Our Internet Obsession Is Making Us Stupid

In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times Pico Iyer wrote about “The Tyranny of the Moment” and in The New York Times Magazine Walter Kirn penned a piece, “A Facebook Christmas Love Story.” Both articles took slightly different views of technology and are well worth reading.

They reminded me of how the Internet has changed the way we live and think. Of course, we are reminded of the Information Age constantly in the media. The print-centric media constantly fingers its collective worry beads about the Internet. Social networking sites like Twitter and the easy access of news is a media obsession–the job of a journalist has been de-valued by society while we applaud the “democratization” of our news. Iyer talks about perusing the Internet and that the result is that he is “wildly stimulated, excitingly up-to-the-moment, alive with ideas — and with no time or space to hear [himself] think.” It is difficult to argue that we are really better informed, which was pointed out by Frank Rich in the Sunday Times. He wrote a wickedly right-on commentary about Tiger Woods and our flawed decade. Despite the adversity the Internet has brought to my profession, I have always had the attitude that the more information the better. But our track record since the birth of the Web points to a society that is easily suckered (Iraq, the housing bubble, Enron, “intelligent design”…and now Tiger Woods) while wallowing in quote-unquote information. We are connected yet untethered when it comes to reality. Just because people can express their opinions does not mean their thoughts have much value, and yet our pride in knowledge equality has taken precedent over everything. It’s not the Internet’s fault, it is the way we obsess over real-time data. It is the misguided way we are using our time. Something is missing.

For all the good it brings, we need to reassess the impact of the Internet on our culture. For example, it is all too easy to say that the Internet democratizes the book business and anyone can create a book and get it published. This has become part of the lore of the Internet times. (People also say this about the music business and newspapers.) This might be correct and even feed into our cultural identification of equality, but most people don’t buy self-published books, the quality of books is lower, and the impact of the self-publishing movement means much less money in the system for the truly talented, from writers to top-notch editors. While it is convenient to view movies, books, and articles as produced by individuals, there needs to be an infrastucture to create the best work. The infrastructure is disappearing and there are no “pay models” to solve this issue. We are willing to give it all away. Consumers don’t really care because they figure the best writers will rise to the top and the information is free, but that argument is becoming less clear as our cultural industries stumble through this decade and beyond. The reflective argument for the last several years has been to rail against the “media elite,” typically a well-informed group of people with experience, knowledge, and perspective. Journalists have not always done a good job, but they used to have the mission to look into the vagaries of America, now they are spending their time producing tweets and other micro-observations. Is a site like the Huffington Post really a model for the future of our media? I am currently reading David Finkel’s The Good Solider, a book about the army infantry soldiers of the 2-16 during the “the surge.” It is a well-reported book by a Washington Post Pulitzer Prize winner; in one scene Finkel describes the juxtaposition of the reality on Iraqi streets vs. the D.C. pundits: “…the soldiers would listen to the screaming and wonder how the people on those shows knew so much. Clearly, most of them had never been to Iraq…And yet to listen to them was to listen to people who knew everything…’They should come to Rustamiyah,’ more than one soldier said, certain of only one thing: none of them would.” Are we willing to let this sort of on-the-ground perspective slip away? Is there something really wrong with a “media elite?” The very definition of excellence is elite, and we should be loathe to lower our standards.