Sep 19, 2010
Sunday Rant – The Internet is Not the Enemy
You know what I’m just so tired of? The idea that the internet is somehow the pinnacle of all that is and ever has been evil. I mean really, honestly, I find this the dullest thing in the world. Journalists, baby boomers, and Shoreditch hipsters in retro T-shirts have all united against an enemy that doesn’t exist. Cultural criticism is dead, at least until some brave soul somewhere comes to a conclusion which doesn’t rely on the assumption that the world wide web created some sort of massive vacuum that sucked the life out of anyone young enough to have had a computer before the age of 20.
I.
Take Camille Paglia’s recent Sunday Times Magazine feature on Lady Gaga (“Gaga and the Death of Sex”, 12th September 2010). I can’t actually link to the article, of course, but maybe you happened to read it. Supposedly it’s about how Lady Gaga is “an asexual, confected copycat who has seduced the internet generation.”
It’s not actually about that. It’s also not really about what Paglia dramatically calls “the death of sex”. It’s not even what it may seem on the surface: a sort of petulant rant that the stars of 20 or even 80 years ago were far superior to the stars of today (Madonna, in particular, fares well – she was “on fire” in her youth and even on her way to the gym impresses the author by being “brutally honest about publicly showing herself in ratty gear with no make-up”).
No, it’s actually just a tirade against an entire generation of human beings unlucky enough to have been born Post Golden Age.
The implication seems to be that no one who is part of the “internet generation” will actually read the article because a) it’s too lengthy, too academic; b) it can’t be accessed for free online; and c) they wouldn’t know how to respond, anyway. They just wouldn’t get it.
So without fear of dissent, Paglia lets loose:
“Generation Gaga,” she writes, making the assumption that “the internet generation” (undefined) and “generation Gaga” (also undefined) are the same thing:
doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions. They don’t notice her awkwardness because they’ve abandoned body language in daily interactions. They’re not repelled by the choppy cutting of her videos (in febrile one-second bursts) because that’s how they process reality – as a cluttered, de-centred environment of floating bits.
It’s a beautifully written and utterly damning piece of criticism, and there’s no going back. Having worked herself up into a sweat, Paglia goes on, now frothing at the mouth, wild-eyed and unable, it seems, to stem the flow of hurtful words:
“Gaga’s fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Everything is refracted for them through the media. They have been raised in a relativistic cultural vacuum where chronology and sequence as well as distinctions of value have been lost or jettisoned by politically correct educators.”
And there you have it. “America’s foremost cultural critic” has spoken.
II.
Or there’s this piece, posted by Richard Lea. For four paragraphs (the piece is only five paragraphs long), Lea manages to maintain the illusion that his article is actually about the proliferation of present-tense novels, what it means, and whether or not Philip Pullman was right to call it a “silly affectation”.
Are you surprised to find out that it isn’t about this? “The internet, mobile phones, Twitter,” Lea writes – and my heart sinks – “all gnaw away at our capacity to reflect; all push us to experience life as a series of unconnected moments. As we blog our lives away to the accompaniment of the 24-hour rolling news, can it be any coincidence that novelists are reaching for the present tense?”
Lea ignores any questions that his statement might raise – can a blog, for instance, not be a reflection? Presumably Lea regards his own post as reflective, after all, although it was published on the Guardian’s Book Blog. But one supposes his word count, and therefore his argument, was limited by both the medium of the internet and the alleged attention spans of the half-wits likely to stumble upon the piece.
III.
Then there’s this.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention…” begins the angry piece on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Quite possibly it’s very funny, with its reference to Ginsberg’s “Howl” meant to signify the cleverness of author Oyl Miller.
But, look. You know what this piece actually is? It’s not clever, it’s not funny, and it’s certainly, despite appearances (or perhaps intentions), original. It’s just another way of saying OH MY GOD THE SKY IS FALLING BECAUSE THE INTERNET HAPPENED.
The best minds of Miller’s generation, apparently, “bared their brains to the black void of new media and the thought leaders and so called experts who passed through community colleges with radiant, prank playing eyes.” They “texted continuously 140 characters at a time from park to pond to bar to MOMA to Brooklyn Bridge”. “Recession wounded and directionless,” they, “sat up, micro-conversing in the supernatural darkness of Wi-Fi-enabled cafes.”
