Entangled Alliances

photo credit: Bull3t

Is the Internet an amazing force for good? Or is it more problematic than people realise? Over the past year or so there’s been a trend in the mainstream press for articles which claimed the latter. For a while this took the form of pieces which asked the question: “Is Google making us stupid?”, the absurd premise of which could only fully be appreciated if you’d used Google itself to find the article, in which case you had to concede that yes, on this occasion it had made you stupid.

Another prevalent form of Internet-bashing has been to take all the things which web-sceptics like to moan about – google, twitter, free stuff, those cocky bloggers etc – and somehow crush them together until you come up with an overarching set of characteristics that proves your theory that the Internet is inherently bad – or at least not as great as those naive, over-eager youngsters keep claiming.

A classic example of this appeared in the Sunday Times last week as a piece by Bryan Appleyard titled “Break free of this world wide delusion” which perfectly highlights the problems with this trend of mainstream-journalists-casting doubt-on-the-Internet. Appleyard’s thesis, in so far as one exists, is that the idea of the web as a revolutionary tool is wrong and dangerous. As proof of this, he takes the reader on an eclectic journey of the usual bugbears of net-bashers. Take, for example, his view on blogging:

Blogging, tweeting and Facebooking all give the individual the unprecedented opportunity to blather to the entire world [...] The first objection to this is that it destroys institutions and structures that can do so much more than the individual.

Okay, so the web is promoting individuality at the expense of the communal value of institutions. This point is so valid and awesome that Appleyard  feels the need to contradict it only one paragaph later:

A further objection to the cult’s radical individualism is that it doesn’t have the intended hyper-democratic consequences. Wikipedia, for example, has tackled inaccuracy and subversion by introducing forms of authority and control that would seem to be anathema to its founding ideals. Bloggery is forming itself into big, institutionalised aggregators such as The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, and remains utterly parasitic on the mainstream media it affects to despise.

So, to summarise, the web’s promotion of individuality is destroying institutions, resulting in… the forming of large institutions! But Appleyard hasn’t finished attributing contradictory values to the web:

The slightly more sinister aspect of this is that excessive individualism leads with astonishing rapidity to slavish conformity. The banking crisis may not have been caused by the Internet but it was certainly fuelled by the way connectivity and speed created a market in which everybody was gripped by the hysteria of the herd

Have you got that? The web’s emphasis on individuality is bad… but it leads (somehow) to conformity… which is also bad! Wow, the Internet really can’t win, can it? What’s particularly interesting about the above quote is how it takes a natural technological progression – the web tells more people about more stuff more quickly – and construes this as a cause of hysteria-inducing conformity. You can imagine similar complaints when the telephone was invented- people talking to each other across continents? Oh, the chaos that will lead to!

But there’s a bigger point here and that’s the fact that the web is neither good nor bad. It’s just a platform on which society imprints itself. And by that I mean you won’t see anything on the Internet that you don’t already get in the real world- the web just gives you much more of it, for good or for ill.  Interestingly, Appleyard seems to get this:

[...] the web is just one more product of the biology, culture and history that make us what we are. In the real world, it is wonderful, certainly, but it is also porn, online brothels, privacy invasions, hucksterism, mindless babble and the vacant gaze that always accompanies the mindless pursuit of the new.

Patronising tone aside (“mindless pursuit of the new”, indeed!), Appleyard is more or less bang on here. What a shame he spent the entire article arguing against himself. After spending paragraphs lamenting the way the web is changing the way we behave and interact for the worse, he concludes that actually the web itself can’t really change anything. Perhaps aware of the contradiction inherent in this, Appleyard tries to separate “the world wide web” from what he refers to as “Web 2.0″:

Twenty years have passed since Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the world wide web. From 1989 to 2000 it grew exponentially. Then it crashed, and bright-eyed, cash-burning dotcoms across the world went bust. From the ashes emerged web 2.0, a cult created, engineered and run by Californians. This can be defined in many ways, but its principal features are, as with everything else in California, freedom, personal expression, letting it all hang out and making shedloads of wonga.

If you’re wondering when this new “cult” of Web 2.0 was set up, or how the Californians managed to create and control their vast empire of let-it-all-hang-out blogging, social networking and general interaction, then stop. Web 2.0 does not exist. The dot com stocks may have crashed, but the Internet carried on just fine, thank you very much. Web 2.0 is just a meaningless marketing gimmick that Appleyard appears to have taken to heart in order to link  all his gripes about the Internet into one single, California-driven plot to shove these scary new values like excessive individuality down our throats. In fact, since Appleyard mentions the inventor of the world-wide-web, Tim Berners Lee, let’s see what the man himself has to say on the matter:

I think Web 2.0 is, of course, a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along

What I don’t understand about all this is what has compelled so many journalists to come up with such distorted arguments in order to satisfy their burning desire to take the web down a peg or two. One possible reason, which I suspect might be behind the prevalence of attacks on the Internet, is the effect the “threat” of the blogosphere has on many members of the mainstream press. This fear of bloggers is very much evident in Appleyard’s article, particularly when he favourably quotes the  writer Clive James:

“After Lehman Brothers crashed,” he says, “The Wall Street Journal carried an analysis that is still the best thing I have seen on the subject. But the story needed half a dozen qualified financial journalists to put it together, and masses of research that no lonely blogger could possibly do . . . This throws into relief the intractable fact that the liberty which the web offers to the individual voice is also a restriction on group effort.”

This isn’t true and misses the point. Some blogs do operate as de facto newspapers with a large investigative team of reporters – Talking Points Memo is a good example of this. The Huffington Post – whom you will recall Appleyard himself called a “big, insitutionalised aggregator” – now gets questions at Obama press conferences. Some bloggers even manage on their lonesome to become particular experts on an issue – US blogger Marcy Wheeler’s phenomenal, mainstream press trouncing coverage of the trial of Dick Cheney underling Scooter Libby is a prime example. But of course the majority of blogs cannot do, in terms of resources, what the major papers – from the New York Times to The Sunday Times – can do. But then that’s not their purpose. Most blogs are there to provide the kind of enlightening, diverse and high-quality commentary that’s been so sorely lacking in the traditional media. Sure, the blogosphere produces a lot of dross, but it also results in a lot of opinion and commentary that is more than the equal of the traditional press.

This fact scares many journalists and it might well be the cause of articles like Appleyard’s. Or maybe he’s right, and we’re all in fact victims of this scary Californian cult of individualism and one day we’ll wake up to find we’ve all been twittered away to a land of endless blogs and wikipedia entries as far as the eye can see. You have been warned…