Is the Internet Dangerous? (Part One)
In this special three-part series, Soul Shelter asks: 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?
We’ve all heard about Internet Addiction, a term referring to personal and relational damage wrought by excessive Web-time. Internet Addiction has slowly come to be embraced by clinical professionals as a verifiable psychological condition. Even your average happy, well-balanced Web-surfer is likely to acknowledge this addiction as something real, worrisome, and worth guarding against.
But might the Internet pose other, as yet unacknowledged dangers to individual, spiritual, and cultural wellbeing?
Ridiculous! you might say. The Internet as a cultural negative?! You’ve gotta be crazy!
Well, I do see the self-destructive irony in using the Internet to muse about the potential damage the Internet may be wreaking on our spiritual lives. But I ought to qualify what follows by stating that Soul Shelter is not anti-Internet so much as pro-balance: balance between work and play, page and screen, and yes, communication patterns both electronic and face-to-face. (Don’t get me wrong: I want you to keep reading my words). 
This past year I sank my teeth into three books that question the real nature of online activity and consider the price we may be paying in our largely unquestioning eagerness to embrace the Internet as a godsend. Each book, in its own manner, asks: How might the Internet pose a threat to the cultivation of a rich, reflective inner life? In what way might the cultural predispositions of our electronic age endanger Art — its creation, its place in our culture, and our ability to appreciate it? — or the cultivation of real knowledge? Can the Internet threaten our very souls by diminishing the things that nourish the soul?
Given the Internet’s unavoidable presence in our lives today, such questions seem entirely valid, and perhaps more important than we’d like to admit (I love the Internet too, believe me).
Back in 1949 the poet Stephen Spender observed and bemoaned a peculiar “American malady,” namely:
The commercialization of spiritual goods on an enormous scale, in the same way as material goods are commercialized.
Does the Internet serve to exacerbate this malady by further commercializing what ought never to be for sale?
Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob by cultural critic Lee Siegel. Siegel’s volume makes the most curmudgeonly arguments of the books discussed in this series — but where it explores the Internet’s effect upon culture, Against the Machine advances a
number of salient points. Siegel notes that the ‘cultural offerings’ most readily available to online browsers through Google rankings, etc, are often qualitatively of the lowest common denominator.
Certainly one can quibble. But Siegel poses this and his other arguments as counterpoints to what he sees as the widespread unquestioning embrace of the Internet, and in this respect I find his perspective worthy of serious attention.
Internet boosters argue that the online realm enriches culture by revolutionizing people’s access to it. Siegel retorts that the Web’s widely praised ease of access is calibrated using a mass-culture formula no different than the kind used on network TV:
Popularity = Value
In other words, the dominant chords sounded in the cyber-world as we now know it are not in themselves any more worthy of our attention than those on primetime television. Like a lot of TV programming, much of the Internet effectively lowers the cultural bar, rather than raising it to accommodate a refined cultural hunger in the American public.
Of course, we must also consider that the Internet is not a restrictive, self-enclosed network, nor a single marketplace, nor merely a popularity pageant. It is a global beehive. I am the Internet, and you are the Internet. Siegel’s book challenges us to bear this fact in mind, and to let it better influence our behavior online. In the cyber-world, like anyplace else, if we seek informed, well-expressed expertise or enduring culture, we’ve usually got to dig below the surface. The Internet is whatever we make it. Against the Machine reminds that unrestricted free access to information and culture saddles us all with the responsibility to carefully and conscientiously parse the popular from the valuable, the shoddy from the artful, the well-reasoned from the sophomoric or chauvinistic, the truly informative from the rumored or specious, and the hyper-ephemeral from the worthily enduring.
Surely that’s responsibility worth living up to.
However, if some of us may be better equipped than others to fulfill such a responsibility it’s probably because we’re old enough to have integrated online access into pre-Internet modes of perceiving and interpreting our world. What we’re left to wonder is, can the generations after us be expected to do the same?
In the U.S. at least, anybody born since, say, 1992, has effectively grown up in a fiber optic world. Inevitably, youths today interpret reality, environment, history, culture, and value through the Internet’s pixelated prism. If Popularity = Value truly is the Internet’s chief law of discernment, what habits of mind does that inculcate in young people?
Next Monday’s post will explore that question and highlight the second of the three books in this profile.
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5 Comments to Is the Internet Dangerous? (Part One)
At worst it’s an attention hog and face to face comm’s/rapport killer (ie dimminished social skills).
At best it’s liberating and a democratiser without social preconceptions.
Thanks for reviewing this book, especially since it’s not something I’d normally read. I agree that we are curators of our own reality, now more than ever before.
To the last point, I actually rebelled against popularity for a while, believing that popularity and value were negatively correlated. Something that I’ve struggled with is that popularity has value in itself. Even if I disagree, I can become a better person by trying to understand the value so many others find. In fact, I think that artists who create works that are strictly unpopular may be the most selfish of all – I certainly was.
@ Aaron: A good point about the benefits of being inquisitive toward what is popular. The Internet certainly facilitates this kind of inquiry more efficiently than any other medium we know, and many of us are often grateful for that.
As to your point about unpopular artistic creations, I grant that certain works set out to deliberately transgress or subvert the dominant cultural dialogue and to remain “fringe” — and sometimes their creators do take special pride in a formidable abstruseness or impenetrability. These artists may bear outright disdain toward what might be viewed as audience-friendliness. Such artists seek the periphery. More power to them.
But I fear there’s another truth about a different kind of “unpopularity,” in which good, fully apprehensible works that in every way desire (and often merit) a place in the cultural dialogue are relegated to the periphery of a “mainstream” that is conditioned by forces of commerce.
Commerce tends to tailor mainstream taste toward work that is entertaining more than elevating, titillating more than explorative, sentimental more than genuinely transformative — or, sometimes, just plainly cynical in its formulaic lust for the buck (product placement, etc). “Unpopular,” as we use the term, often means, more precisely , “uncommercial.”
A book is judged “uncommercial” by its publisher’s sales force, or a movie is judged “uncommercial” by its distributor. These works thereby become predestined to “unpopularity.”
There are exceptions. “Uncommercial” works do sometimes unexpectedly gibe with commercial trends — or revolutionize a commercial matrix.
What is popular can be valuable (enduring), and what is valuable can be popular. Edouard Manet enjoyed great popularity even while revolutionizing French painting. Vincent Van Gogh, on the other hand, never enjoyed popularity enough to buy a healthy supper.
My point is simply that very often, in spite of an artist’s sincere efforts to engage an audience, to create a work that will inspire others or illuminate their lives, the artist’s vision is by nature at odds with commerce (in a sense, that’s a real artist’s role). The artist thus has “unpopularity” thrust upon her. Meanwhile, her creation might have had every chance of striking a “popular” chord if only it had been given a “popular” airing.
In a better world, being at odds with commerce would not expressly doom a work to unpopularity.
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. And of course, it is Internet-users like you and me who will shape that redefinition. Have we risen to the challenge? That’s the question that has yet to be answered.
Personally, I believe we’ve made baby-steps. But for the time being, purely commercial voices certainly remain dominant …
Thanks very much for reading and chiming in. ~Mark
Popularity is often a good measure of value, in my view. A best-selling book usually has some kernel of exceptional value. Not all are written by celebrities or people who already have a string of bestsellers.
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