The atmosphere of loneliness is palpable. I picture an updated Edward Hopper painting: two figures, back-to-back in a lit-up café, MacBooks open, eyes shut, Red Bull on a plastic tabletop, no traffic outside because we were all too busy being shallow to bother going anywhere.
Okay. I get it. We’re missing out on real life because we tweet and we blog. Now can we all for the love of God find something else to write about?
IV.
Of course you might say I’m only writing this because I feel I’ve been personally attacked. And you might be right. I am, undeniably, of the “internet generation,” whatever that actually turns out to mean. Of course, I’m not supposed to have a voice, or even the attention span to write a blog post this lengthy (but actually, I can hear a niggling voice suggest, the intertextuality is really only a crutch for laziness, hyperlinks only a symptom of patchy education!). And yes, I do want to stick up for my generation. I like being part of the internet generation. It’s the only generation I know of that doesn’t identify itself by age group. I know old people and young people who identify with this depraved group. We’re all blogging our lives away together, marooned together in the technocracy. We’ve created a community in the black void.
And are we really starved emotionally? I don’t know. It depends. It depends, frankly, on what that actually means. Like the death of sex, it sounds like a big important thing – emotional poverty! – and might actually be a completely empty phrase. Maybe I’m an exception. I left home early, I support myself (it took me awhile to get there, but I do), I have the capacity to be both trite and reflective using the same medium. And I feel emotionally charged, ridiculously alive. All the time, I feel that way.
So yes, maybe I’m an internet generation anomoly. More likely, we all need to get over the idea that the internet can be blamed for everything on this earth which is vacuous or scary or different than it was twenty years ago. Maybe journalists and cultural critics are just uneasy because the earth is continuing to spin under their heavy feet even though they are getting older and they think they’re in danger of losing their jobs (they’re not in danger of losing their jobs).
And meanwhile, internet users, particularly young ones, are scared. They’ve got shouty people telling them how shit they are all the time, and scary sexless ladies gyrating on screens in the other room, and they’re being constantly gagged and bound and put on display like apes and then set free again to run in the wretched wild of tangled wires and glowing screens. Guess what? That gets old really fast. Because in case you hadn’t noticed (or is this what’s actually scary?), we’re all grown up now. We can (most of us) read, and write. We earn livings, we pay taxes, we meet up in the pub for a few beers, go out to restaurants and talk to each other one-on-one like everybody else. We fall in and out of love in the same way that people have done for centuries – without grace. We have families, want someday to own a house, know we’re crippled by finances and yet continue to imagine that everything is somehow possible.
“There are no dreams in the New Immediacy,” Miller writes, which sounds nice and means nothing. No dreams? You think we have no dreams?
Frankly you can go fuck yourself.
excellent rantage.
I feel afronted by the web-phobic ramblings for two reasons – one, just about ever good idea I’ve come across in the last 12 years has been because of the internet. There have been email discussion lists that have changed the course of my life, forums that have connected me to communities that have challenged and supported my various endeavours, found music, videos, books, thinkers, friends… all through recommendations on blogs, sites and social networks. I’ve talked people I’ve never met through potentially life-threatening stress situations, have found an audience for a load of music that has made me a living but which no record label would have a clue what to do with…
Even moreso, every paltry morsel of insight I’ve gleaned from the mainstream media has been tested, corroborated, expanded on, clarified or debunked by the internet. It’s a gloriously disintermediated world where people are actively encouraged to be remarkable because people you care about are watching. Not in a voyeuristic way at all, but as part of a deeper connection that was possible when all relationships were prisoners to geography.
