Everything, Click Here is a valuable survey and critique of what David F. Noble called the Religion of Technology.

Highbrow Drag

Here's a funny tidbit that echoes what I hear about the supposed destructive cultural effects of TV and the Internet.  I'm reading Jaime Harker's Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America (Minnesota, 2013), which at one point describes the effects of cheap paperbacks on American literacy and literature.  Like the Internet, they were cheap, gaudy, ubiquitous (sold in drugstores and supermarkets), and indiscriminate -- one might even say promiscuous.  Certainly they fed my own promiscuous reading tendencies, back in the day.  Publishers put sleazy covers on everything, whether it was pulp genre fiction ground out under a pseudonym for a flat fee of a few hundred dollars -- Gore Vidal wrote three murder mysteries under the name Edgar Box when he needed some quick money in the 1950s -- or reprints of the Kinsey reports (Harker seems to think The Kinsey Report was the actual title of those volumes), Jean-Paul Sartre's novels, or recent literary fiction.

The 1950s, when this trend took off, were a period of anxiety about cultural values, and would-be highbrows were displeased about this.  Literature was supposed to be serious, dull, and ideally difficult to read.  It wasn't supposed to have covers with "the shoulder straps of women's dresses and brassieres ... always loose, slipping, or undone" (Harker, 36).  The flood of paperbacks included a lot of gay and lesbian fiction of varying degrees of quality, and since quantity mattered more than quality, the usual publishing censorship often slipped, like the bra straps of the women on their covers.

Cold War gay print culture was visible, lucrative, and influential, even if it wasn't celebratory.  It also contributed to a larger breakdown of cultural hierarchies in its leveling of literary reprints and paperback originals.  It was the threat this lack of distinction posted to Cold War cultural hierarchies that worried Cold Warriors like Malcolm Cowley, much more so than deviant sex.  Cowley's description of a paperback bookstore highlights his concern about discrimination in brow level: "It was rich, random, gaudy, vital, corrupt, and at the same time innocent: it put culture at the disposal of the plain man, even the poorest, for less than the price of a bar whiskey; it was impersonal, friendly, egalitarian, and it proclaimed as dogmas its lack of discrimination.  'Here we are,' the books in the big racks seemed to be saying, 'the mud and sapphires of our time, and for one or two pieces of silver you can take your pick of us."  Cowley's concern about cultural hierarchy echoes those of Cold War intellectuals: democratic access equals an utter "lack of discrimination," one that cultural critics saw as the biggest threat to American life.  As David Earle astutely notes, "What Cowley is doing in these pages is policing the cultural borders between elite literature and popular literature.  He is, as it were, protecting his own intellectual and professional stake in American culture and letters."

... A remarkable number of writers being canonized during the Cold War appeared in paperback reprints, including James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway [47].

There's a lot going on here, but for now I want to point out what I see as the parallel to concerns about the Internet today: there's this flood of material being thrown out there where just anybody can get at it, and there's no proper supervision to teach the lower orders what they should choose and what they should avoid.  It's not just about children: a lot of the worry is about adults who lack the moral fiber to discern good from bad.  This is nothing new, of course.  It goes back to the explosion of print in previous centuries, but even before the invention of printing books were burned -- probably in every country that had them -- to try to keep the unruly written word in bounds.

As always, who watches the watchers?  Literature was still an unquestioned boys' club during the Cold War, so Cowley's "plain man" should be read literally, even though women have always been big readers, and writers as well.  But the Woman Writer was as suspicious to the boys in this period who sought to be Truly Serious as the Homosexual Writer, the Jewish Writer, the Negro Writer.  I'll return to this later on.

The Power of Critical Thinking

One reason I'm so skeptical when people claim that the Internet has somehow sapped our precious critical fluids, and that people are now more credulous than they used to be is that I'm old enough to remember the days before the Internet.  One famous case is that of the petition allegedly filed with the Federal Communication Commission by the atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair to ban all religious broadcasting from the airwaves, so all faithful Christians should write the FCC right now!!!  As Snopes.com explains if you want the details, this hoax goes back to at least 1975, long before the Internet became accessible to ordinary mortals.  Though the hoax was debunked many times, the FCC received more than 30 million pieces of mail decrying the nonexistent attempt to ban religious broadcasting.  That's thirty million, and all without e-mail or Facebook.  It may well be that the Internet has made it easier for such rumors to spread, but word-of-mouth, photocopying machines, and radio evangelists did quite well without microprocessors and fiber optics, thank you very much.  In the absence of evidence that people are more gullible than they used to be -- which I haven't seen, and I don't know how you'd try to prove the claim -- I think it's fair to presume that people have always been willing to believe absurd things.  The history of religion alone gives plenty of evidence in favor of my opinion, and I'm inclined to cite the frequent and unsubstantiated claim that people are more gullible or more stupid than they used to be as more evidence in itself.

