|
|
Digital
Kapital I've actually been holding back on this subject for a few months, but the appearance of Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf at the top of People Magazine's Annual Beautiful People Poll has broken the back of my restraint. It's time to recognize that having a voice is not power, it's merely the power to sound like a fool. The technology industry has to grow up now, but judging from recent evidence, including the embarrassing appearance by technology CEOs before the Senate Judiciary Committee, it has a very long way to go. Now, first, Hank. I like the Hank phenomenon, but only because it is very funny to see the People Poll hijacked by the public. I confess that I am one of the approximately 200,000 people who have voted for Hank thus far, and frankly I don't care when the election is over. Who is Hank, you ask? Well, Hank is a wretched figure of a man who appears on the Howard Stern Show drunk and raving, in various costumes ranging, judging by the pictures I've seen, from a Viking outfit to some sort of pumpkin suit. I don't really know who Hank is, I just know he's reprehensible. Not because of his stature, which is decidedly Munchkin, but because he so clearly has no dignity. Stern or his minions launched a write-in campaign to make Hank the most beautiful person among People's annual selection of pretty faces. So far, Hank leads Titanic star Leonardo Dicaprio, the nearest so-called "legitimate celebrity," by a 20-to-1 margin. But what's really nifty is that the number two position, as well as nine other positions among the top 20, have been taken over by write-ins. This clearly signals that the power to arbitrate taste has been seized from the editors and producers of the nation's leading magazines and television programs. It demonstrates that, to the extent that anyone can put up a Web site, they can have a substantial impact on the public consciousness. This is revolutionary, perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the information age to date. It's Bastille Day big on the scales of history. Of course, for those of you who don't follow your French history, the storming of the Bastille wasn't even half as dramatic as it is portrayed in paintings and books. It was, in fact, somewhat anticlimactic, because it was more like a large public works project conducted by the people to tear down an infamous prison. Although there were other more infamous places in France at the time, the people sated their revolutionary appetite on the Bastille until the outbreak of the Jacobin Terror. So, we have Hank at the summit of People's poll and a Net gloating over its newfound power to influence the media. That's really missing the point. Reading the comments from ZD Net readers, I was struck by the common thread that ran through them. These folks seem to think that they have now acquired the power to dictate to the rest of the world. One college student wrote that "It's about time the world recognized that we can say what we want and they have to listen." Well, I don't know whom the collective "we" this kid is describing actually includes. I do know that the population of the Net does not include a majority of the people of the world, not by a long-shot. What the Net provides that you can't get elsewhere is ease of access to communication. Voting in the People Poll would have required a piece of paper, a pen and a stamp only a couple years ago. What a hassle. People didn't vote for a Hank in droves before this because they were too lazy, and the rewards of such nonsense too small to justify the effort. Putting the poll online merely made voting easy. In a very real way, the Net is trivializing the power of communication in the same way that sitcoms and docudramas trivialize entertainment and life. Good television takes a lot of hard work; it will be the same with the Web. Voting for Hank is not hard work, but it can be fun. There have been some other stories in the news that really underscore what I am saying. To name two: the confession to a murder by a man on an online alcohol support group at the end of April and the denouncing of JenniCAM by TCI executive Leo Hindery before a gathering of the U.S. Catholic Bishops. The facts of these two stories, in a nutshell: While participating in an online forum recently, a man confessed to staging the death of his daughter five years ago. The story is gruesome, very difficult for a parent to hear, because it included a description by the man of his having tried to make a fake rescue of the girl and, when he discovered she was still breathing, how he'd dropped her back into a burning building. The members of the support group, in general, rallied around the man, treating him with respect and honoring his confession as a difficult and ennobling experience. But some of the members decided to call the police, and rightly so. They recognized that online discussions are not privileged, that they are like any conversation on the street. If you hear a murderer confess, you call the Right? Well, the members who called the cops were attacked by the rest of the group, as though they had betrayed the confidence of the confessional or some sort of doctor-patient confidentiality (which, by the way, doesn't protect a criminal from the consequences of a confession to his doctor). The other story, about JenniCAM, is really interesting, in my opinion.