Big media, and the people who glean status, work, meaning and an artificially elevated platform from it are bound to feel threatened, slighted, challenged and disabused of their power by the web. I talk on a daily basis to smarter feminists than Paglia, to better scientists than those who describe twitter as something that only those with a broken sense of self would do, to funnier comics than the TV provides, to more supportive and helpful people that I could possibly find by retreating from the web and… and what? What did we do before the web? We were hostages to other people’s community initiatives – be they council, church, school, sport or charitably-led. We were stuck with whatever they offered us. More interested in Kabaddi than football? tough shit, footie’s the only thing available at your local sports ground. Rather talk about contemporary fiction than classics? No dice, your library only runs a dickens appreciation society… Choice is scary, it’s also a very grown up thing, because it requires us to actively seek challenge to our entrenched worldview. But there’s the rub – social networks are far from homogenous. I consciously disagree with almost everyone I’m friends with on a social network, but my own thinking is nuanced, challenged and bettered on an hourly basis by the stream of smart, funny, empassioned information, conversation and community. Sure, there are dickheads. Just as TV has its Clarkson and Newspapers have their Littlejohn, the internet has its fair share of tedious, lying, cretinous bores. But hey, that’s life, shitheads, deal with it.
We’re here, we love it and our lives are better for it. Now, if you want some help understanding it, give us a shout, we’re happy to help.
Hi Miranda,
Hope you and X are thriving. I thought this speech might interest you, and indeed possibly your readers too:
http://www.gresham.ac.uk/event.asp?PageId=4&EventId=1008
The Beat Generation, The Rock’n'Roll Generation, The Hippie Generation and The Punk Generation were all written off as attention-deficient lost causes by their scared predecessors. Now those generations are old. They’re staging comebacks and struggling to understand why the kids aren’t alright any more. They’re writing for the Guardian and The Sunday Times Magazine and McSweeney’s. So the cycle of abuse continues.
The Internet Generation may not sound very cool, but I’m proud to be part of it. Anyway, who needs to read the Sunday Times Magazine when you have @aliteralgirl’s Sunday rants?
top rant.
i’m surprised that paglia sees the ‘death of sex’: aren’t the internet generation constantly engaging in frenzied meaningless coupling with strangers they met on twattr or whatever it is.. on the internet?
paglia’s piece proves the law that the word ‘febrile’ is daily mail code for ‘something bad’.
anyway, i have to go. i’m flying to sweden to deliver a lecture on how the web empowers people in emerging economies and disabled people. entrance fee is being donated to a children’s charity.
Hey Miranda,
I don’t know if I got it right, but if I did, I don’t think it’s fair putting the “present-tense-narrators” in the same category as the people who like and use the web.
About the first group, I am also worried that we lose our social skills every single day with the massive use of chats or social networks. Can’t you see it in daily life in the ages 18-30? I Can. (I’m 27). And indeed, Lady Gaga sucks. Madonna is way much better!:)
Anyway. In a completely different subject, your font-family is un-readable! The next alternative, Gentium, is better, but you still need to push your size to 1.3!
Best,
George
[...] Yesterday, the wonderful and talented Miranda Ward wrote this brilliant rant entitled ‘The Internet Is Not The Enemy‘. [...]
Respectfully, I have to disagree with you. Your theme – the internet isn’t bad – well, yes, I can get behind that. Does it empower, connect, widen horizons? Yup, sure. All that and more.
But does it reinforce, pin down, make small? Yeah. It does. Somebody else raised the point that exercising choice requires that we challenge ourselves. Part of that challenge is finding out what is “other” to you, and part of that challenge is accepting that other. But a lot of people don’t get round to even searching beyond the Facebook collection of friends that they draw to themselves.
As you state, this isn’t a generational thing. The internet generation is a mindset, and those who do best within that mindset – our “a list bloggers” and other wunderkind – are often people previously passed over by conventional media. More often than not, a little nerdy. Good with computers. And possessed of a sharp wit with extrovert tendencies, which lets them riff on subjects for a long time.
I think that the ‘Howl’ rip-off is saying that mindlessly chewing over the contemporary surface of the internet is boring. That endlessly tweeting when you have nothing but yourself as a subject is dull. I see its quote of Howl is a call to garner experience and then spend it on something worth talking about, like the subjects endlessly riffed about by a-list bloggers – Doctorow’s steampunk and scifi obsessions, for instance.