I've just begun reading Helen Merrick's The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms (Aqueduct Press, 2009), which attempts to trace women's participation in the world of science fiction not only through the women who wrote it, but through the women who participated in fandom.  I came across a reference to the book while I was rereading Joanna Russ's The Female Man last month, and so far I'm enjoying it.  Among much else, Merrick recounts the genesis of probably the first women's fanzine, Femizine, in England in the summer of 1954.  Also pre-Internet, you'll notice.  There were three editors, but the editorial manifesto in the first issue "was signed by the main editor, Joan W. Carr 'on behalf of all femme fans' (and co-editors Frances Evans and Ethel Lindsay)" (90).

Reading this zine for evidence of the interests and passions of female fans of the 1950s is, however, complicated by the fact that Joan W. Carr was not, in fact a woman, but a hoax, a fictional persona created by male fan Sandy Sanderson.  While Frances Evans was aware of Carr's real identity, co-editor Lindsay initially was not, and the hoax was not revealed to UK fandom and the readers of Femizine until May 1956 [91].

Femizine turned out to be very popular, drawing up to 100 fan letters for each issue.  (The letters pages of sf magazines and fanzines back then were the forerunners of the computer bulletin board and Usenet decades later, both in terms of their style and of their demographic.)  The editors exploded the hoax themselves in the summer 1956 issue, and to their relief, "fannish reaction to the hoax was not the catastrophe Evans and Lindsay feared ... That the response of women fans was not as bad as the editors feared may have been due to the fact that many had secretly not found "Joan" as enticing as the men [did]."  One female fan commented that "Not everyone liked Joan wholeheartedly.  My own reaction was that she was another of those masculine sergeant-type women -- horribly competent and out to prove they are as good as any man by acting like a man!" (92-3).  Femizine stopped publication for a while, then restarted in September 1958 and ran for two more years.

This is a relatively benign and minor deception, but it shows that the written word, whether printed or mimeographed, can provide the same kind of anonymity that the Internet does now.  And people tend to believe what they read, and what they hear.  (Most of the time, anyway: the biblical scholar James Barr pointed out that though fundamentalist Christians deplore the materialist, secularist skepticism that doubts the literal reality of the biblical miracles, they are harshly and scornfully skeptical of miracle stories outside the Bible, whether in Catholic lives of the saints, "heretical" Christian writings, or "pagan" mythology.  Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have nothing on them.)  In a way that's neither surprising nor foolish: we are social animals, and trust is the glue that lets us communicate with each other.  But it is also surprising and foolish.  One of the primary uses of language is to lie, and children figure out how to do it themselves before they learn to distrust their parents on Santa Claus or other official lies.  We couldn't survive if we decided to disbelieve automatically everything anyone says to us; but we'll get into trouble if we believe everything automatically.  We have to learn to use judgment, which means learning to use reason and evidence but doesn't stop there.  It takes experience and intuition, which must be cultivated throughout one's life.  But the right kind of skeptical, critical judgment will be discouraged forcefully by some or most of the people around us, starting with our parents, so it's hardly surprising that most people never really learn it.

There's an Echo in Here!

Ah, I knew there was something else I'd been meaning to write about.

Kim Brooks, whose reflections on the uselessness of high school English classes I discussed some time ago, returned to Salon last weekend with weeping and lamentation over ... erm, well, her own narrow-mindedness and intolerance on Facebook. The given title was "Is my Facebook page a liberal echo chamber?"

She'd found herself in what is probably a common situation for us older people who've been out of school for a few decades and didn't construct our school environment around the Internet from the start, because it didn't exist back then: she was re-establishing contact with people she knew in high school. She questioned the decision at first but then figured, What the hell, why not? I did pretty much the same thing when I began getting friend invitations on Facebook from high school acquaintances a few months after I joined.

She quickly learned why not.

President Obama had just given a televised speech on the economy, and this particular gentleman, someone I’d never known well but with whom I’d shared a neighborhood and a classroom for most of kindergarten through 12th grade, a fellow I remember as being pleasant, a bit on the quiet side, a member of the marching band, certainly not a bully or a jerk, had written, “Just turned off the t.v. More lies from B. Hussein Obama.” Within a few minutes, 10 people had “liked” this comment. Within a few more minutes, others had begun to add comments of their own, nearly all of which made reference to the president’s skin color, “questionable” national origin, or socialist death-panel agenda. I nearly fell out of my chair. My heart was racing. I squinted at the screen. I read the comments again and again. This was the real deal, not on Fox News but right here on MY computer, on MY Facebook page. I’d invited it in, that horrible place I’d left the day I graduated from high school. I looked down at my keyboard and saw that my hands were shaking. I decided to add a comment of my own: “Don’t like! Boy, am I glad I don’t live in Richmond anymore. You are un-friended!”

My own situation was different. I expected to see such things. But then I've been using the Internet for twenty-five years. I've spent a lot of time reading the subliterate ravings of people I hadn't gone to school with, but might have, and learning to deal with them, to call them out when they lie, to point out when they've passed along a well-discredited legend, to read with care what they replied, and to try to answer them without jerking my left-wing knee too much. I've also debated people who fall on the same place of the political spectrum as I do; there's no guarantee that we'll always agree with each other. This has been useful, if only to hone my own arguments, but also to make sure that I hear the views of people with different perspectives.