Jenni, of JenniCAM, is a nudist HTML coder who lives her life in
front of a Web-connected camera. Every few minutes, the camera snaps
a shot of her, whether she's working, eating, dressing, sleeping
or having sex. Apparently, a lot of guys spend a lot of time watching
Jenni, and she charges a fee of $15 a year to, as she represents
it, cover her costs. I figure if one-twentieth of her half-million
visitorseach month pay the fee, she's pulling in $375,000 a year.
Not bad work if you can get it, I suppose. Jenni takes credit cards
and 900 number calls. |
|
Well, here's Jenni, carrying on, and along comes Leo Hindery, president of cable giant TCI, who, during an address to the bishops of the Roman Catholic church cited Jenni and her little site as an example of the "stunningly immoral" environment on the Web. According to Hindery, "Jennie has attracted a cult following of voyeurs. It may sound pathetic, but people actually relate to Jennie; they feel they know her personally -- so much so that men worldwide regard Jennie as their 'virtual' girlfriend." Now, I had to think about this for a long time, but I finally understand what, precisely, has Leo Hindery so bugged. At first, it appeared to be a case of sour grapes. After all, TCI carries the Playboy channel and other explicit material, yet here he was preaching to the Catholic Bishops. Jenni eats into the TCI audience, harking back to my comment before about the media's deteriorating ability to set the public agenda. But, what's really eating at Hindery is the false intimacy that he believes underlies Jenni's popularity. I came to this realization last night, while my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter tossed and turned with a 104-degree fever. I sat up most of the night by her bed, watching her breathe, holding her hand and, when she would open her eyes to see if I was still there, smiling to reassure her. I registered every breath, felt the rise and fall of her temperature during the night, the squeeze of her fingers around mine when she was frightened, and her racing pulse. The experience was terrifying and wonderful, since she's feeling much better this morning. What Leo Hindery is upset about is the cheapness of the experience of watching Jenni, compared to the felt, heard and seen world that he knows at home and in church. And, basically, I have to agree with him on that score, though I don't take the catholic (with a small "c") perspective. The braggarts of the Web, who claim now that the Bastille of media dominance has been disassembled, think that they are literally in charge of the public agenda and possessed of superior intuition about what the public wants. Their knowledge of the world is painfully constricted, filtered through their own prejudices and not based on a balanced view of the world -- just like the media executives who, for years, may or may not have underestimated the intelligence of the viewing public. This is because the Web user thinks that they know other people through the Web. However, they merely know one another's minds, or what of each mind the possessor chooses to expose. The man who confessed to murdering his daughter had participated in the same online forum for more than a year, was liked, and thought to be a good person struggling with his addiction. What he was actually wrestling were demons much more heinous than those suspected by his comrades in recovery. You cannot know a person without being connected to them in an urgent and important way, as I was last night and am every day with my daughter. The computer, while an excellent tool for communicating, will never replace real contact. Never, not even when technology has advanced another 500 years, because the night spent by a virtual bedside will always be mediated by a device. Even a device that simulates sweat is just a representation of the suffering child; the computer user will always remain safely isolated from the illness, the fear they experience will always be merely vicarious. From this perspective, the Catholic (with a capital "C") Leo Hindery can say with grave concern that he worries the tawdry intimacy of the Web will supplant a direct relationship with God, or at least with a priest. Which brings me to another story, one that appeared in the news as a legend and not a news story. I speak now of my friend John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist, hippie cowboy, Republican committeeman from Wyoming, and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. John Perry suffered a horrible loss a few years ago, when his fiancée died suddenly of an exotic virus. The outpouring of grief and concern over the Net was phenomenal, and Barlow, who is a virtuoso netizen, poured himself into the Net to deal with the grief he was experiencing. This is really one of the great examples of how a technology allowed a man to safe himself. Yet, there was a dark side to the cure. For months, Barlow existed on the road and in Cyberspace. He seldom stayed in one place for more than a few days, and he communicated constantly and copiously with a network of friends around the world. When I met him in the physical world, what I saw genuinely frightened me. Barlow is a big man, his presence fills a room. But the John Perry I encountered was somehow diminished by the PowerBook computer he clutched to his side or chest constantly. It was like a life jacket that anchored him to the virtual world, where he was safe, so that he could survive in the physical world. The PowerBook seemed to