The internet is like a great larder that we’ve been raiding for ages now. We have to send a posse out to the shops to get more cereal and chocolate soon, or we’ll just be down to a big slice of Gawker cheese and a mountain of Wikipedia baloney. And if, as Jaron Lanier posited, all we end up gaining from the internet revolution is a free encyclopedia made of baloney, that’ll be a wasted revolution. I think that’s what Pagilla and her fellow critics are afraid of, having seen their revolution derailed by capitalism.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going on a run to the shops. I’ve got a big checklist, so if you want something you should go get it yourself.
Pete,
Thanks for your comment!
I certainly agree that a lot of people are small-minded in spite of being online; but to further the point I was trying to make in my post, I just don’t think it’s fair to say that they’re small-minded because they’re online. The same people who don’t look any further than their circle of Facebook friends might not be any better off without the internet; they’d simply find other ways to be empty.
Similarly, while I agree that self-indulgent and repetitive drivel – of which there is undeniably plenty, both on and offline – is boring, and while I even agree to a certain extent with your reading of the ‘Howl’ pastiche, I also believe there already is a lot of quality content and engagement online. I don’t see the need to call the internet generation to action; in my opinion they’re doing pretty well at using experiences and saying things worth saying. That’s not to say there isn’t still a lot of crap out there – just that maybe sometimes it depends on where you look. The medium itself is not the problem.
I like your characterisation of the internet generation as a mindset – that’s nicely put – and I think for me, part of that mindset involves a certain degree of optimism. I’ve been lucky enough to have that optimism rewarded – every day I see examples of the internet used beautifully. But I also understand that mine is not an intuitive optimism, and that we’re talking about something which is always scary: change.
Still, the very fact that we can talk about it is a good sign.
George,
I think the author of the present-tense article was citing the web as a possible cause for an increase in the number of present-tense novels which have been published recently. And while there may well be a correlation, it was simply his characterisation of the web as a negative force that I objected to.
Interesting feedback re: fonts; have never had any other complaints about this, but have increased the size a bit. Hope it helps!
Tom! Yes, X and I well – hope you are too. Had a quick glance at the link at work today; looking forward to giving it a proper read tomorrow – many thanks!
Ben – Very good point and I guess the worry (or perhaps the inevitability) is that in twenty years you and I will be sitting hunched over our antiquated Macs moaning about the death of creativity, refusing steadfastly to be seduced by anything new. But then again, maybe the internet generation will transcend the cycle. You never know.
[...] Marsden of the Independent was kind enough to quote last week’s sunday rant in his Cyberclinic post on Wednesday. It appeared in print and everything. You can read the piece [...]
Just came here from your comment on the Guardian article. It’s refreshing to read this. I’ve been on the ARPA/DARPA/Internet since 1982 and it’s shaped my life and my work in many ways, but it hasn’t reduced my humanity. I believe humans remain humans in the face of technology and communications advances. Don’t think the telegraph and the telephone didn’t incite just such damnations of the youngest generation. Where did we get the idea that improving our ability to communicate was going to make us less human? And yet, and yet…
Anyway. Agree with you and really like your piece.
Valerie – glad you found your way over here; thanks for commenting!
Thank you for reading my poem ‘Tweet’, and for expressing such a passionate reaction to it. I use the Internet, Twitter, YouTube daily, and couldn’t be more excited about the potential of all these tools to be used as an outlet to give everyone a voice.
To put ‘Tweet’ in context, it was written for a notoriously ironic website, so the merits of the opinions expressed should be judged through that lens. I certainly think spending all of existence in front of a screen would be detrimental, however, used in balance and conjunction with experience, this connectedness is undoubtedly a Revolution in progress.
Thank you again for starting the discussion around my work.
I look forward to your next rant!
Cheers,
Oyl
Hi Oyl – thanks for reading. I’m glad you’ve been able to put your poem in some context, as in retrospect it was remiss of me not to. McSweeney’s is indeed notoriously ironic, and context (particularly online) is often crucial to meaning. I totally agree, also, in the importance of striking a balance between online activity and offline experience. I suppose the thing that worries me is the implication in pieces like Paglia’s (which I’m pretty sure was in no way ironic!) that people – particularly younger people – are not striking this balance. Undoubtedly some aren’t, but my feeling is that many are, and very admirably.
Anyway, appreciate your response to this!