But I also had the advantage of spending thirty-seven years working with college students from all over the world (and contrary to popular stereotypes, not all college students are liberal hippies), but also with plenty of good old boys and gals from Southern Indiana (and contrary to popular stereotypes, not all good old Hoosiers are right-wing rednecks). Not only that but working on, and eventually running, the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Speakers Bureau put me regularly in front of audiences that included everyone from raving homophobes to the children of gay or lesbian parents. Since we provide panels, not solitary speakers, I was sharing the stage with gay people who ranged from fellow Gay Liberationists to the (former) president of College Republicans. (He was kicked out of the organization and pulled from school by his parents when word got around that he was gay.) A lot of those people are in my Facebook friends list now. So my Facebook page, let alone my world, is not a liberal echo chamber.

I can't say the same for Our Ms. Brooks. Not only her Facebook page, but her life is evidently structured so as to protect her from people with differing values and opinions.

As an angsty teenager and college student, I used to mock people who lived in gated communities, who were so afraid of the unfamiliar world they had to erect a physical boundary to keep it at bay. But now I wonder, aren’t the boundaries we draw with Facebook just as secure as a man-made moat or an underpaid security guard manning a booth? Was the daily back-and-forth on my Facebook feed really a conversation, or was it no more than an echo chamber?

... In a world of friending and unfriending, the 99 percent versus the 53 percent, Obama as antichrist against Obama as savior, who, I wonder, has the tolerance anymore for such messy contradictions, such tainted, imperfect kinships? Who has the patience?

The most pertinent response to this, I think, would be "What do you mean 'we', white woman?" The only person in her article she really can point to who fits this picture is herself. Not that she's alone -- far from it. I've been unfriended for True Political Incorrectness by a few people on Facebook myself. The only person I've unfriended was a former co-worker who moved to another state and sent me a friend invitation before he found Jesus and began spamming his feed with Bible quotations, self-pitying inspirational soundbytes, and overtly racist anti-Obama material. He attacked me when I commented critically on his postings, so when I found that blocking his Bible feed wasn't enough to stem the flood of swill, I finally unfriended him.

As those who read this blog will know, though, I have plenty of contact with other right-wingers on Facebook, such as my two Right Wing Acquaintances. They've given me a lot of material, which saves me the trouble of browsing the Right's propaganda mills; RWA1 especially gives me what he considers the cream of the crop, the serious commentators, so he can't accuse me of cherrypicking ignorant yahoos. Then there's my Tabloid Friend, who's one of several Obama stalwarts in my Friends list. I've also got my high school friends, most of whom are simple Republican fundamentalists, though there's also the middle-of-the-road minister and his wife and a Randite high school teacher who recently moved from teaching Army brats in Europe to a different environment in Africa. I don't respond critically to everything they post, but when it seems proper, I do. Some have defriended me, others ignore me, and I'm having real (though virtual) conversations with some others. With War on Christmas Season less than a month away, I'm sure things are going to heat up again.

Who has the tolerance, who has the patience? Well, I do, for one. But so do the people who put up with me, online and face to face. Kim Brooks is overgeneralizing and oversimplifying from far too small a sample: a sample of one. What disturbs me is that she's not just a Salon pundit; she's also been a college writing instructor -- might still be, for all I know -- and not in the Ivy League, but in community colleges, which aren't exactly liberal hothouses either. She must have been a really involved, empathetic teacher if she never noticed that her students didn't always agree with her politics.

One more thing, though: there's no reason why anyone's Facebook page has to be an arena for debate or the broadcast of opinions (whether your own or your friends'). That's one reason, apart from shyness, that I usually wait until people I knew in high school invite me on Facebook; and when I accept their invitations, I don't grill them on their political or religious positions to ensure they meet my high standards. They'll see some of my opinions expressed in my newsfeed soon enough, and they're welcome to react. I wait to see how they use Facebook, and if they only post photos of their grandchildren and Youtube videos of cute kittens or Top 40 hits from our youth, then butter won't melt in my mouth. If they start posting stuff about Illegal Immigrants Who Don't Pay Taxes, or the Kenyan Usurper banning Christmas Trees from the White House, though, they've entered the arena of debate.

So I don't object to Kim Brooks defriending anybody whose politics she dislikes, any more than she should object if they do the same to her. What I object to is her projecting her own hatred of difference onto everyone else, as though she weren't responsible for her own opinions and actions. (I suspect her freakout over commas is not entirely unrelated to this.) I realize that many people think of stating their opinions in public as an invitation to social bonding: You and I both agree that Meskins are dirty and should go back home, right? The homosexuals want to bring America to her knees and force their radical agenda down her throat, don't they? They need to learn that they won't always get the agreement they seek. I've gotten used to it; so can they. And now that I think about it, that's probably what Brooks was doing in this and her other essays for Salon: We're all intolerant, aren't we? All mothers are Jewish mothers, aren't they -- really? People who can't use commas correctly are low-class and stupid, aren't they? Well, since you ask ...