Is the Internet Dangerous? (Part Three)
Our special three-part series concludes herewith, asking: At what point does being wired, linked up, zoned in, and always connected become a disservice to ourselves and the culture around us? Is high-speed information-gathering destroying the inner life?
(Missed the prior installments? Start with Part One.)
Last Monday’s post explored how the Internet, despite its infinite variety, may ironically produce a sameness of individual and cultural experience, and may endanger subjective self-awareness. In today’s conclusion to our series, we expand upon the topic of mass culture with discussion of the third and final book in our three-book profile.
The Twilight of American Culture by Morris Berman. Published in 2001, Berman’s volume takes aim and fires at a relatively new American culture in which “community life has been reduced to shopping malls,” and “endless promotional/commercial bullshit … masks a deep systemic emptiness.” He presents engrossing parallels between the onset of the European Dark Ages and the consumer decadence subsuming our national culture.
His societal critique is broader than the subject of the Internet, but it inherently probes the soul-damaging effects of the Internet Age, and sounds notes similar to those of Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine (see Part One) and Sven Birkerts’ The Gutenberg Elegies (see Part Two). Where Siegel encapsulates the ills of the Internet by stating its ruling formula, Popularity = Value, Berman approaches the problems of mass culture by an important clarification in vocabulary:
Mass culture [is] not culture, but entertainment, and … to believe a society could become cultured via this process [is] a fatal mistake. … [Nevertheless] the drift in the United States today is toward the submergence of the self into the Mass Mind, a trend that is powerfully encouraged by corporate culture and the new technology. Along with this — as in the early Middle Ages – we see the dissolution of interiority, and the loss or denigration of individual judgment and achievement. All this is a major factor of the disintegration of American culture, which, popular opinion to the contrary, is a herd culture, not an individualistic one.
Sound pessimistic? Indeed it does, but fortunately Berman’s argument builds to an inspiring discussion of what he calls a “New Monast
ic Individual,” a person who quietly “checks out” of the “total commercial environment” and espouses habits or causes that will help to sustain our culture through its coming twilight in the same way that a coterie of monks preserved the Western world’s cultural treasures during the Dark Ages.
[New Monastic Individuals] belong to no class, have no membership in a hierarchy. They form a kind of ‘unmonied aristocracy,’ free of bosses, supervision, and what is typically called ‘work.’ They work very hard, in fact, but as they love their work and do it for its intrinsic interest, this work is not much different from play. In the context of contemporary American culture, such people are an anomaly, for they have no interest in the world of business success and mass consumerism. … [But] the new monastic individual is the purest embodiment of the human spirit.
And here, at the close of our Internet-critical series, we might come full circle to celebrate the existence of the Internet as a wide-open channel for positive cultural impact, for certainly Berman’s admirable “New Monasticism” can find expression online!
You could say that the myriad tiny online zines, for instance, are monastic undertakings (surely they aren’t produced for profit or in hopes of getting 30,000 hits per day).
Monastic, too, are the countless online voices of individuals and groups espousing the nobility of the human spirit over the lures of cynical marketeering and empty commercialism. Such Websites, blogs, and podcasts fulfill the humanistic responsibilities of being online discussed in Part One of this post series, that is: they effectively parse the shoddy from the artful, the well-reasoned from the sophomoric or chauvinistic, the soundly informative from the rumored or specious, and the hyper-ephemeral from the worthily enduring. The Web is Monastic wherever its practitioners do this.
The Internet is what we make it — and we can make it about something much finer than profit, self-promotion, or popularity. While the Web’s myriad Monastic voices may not be popular, they will surely have value (even Berman himself has a blog).
The measure of the Internet’s power will lie, at least it seems to me, in how thoroughly it can redefine culture as something other than a byproduct of commerce. It is Internet-users like you and me who will shape that redefinition. Are we rising to the challenge?
Against the Machine, The Gutenberg Elegies, and The Twilight of American Culture form a beautiful triumvirate on the themes of Technology versus the Soul, Commodity versus the Spirit, Creativity versus Commerce. The reader will find valuable counsel embedded in each book.
I hope you’ll explore these three volumes in themselves, but let me offer some key takeaways:
Against the Machine: Popularity does not equal value. “Popular,” as we use the term, often means, more precisely, “commercial.” But being at odds with commerce should not expressly doom worthy, valuable work to unpopularity (think about all those now immortal painters, writers, and composers who lived and died utterly unknown to the world); Log off; Go outside; Have a face-to-face conversation.
The Gutenberg Elegies: Information is not everything, neither is connectivity; Plumb the present moment; Be wary toward electronic devices; Protect and nourish subjectivity and inwardness; Spend more time with the unrivaled technology of the “old-fashioned” printed book. As John Updike warned,
The book revolution, which, from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets.
The Twilight of American Culture: The cash value of things is not their only value; Avoid mistaking the “tools of the good life” for the good life itself; Defy the “commodity culture”; Be “monastic.”
You might also enjoy:
“Creativity V. Commerce: My Kid Could Paint That”
“Happiness is Turning Off the Computer”
