[tt] CHE: Seduced by Information

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Seduced by Information
The Chronicle of Higher Education  The Chronicle Review
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i31/31b00501.htm
From the issue dated April 11, 2008

CONSIDER THIS

The move from print to the Internet is not as radical as it seems

By JOHN SUMMERS

I still remember the feeling of anxious anticipation when I first spread 
open The New York Times. I was 26 years old. I had been raised in rural 
Pennsylvania in a family of tradition-minded conservatives with little 
good to say about cities or their newspapers. Not until after I graduated 
from college in rural Virginia did I read The Washington Post, and it took 
a few more years to gin up the confidence to confront the Times.

More than any one story, the seriousness of mood struck me forcefully. 
"They'll never get away with it now!" I remember thinking to myself while 
reading exposés of malfeasance and corruption. Since then, having 
discovered the necessity of untruth in party politics and the 
impossibility of finding rational grounds for value judgments, I have 
learned to distrust my assumption that truth trumps lies.

If reading the newspaper was not what it appeared to a rural naïf in the 
mid-1990s, already it was giving way to another kind of anticipation. Even 
before I left college, I heard bold predictions that the Internet would 
make newspapers obsolete. Today those predictions form a consensus that, 
if realized, promises to make us witness to a profound transformation. But 
the most striking feature of that development is not the radical break 
between old and new media; it is the underlying continuity.

Only a sudden interruption of daily newspaper reading could expose its 
ritualistic quality. Thus the significance of the New York newspaper 
strike of June and July 1945, during which eight major dailies were not 
delivered for 17 days. In a famous essay on readers' reactions to the 
strike, "What 'Missing the Newspaper' Means," the behavioral scientist 
Bernard Berelson reported a diffuse panic in the public. Almost everyone 
he and his team interviewed claimed to miss the "serious information" 
contained in the newspaper, yet very few of the respondents could recall 
any specific stories or events they had been following prior to the 
strike. Berelson concluded that what they really missed was "the 
ritualistic and near-compulsive character of newspaper reading." The 
longer the strike went on, the more people missed that feeling. That acute 
psychological dependency, so often noticed by critics of mass media, was 
intrinsic to the enterprise from the beginning.

The newspaper emerged with the anomie of modern society. To the displaced 
and disorganized, it offered an illusion of solidarity, a chance to 
participate vicariously in social knowledge. By the middle of the 20th 
century, newspapers presented themselves both as guides to the management 
of self (offering weather and financial forecasts, advertisements for 
commodities, records of births, deaths, marriages, and events) and as 
vehicles of escape from the banality of self-management (providing sports, 
comics, scandals, crises, human-interest stories). In truth the newspaper 
offered another routine for a society of estranged individuals afraid to 
be alone with their thoughts and feelings.

The news never stopped. Every issue introduced a new crisis or scandal 
into the same eternal present of repetitive triviality. Journalists 
annihilated the meaning of privacy altogether. The critic Dwight Macdonald 
noted the self-aggrandizing quality of the information cult, whose real 
subject was attention: "For those who, as readers or as writers, would get 
a little under the surface, the real problem of our day is how to escape 
being 'well informed,' how to resist the temptation to acquire too much 
information (never more seductive than when it appears in the chaste garb 
of duty), and how in general to elude the voracious demands on one's 
attention enough to think a little."

The migration of the public from print to the Internet carries the same 
ritual psychology of slavish dependence. On April 17, 2007, millions of 
BlackBerrys in North America suddenly stopped working. Cut off from their 
wireless e-mail system for a few hours, users reported feeling phantom 
vibrations and compared the effect to a forced drug withdrawal.

Berelson would have understood, just as Macdonald would have recognized 
how the rhetoric of information and citizenship that accompanies the 
Internet hides the fact that it often discourages the very qualities of 
mind and character needed to think clearly and independently.

The Internet is completing the newspapers' project of seizing mass 
attention. In the absence of real solidarity, it multiplies the 
technological functions of the psyche. Often the results are felt as a 
minor irony: While machines make communicating more efficient, they 
drastically increase the volume of communication.

The feeling of technical power generates no equivalent political or moral 
resources. Terrorists create manuals that instruct fanatics how to use the 
Internet for recruitment, strategy, and propaganda. In China and 
elsewhere, technology is easily adapted to the needs of authoritarian 
regimes — and corporations that provide it are eager to comply. Does the 
Internet bring friends together? Yes. It also brings together spammers, 
spies, and misanthropes who find and exploit new tools of seduction and 
surveillance. The mob mentality, always a part of democracy, is no longer 
organized around the newspaper; now it finds itself online.

Not only public and private, but the distinctions of home and away, past 
and present, here and there are abolished in the bleary cries of more and 
now. Once civilized man regarded the machine as an extension of his power. 
Then man worried that he had become a slave to the machinery of 
civilization that he had created. Now man becomes the machine's facsimile: 
disciplined, regular, undivided. Gone or going is the image of the person 
as an organic being, emerging, growing, decaying, returning. In the 
virtual world, as in the world of the print newspaper, the difference 
between communing and communication goes unrecognized. Convenience is an 
unmixed good; solitude the stigmata of eccentrics and loners.

As all spheres of practical life go online — with or without the consent 
of the connected — and as possibilities turn into necessities, vicarious 
participation in society grows more burdensome as it grows more. The 
romantic idea of the Internet as the summation of individual wills united 
in voluntary association has been replaced by a crippling paradox. Freedom 
of choice does not acknowledge the most important choice of all: the 
freedom to sign off.

John Summers is editor of The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. 
Wright Mills, to be published in September by Oxford University Press.