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February 14, 2011
Selfhood and the Net
Adam Gopnik’s piece in the current (2/14 & 21) New Yorker raises a pertinent but perennial question: “Does the internet change the way we think?” (It’s perennial because he quickly acknowledges that the real question is whether new media technologies in every age—from Guttenberg to television—change the way we think (and relate to each other)? In digging to the answer he surveys an array of books on the issue, categorizing them according to their relative optimism, pessimism, or historically tempered acquiescence. Ultimately, after leading us through the jungle of naysaying worrywarts and techno-Pollyannas, he chooses not to answer the question but to recast it to suit his own disposition for reasonableness and moderation: it (and all such technology)is only dangerous if we let it take over our lives—as all such media is want to do.
It is the wraparound presence, not the specific evils, of the machine that oppresses us. Simply reducing the machine’s presence will go a long way toward alleviating the disorder. Which points, in turn, to a dog-not-barking-in-the-nighttime detail that may be significant. In the Better-Never books, television isn’t scanted or ignored; it’s celebrated. When William Powers, in “Hamlet’s BlackBerry,” describes the deal his family makes to have an Unplugged Sunday, he tells us that the No Screens agreement doesn’t include television: “For us, television had always been a mostly communal experience, a way of coming together rather than pulling apart.” (“Can you please turn off your damn computer and come watch television with the rest of the family,” the dad now cries to the teen-ager.)It’s actually a smart position. And despite the fact that he gets there by being a little too glib about some very real concerns—such as the prospect that the use of particular technologies may actually effect changes in cognitive structure—he also stumbles upon a very important insight: the erosion of the public/private dichotomy of selfhood.
Yet everything that is said about the Internet’s destruction of “interiority” was said for decades about television, and just as loudly. Jerry Mander’s “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” in the nineteen-seventies, turned on television’s addictive nature and its destruction of viewers’ inner lives; a little later, George Trow proposed that television produced the absence of context, the disintegration of the frame—the very things, in short, that the Internet is doing now. And Bill McKibben ended his book on television by comparing watching TV to watching ducks on a pond (advantage: ducks), in the same spirit in which Nicholas Carr leaves his computer screen to read “Walden.”
Yet surely having something wrapped right around your mind is different from having your mind wrapped tightly around something. What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. The things that have usually lived in the darker recesses or mad corners of our mind—sexual obsessions and conspiracy theories, paranoid fixations and fetishes—are now out there: you click once and you can read about the Kennedy autopsy or the Nazi salute or hog-tied Swedish flight attendants. But things that were once external and subject to the social rules of caution and embarrassment—above all, our interactions with other people—are now easily internalized, made to feel like mere workings of the id left on its own. (I’ve felt this myself, writing anonymously on hockey forums: it is easy to say vile things about Gary Bettman, the commissioner of the N.H.L., with a feeling of glee rather than with a sober sense that what you’re saying should be tempered by a little truth and reflection.) Thus the limitless malice of Internet commenting: it’s not newly unleashed anger but what we all think in the first order, and have always in the past socially restrained if only thanks to the look on the listener’s face—the monstrous music that runs through our minds is now played out loud.
Most of us, I suspect, grow up with a reasonably firm grasp of the distinction between our public selves and our private selves, our inside voice and our outside voice, the way we talk around the dinner table and the way we talk in school. But never before have we had such an opportunity to expand the scope and reach of that outside self. Whereas once that self might be restricted to school, church, or the workplace—and the purposes, rules, and subject matter that generally attend those places—now we are all enabled to speak on all manner of public issues and be heard (potentially, at least) across the globe. This is all well and good, except that we are also enabled to remain utterly and completely private while doing so.
Posted by stevemack at February 14, 2011 01:04 PM