buoy him up and sustain his breath in conversation. The computer was always there; he would open it and finger the keys, even when he wasn't actually writing, when he was disconnected from the Web. There was a fevered urgency about him, and he rushed around the world at a break-neck pace, as though he himself was running out of time, like a survivor cast into a cold sea far from his rescuers. I really thought Barlow was racing to beat death. He paddled that PowerBook here and there, speaking constantly and with a venomous passion about the issues confronting his online world. The benefits of the Web, in this case, may have protracted his actual suffering, since he was clearly constantly on the run from the physical grief associated with his fiancée's death. As I sat there by Geneva's bedside last night, I could feel the emptiness that the computer places between myself and others on the Net. By way of illustration: I've been working on a Web site that provides scenarios for the next 20 years, and one of the topics I am researching is the number of personal relationships we have today compared to 100 and 200 years ago. When I began the research, I thought I would find that people today have many more intimate relationships than they had, say, in 1800. But what I found was that the people we remember, like Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Liebnitz, Mozart, all had hundreds of friendships that they sustained even over great distances. People wrote long letters and many short notes, they gathered at considerable effort, all to forge lasting relationships. By comparison, most of today's cyber-friendships are rather cheap replacements for intimacy. People today actually carry on far fewer ongoing exchanges of letters, even of email. Or, perhaps, I should say that the people we will forget carry on far fewer distant relationships than those who we will remember, even now. Online relationships are convenient, like voting for Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf. We exchange messages sporadically with others and, when something bad happens to someone, we act as though acknowledging the misfortune is the same as living through it. You can get the same kind of experience watching television. This does not mean that the Internet is bad for us, nor even that television is bad for us. It is different than physical experience, but not better or worse. How we use it is the fundamental question. The Net does allow us to cultivate distant friends with greater ease than at any time. We have to decide to use it for noble purposes, or we give way to trivial actions that make us all little more than bad performance artists. Doing everything just for the hell of it is the same as shutting down our critical faculties and diving into the sitcom world of television. The elevation of Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf to the Olympus of People-approved beauty is not a demonstration of the power of the people, only of the Net's facility for communicating the people's will. As a people, we haven't stepped up to the opportunity presented by the Net. Which brings me, at last, to the appearance of Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates, Sun CEO Scott McNealy and Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale, among others, before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I've never been so embarrassed in my life for an industry or a global constituency looking for role models. How can I say it? The panel of industry executives came off with all the dignity of Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf. With the notable exception of Gates, who I thought was almost adult, these clowns interrupted one another, raised their hands like indignant children waiting to speak and, without exception, demonstrated that they had no idea that they were sitting in the presence of true political power. The Senators may not have been fully briefed on the programming of computers, but they clearly understood that the debate about Microsoft's dominance of the computer industry has implications across the economic, political and social dimensions of life. Yet, at one point, venture capitalist Stewart Alsop interrupted Senator Strom Thurmond to ask a "clarifying" question of Bill Gates, implying that the Senator had utterly missed the point. Now, I don't respect anything about Strom Thurmond, except, perhaps, his stamina, but Alsop showed that he doesn't understand how the real game is played -- the game that makes nations, stops wars and closes trade agreements. Alsop, whose father and uncle were consummate Washington insiders, acted as though he were back in the moderators seat at one of his industry conferences and blithely pursued his question of Gates while the grizzled old Senator from South Carolina glared at him in a way that only a 90-something redneck can glare. Netscape's Jim Barksdale, a man of some comportment, acted like a child, apparently under the impression that his customer base carries the same clout as a political constituency. But, listen folks, the relationship of buyer and seller is a lot less intimate and energetic than that of representative and constituent. The computer executives showed that, although their industry has substantial clout, it hasn't taken the first step toward true political power. The robber barons of the Gilded Age were laughing in their graves, because they recognized that it is better to let a Senator have his say and then press for your goal than it is to interrupt him to point out that, not only is he old, but also stupid. This is what it all comes down to: You should live by Abraham Lincoln's example. He said that it is better to remain silent and have people think you a fool than to open your mouth and confirm their suspicions. The denizens of the Internet are a noisy bunch, but not a particularly potent force, because they are so damned noisy. Most of the time, technologists come off like the gadflies that attend every city council meeting in every town in the world. The politicians let the gadflies talk and then go right ahead and vote what they think best. In reality and politics, the act of listening is the ticket price to power. As a result, the influence of the Net on society is building up like sediment rather than a solid foundation built according to a collective will, largely because they do not understand and respect what has come before. Ask anyone from San Francisco if it's a good idea to build atop sediment when you know there's a lot of shaking due sometime in the future. Being part of a young medium is like being a young writer, in a way. When you are a young writer, you write angry and intense stuff. You go to readings and brood, drinking coffee or beer to excess to amplify your intensity. Your poems and stories are filled with angst and attitude, but very little grace. Characters erupt, they seldom reflect and, so, at the end of the story, nothing really has happened. Respected journals and then the journals of ill repute reject your stories. One day, you realize that teen angst doesn't make for a career. Your anger wears out and you discover that a whole world of emotion and action is open to you and your characters. If you get through that, you may succeed as a writer. When I was a young writer, my first unpublished novel was about a world in which everyone sold their story to tabloid television. This was written before tabloid television, but I imagined a planet orbited by spy satellites that focused on docudramatic lives, where individual citizens became the center of their own soap operas, sitcoms and mystery shows. Some folks specialized in murdering, while others spent their on-camera time fleeing murderers like real-life, Jerry Springer-fied David Jansens in their personal episodes of The Fugitive. Young women sold their lives to porn channels, arranging outlandish sexual stunts for broadcast, and most of the programming was consumed by wealthy Arab and Asian countries who turned to the U.S. for entertainment. I've lived to see all my dystopian intensity realized, which was not what I expected or desired. Just last week, I was stopped by a cop for driving with expired license plate tabs. This was a cop who knew me from a previous encounter when I'd been driving with my kids; he even acknowledged that on approaching my car. I gave him the wrong insurance card. When I got out of my car to hand him a current insurance card, he reached for his gun and shouted for me to "get back." He'd watched way too much "Cops" on television, which emphasizes the few exciting moments of a policeman's life among the see of boredom. He made no distinction between this traffic stop involving someone he knew and one with a gun-toting stranger. Now he has to pull his gun on anyone, because he can't distinguish between reality and his paranoia and desire for stardom. He could share a green room on the Leeza Show with the folks from the alcohol support group who think it's wrong to rat out a confessed murderer because he speaks up online instead of on a local street corner. Recently, a local woman who had appeared on the Jerry Springer Show told the Tacoma News Tribune that criticism of the show is "garbage." She went on: "This is real life. People just need to get used to it. It's a cruel world. Live with it. I'm no big celebrity like Dennis Rodman or Marilyn Manson. But I am a celebrity from Tacoma." Let usmake this the epitaph for the present,bury it and get on with building a future. On the day I dropped by JenniCAM to see what she had to say about Leo Hindery's accusations of immorality, she was out. A sign on her chair said that Jenni would be back in a few days, because she was appearing on one of the talk shows. Today, when I stopped in, she was asking viewers to vote for her in the People Most Beautiful Poll. She hadn't cracked the top 20 when I last checked, despite her reputed audience of 500,000. Just imagine what the stage at the Jerry Springer Show will look like when the 10 write-in candidates who top the People Poll appear together: Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf will ogle Jenni, and whoever "Tiny the Trow" is can mud-wrestle Gillian Anderson of the X-Files. Now, that's entertainment. Today, everyone wants to be part of the show. They don't see that the show is what's wrong, that the showmanship they attribute to themselves is precisely what they damn in others. If the Net is going to change the world, it will have to do it without the hubris it condemns in the established media, established political system and society at large. As it is, the Net is like one big life raft, full of people paddling desperately toward the klieg lights of relevance, a relevance defined by trolls and television producers, who value confession without the accompanying pain of real atonement for one's crimes. I've got just one thing to say: Grow up, people. Of course, who am I to talk? |
|
The
Library |
|
Sites on my mind: Far
Eastern Economic Review
|
|
|
|||
|
Copyright
1992-2002 by |