The internet and its enemies

Christian Lorentzen

• Last Updated: July 10. 2008 9:13PM UAE / July 10. 2008 5:13PM GMT

A hive mind is a terrible thing to waste: young people apparently oblivious to the risks of online life at a Beijing internet cafe. AP Photo

Can we speak of an Internet Mind? That would be to speak of a mind formed by the perusing of websites, the clicking of links, the sending and receiving of e-mails, the typing of instantaneous chats. We would be speaking of a searcher – that is, one who types words into the box of a search engine. We might also be speaking of a shopper – someone who uses his computer as a means of consumption.

Then there is that famous new species, the blogger – the citizen who has accepted the burden of informing the public of his opinions or emotions and providing pictures of his children and pets. Today some of these oversharers ply their trade professionally – waking up at dawn to ingest prescription stimulants in order to post vast amounts of commentary and confession in quest of the page views that earn them their keep. Or we could be talking about a troll – those who rove cyberspace to fling anonymous invective at strangers in comment threads and on message boards. None of these categories account for the relatively recent rise of video on the internet, which has unleashed a horde of vloggers, monologists, zit poppers, and people who like to put Mentos into Pepsi bottles and watch the fizz explode. I have neglected to mention podcasts, social networking, Nigerian spammers, gaming, and Second Life.

What are the qualities of the Internet Mind? Is it moral? Intelligent? Independent? These questions have of late been the occasion for anxiety bordering on hysteria in what the Internet Mind calls the MSM. “Is Google making us stupid?” asked Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic. Mark Bauerlein, an English professor, has published The Dumbest Generation, blaming the internet for a decline in reading and a swelling of narcissism among American undergraduates. In Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, Lee Siegel, a literary critic, issues a Churchillian warning against what he has termed blogofascism.

These three variations – the internet is making you dumb; the internet is making your kid dumb; the internet is rounding up a gang of goose-stepping dummies to lynch you the moment you step out of line – are the latest memes in an ongoing debate about whether the internet is a corrosive agent hollowing out human culture or a messianic force delivering us to wireless liberation.

But let’s assume for a moment that the Internet Mind exists within a recognisably human range of morality, intelligence, and inclination toward conformity. Let’s grant the Internet Mind free will. Its signature quality, then, is amplification. The internet has made it easy to be an idiot in public. It has made it easier for the mob-inclined to meet up and sound off. It has facilitated every sort of temptation. The Internet Mind is tempted perpetually – tempted to rant, to vent, to skim, to gawk. To click and click and click and click.

Skimming and clicking are the vices that worry Nicholas Carr. “My mind isn’t going, but it’s changing,” he writes. “I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading... Now my concentration starts to drift off after two or three pages.” He blames this on his “spending a lot of time online” and lines up a few acquaintances who complain of similar afflictions. He admits to being without much science to back his hunch, but cites a British study that online research more often takes the form of “power browsing” than “reading in the traditional sense”. Well, skimming until you come upon a useful fact has always been an efficient way to conduct research. The web streamlines it. But Carr frets that he may be losing his very ability to read “lengthy articles and books” as if he were powerless before the magnetic pull of the various headlines in his RSS feeds. Reading on the web “is a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking – perhaps even a new sense of self... We can expect that the [mental] circuits woven by our use of the net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.” In Carr’s McLuhan-fed vision of technological determinism, the Internet Mind has no will save the will to click.

A computer is an all-purpose tool, but at a fundamental level it is a time-spending machine. When I was growing up, a stigma was attached to spending too much time in front of a screen, which back then, in the days of the Apple IIe, tended to be lit in green on black. One was called a “nerd”. Today the full-colour glow of the laptop beckons the Internet Mind to indulge in a fitful form of leisure. At a recent panel discussion in New York the journalist Caleb Crain said, “Reading online does not seem to me to be a pleasure in itself but a response to irritation. That is, it is not like eating an ice cream cone; it is like scratching an itch.” Carr has become a man who would rather have a rash than eat an ice cream cone. Or he’s caught a rash that stifles his appetite for ice cream. He seems oblivious to the possibility that the decline of book-reading may be a matter of choice, and that most of those reading the internet would not otherwise be engaged in devouring the classics. How many are putting down copies of, say, War and Peace or Persuasion to read the Drudge Report?

But what about the children? cry Cassandras like Mark Bauerlein. They might be addicted to Facebook before they ever pick up Moby-Dick. “Going online habituates them to juvenile mental habits.” That such habits might as easily be obtained offline, in dormitories, locker-rooms, in front of the television, or smoking cigarettes down by the railway tracks is, in his conception of the Internet Mind, beside the point. But the vector of American culture and of every culture it has touched since at least the birth of rock ’n’ roll has been toward the adolescent. The internet at least allows access to mature culture (in the clean sense) to those precocious adolescents who go looking for it.

My younger self might have enjoyed reading the sort of publications that never made it to our doorstep when I was a boy: the small-circulation journals of opinion that discuss and dissect the culture. These organs have since been subsumed by the internet, and their readerships have swollen. But whereas niche entities have been popularised by the internet, pop phenomena have been propelled into ubiquity.

And it is mass popularity, and the Internet Mind’s capacity to amplify it through “groupthink” that worries critics like Siegel. But in its most popular aspects the internet may not be so different from television, which today often takes its cues from those trends that gain large audiences online. But television is a passive vice, broadcast for mass consumption, tailored to the whims of the masses.

“TV,” David Foster Wallace has said, “is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.” The difference between the Television Mind and the Internet Mind is that the latter has access to the vulgar and prurient and dumb as well as the refined and aesthetic and noble elements of culture. And unlike TV, the internet fosters a culture of participation that, though it may lead the majority to public displays of vulgarity, banality, and idiocy, draws enough talented people to noble pursuits in what might be called the “online underground” to give credence to the claims of the cyber-Utopians. The Internet Mind then is a craven, stupid, obedient thing – except in the frequent instances when it is compassionate, subtle, and free.

Christian Lorentzen is a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine