More on the internet.

Following up on my post the other week about the impact of technology on the human condition, Maureen Dowd has an excellent column up about the empathy-destroying powers of the internet. She quotes Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains*:

“Researchers say that we need to be quiet and attentive if we want to tap into our deeper emotions. ... If we’re constantly interrupted and distracted, we kind of short-circuit our empathy. If you dampen empathy and you encourage the immediate expression of whatever is in your mind, you get a lot of nastiness that wouldn’t have occurred before.”

This is exactly what Wallace and Franzen talk about.** And untangling what is going on here is very important, I think; I'm quite disturbed by the sheer amount of cruelty people on the internet seem to delight in directing at each other. I'm always wondering, what are these people like in their every day lives? If I could confront them, and ask them point blank, in an honest desire to know -- dude, what the fuck?, what would they say? What is their level of consciousness about how mean and awful they are being? To what extent do they behave like this in real life, to actual people they see around them? Undoubtedly there are a lot of bitter, nasty people out there that the internet simply brings out the best in, so to speak. But then it seems the internet is also a lot like road rage -- for some people, being locked into this virtual world pushes the off button on a lot of suppressed ugliness that has not been fully dealt with. Or so it would appear.

Anyway, here is Wallace discussing another aspect of the same issue, particularly relevant from 2:10 on:

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* I noticed Dowd does not italicize the title of the book in her article (but rather quotes it), although I checked, and indeed it is a book - is this something else the internet has done? Has the distinction between how to present an article or blog post title and how to present a book title also been obliterated?, and now I am merely being a fusty, quaint academic by insisting on the distinction?

** I know I keep bringing up Wallace and Franzen, and I look a little stuck on them. That is because I am. No point in denying that. I'll probably blog in the near future more extensively as to why I am so drawn to them at the moment.

Media technology; an infinite jest?

In the past six months or so, I have added the issue of technology – especially the technology of media, ie TV to facebook  - to the docket of things I think about. This was inspired mostly by the commentary of Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, two authors I’ve started to read after a whole lifetime of almost totally ignoring literature. Simply put, neither Franzen or Wallace are Luddites (and the way in which this term is used is actually a disservice to the actual Luddites, who were about much more thoughtful and noble ideas than simply disliking technology), but they both articulate a concern that media technology, while having its uses, distracts Americans from both civic engagement and sustained confrontation with the existential questions that all of us must try to address to fully face our humanity. As Jonathan Franzen puts it, “There is some part of me, if I spend all day online, [which] is even lonelier than when I started.”

I myself have a rather ambiguous relationship with the internet in particular. Ever since my undergraduate years, the internet – particularly through the venue of blogging and, online discussions on such social networking sites as facebook – has offered me both one of the most powerful tools of self-expression and also the most acute reminder of how limited that self-expression can often be. It has been both the symbol of connectivity with the outside world and the ultimate symbol of loneliness. In particularly sad times, which always corresponded with a feeling of invisibility, the specter of being surrounded by blank monitors, totally unresponsive to and uninterested in my existence, would present itself to me in my daymares. But obviously here I am, still blogging away – for the internet has also provided me with some of the best opportunities to make connections to other likeminded people, and to have my own views challenged and refined. As the title of this blog suggests, it is part of what keeps my isolation incomplete. 

I try, however, to balance this with activities that depend on and cultivate the type of solitude that actually leads you to being more, rather than less aware of the world around you. It is important to always keep in mind, and thus try to mitigate, the tendencies of media technology to whittle the entire world down to you – to keep you so focused on yourself that actual human empathy becomes increasingly more difficult. Thus this recent column by Maureen Dowd at The New York Times caught my eye. The column mostly flirts ironically with the humor of a new iPhone application designed to make Catholic confession more user-friendly and to encourage the faithful to attend more often. However, the column brings up an unspoken question that both critics from the right and the left like to tackle: will technology ultimately, and inherently, erode human relationships and the fabric of the concept of the larger good? 

American Denial.

A few months ago, David Brooks penned a column in which he argued that Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Freedom, tells us more about the obsessions of writers and outcasts than it does actual middle-class Americans. Of course, Brooks reduced the complex struggles of the characters in Freedom down to the diminutive size of a morality play, when he determined than the main character, Patty, is “unable to make a moral judgment.” That the world, once filtered through David Brooks’s imagination, can always be whittled down to a juvenile, almost Victorian understanding of virtue as opposed to vice is, of course, to be expected. However, Brooks also went on to make a claim just a little bit more offensive than his usual, almost endearing desire to turn the landscape of humanity into black and white forks in the road. Brooks argued that most of the misery of the American middle-class – depicted by Franzen and other writers as leading lives lacking meaning, emotional fulfillment and community – is merely in the heads of “writers and other dissidents.” 

Plenty of people chimed in the comments section to ask, “Really? What country are you living in?” I do believe they effectively responded to Brooks’s desire to sweep the sadness of American life under the rug by merely chalking it up to spider-webs in the minds of Those Who Don’t Quite Belong.  So I won’t add to that particular discussion here.

However, that column was on my mind when I was watching Rachel Maddow painfully document this nation’s recent history of gun violence a few days after the tragedy in Arizona. The point Maddow was making was concerned primarily with the how, and not the why, of gun violence in America – frequently, much more frequently than comparable Western nations, Americans and especially young American males decide to kill a lot of people with guns. Whether or not this is a good reason to think more seriously about what kinds of guns and ammunition we need to protect ourselves and fulfill the Second Amendment – and I think it is – the torrent of newspaper headlines Maddow held up prompted another question in my mind: why?

This is of course, a question that is being asked all over the place. Almost never, however, is any theory advanced beyond the theory that there is no theory; these are acts of singular madness, and attempting to answer them, the suggestion seems to be, is unacceptable because almost anything you say will qualify as political. That we ought not to draw conclusions or make suggestions based on national tragedies that seem to speak to larger patterns is a strange, self-defeating ban on discourse for a democratic society to make. It is almost as if, no matter how horrific the tragedy or how high the number killed, what Americans fear even more than another gun massacre is a real reckoning with the question of why – we ask it merely to say we cannot answer it, so then we can continue as before. It is as if the truth would be more terrifying than the meaninglessness which the insanity of a singular American murderer offers us.  

So here is a politically loaded reflection, political not because I aim to artificially shame a political party or win an election, but political because it speaks to my larger beliefs about our country and the state it is in: one of the first things that came to my mind, watching Maddow rattle through the list of tragedies caused by gun violence in this country, was that David Brooks review of Freedom. At first glance, these two events would not seem related; Franzen certainly doesn’t have any character that speaks to the type of deranged alienation it appears Jared Lee Loughner fell into, nor could the novel in any way be offered as a clear explanation to why such characters develop. But Brooks’ denial of the underlying problem of American alienation – his desire to use a book which faces that honestly as an opportunity to claim that such arguments are merely the self-absorbed, self-affirming obsessions of a misfit elite – seems all too tragically connected to the media’s response to the horror in Arizona. The ardor we feel for glorifying America as the best of all possible places is completely out of proportion to the amount of mental anguish experienced by so many Americans on a daily basis. Conservatives hear the statistics about America being a land of depressed people and shrug their shoulders – inside, many of them believe it is the very fact that our culture finally has reached some level of openness about the challenges of finding meaning in America that explains the phenomenon of unsatisfied people. Back in the good old days, the inner rant goes, people did not complain so much, people did not expect to feel happy all the time – people merely put that in a box labeled the local bar or the 60 hour work week and left it there. Under much of this denial is a resentment, a resentment that the version of America as a land of contentment should dare be challenged by the likes of Loughner, and yes, even by the likes of Franzen. 

I am not denying that individual mental illness exists and much of this existence is separate from or immune to the particular cultural context in which it plays out. But it doesn’t always have to play out this way – it does not even have to develop in this direction, at least not this often. Sociology tells us that a good society is one in which all members of that society feel valued by their community, where each station and status in life is recognized and granted dignity. Individuals frequently deciding to kill others in a crazed rage of alienation, and then just as often, turn the gun on themselves, is only the most obvious manifestation of the failure of a society to provide meaning and dignity to all of its members.