Is the Internet becoming a catalyst for human self destruction?
I was recently referred to an article in the UK Guardian. I quote a part of that article:
“There’s no point debating anything online. You might as well hurl shoes in the air to knock clouds from the sky. The internet’s perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain’t one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional “live audience” quickly conspire to create a “perfect storm” of perpetual bickering.â€
I also read somewhere that web logs are very popular because they are a great way for rallying emotion. Blogs are great means for bringing together ideologues into a screaming blunt instrument.
My experience leads me to agree with both assessments of the Internet as a communications media. The Internet is lousy for intellectual discourse but great for emotional demagogy.
Is the Internet becoming a catalyst for human self destruction?
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yeats—the bold accent is mine
I would agree that it has been for me. I recently decided to quit a group I’ve been posting with for 5 years or so because it almost has been nothing but constant bickering mostly on politics and religion, two hardcore subjects. That cannot be good for the health at all, not to mention the idleness of sitting around all of the time and bad eating habits that came along with it. And I also happened to become an attention harlot and brought some of it on myself. I would say that I kind of made up a character who is the opposite of myself, and I did not distinguish the real me from the false me. They were blended. People came up with all kinds of false conceptions of me, and sometimes I foolishly gave in to have fun or so I thought. Then there is all the crazy things I said, some of which I afterward wished I had never said, for all the world to see.
It’s very true that discussions in internet forums tend to achieve absolutely nothing in the real world. What can happen though is people can learn things off each other and hone their own ideas. This is the main reason for me being on this forum.
Bear in mind one thing - the editors of the Guardian are cretinously incompetent and generally haven’t researched a single claim in the articles they publish.
Oh, and that link doesn’t appear to work for me - could you give me the title/headline of the article so I can find it on the Guardian website?
The more opinions out there to read, the more angles of an issue we can discuss and the broader our view becomes. I think it could well be called catalyst for learning rather than destruction, if that’s what people want to use it for.
the link works fine for me. It’s called ‘Supposing … There’s only one thing worth debating online.’
Well said. I think it is a good place to become conscious of an idea but the gaining of knowledge must come from more knowledgable sources than will be found in a forum.
Yep, seems to work for me too now so disregard the prior post.
A point to note - Charlie Brooker is predominantly a hypercynical TV critic - his column Screen Burn in the Saturday Guardian’s TV Guide has entertained me for years and was published as a book a year or so ago - and so is not the most internet-savvy of journalists. I doubt, for example, that he’s been to this site or any other like it (not that there is another one like it, from my experience). He’s also a comedy writer - he co-wrote the cult media satire Nathan Barley, a show so biting and contemporary that it was roundly hated by TV reviewers because it threatened the very basis of what makes their job easy. He also contributed to the sketch show Spoons which is about a dozen times better than Little Britain* but far less acclaimed. He’s a huge fan of BBC4’s political satire The Thick of It, which was the best show of 2005. Now, The Thick of It is produced and directed by Armando Ianucci who worked with Chris Morris (unnadulterated comic genius) on The Day Today, a mid-90s media satire. Chris Morris co-wrote Nathan Barley with Charlie Brooker, who authored the Guardian article.
Indeed, there are about 30 writers who’ve collectively written just about every good TV/radio comedy show in Britain in the last 20 years. It’s a conspiracy, I’m sure. Actually, it isn’t. It’s just what happens when you have a comedy department as large as the BBC’s.
With all that in mind, I turn to Brooker’s arguments.
This the conclusion of the argument, written in typical newspaper fashion in the opening paragraph. If ever you wanted an example of the media chasing it’s own tail in order to tell a story… I’m getting distracted.
‘Futile’ - this is ironic in the extreme given that Brooker’s show, Nathan Barley, achieved disappointing audience figures/ratings but seemed to generate proportionally far more interest on the internet. This actually led Channel 4 to re-run the series. ‘Futile’. Hmmmm…
The internet provides plenty of room for debate - the room is there, it just depends on the posters to use it well. A space is a space, you can either build a toilet and shit in it or you can turn it into an artwork or a public libary or a food cooperative.
Perceived anonymity - I actually think that this encourages people to be more sincere and often far freer with their imaginations than in direct face-to-face contact. This is just the same logocentric (ranking speech over writing) prejudice that we’ve had since Plato being applied to the internet. I know far, far more about some of the people here than the girl in the corner shop near here who I’ve met face to face maybe a hundred times. I’ve even spoken to her about one thing or another, but I have absolutely no idea who she is (save for how she looks, the tone of her voice and that she works in a shop).
Brooker seems to be applying a fatalism to the internet then jumping up and down in pride at having proved himself correct. If one goes looking for fights then the internet can provide you with a more or less inexhaustible stream of cretins to fight with, that’s true. But the stream is optional, or at least, there are other places to swim. Like ILP.
Indeed, not that I’m slating him because I really like the guy, but when Mastriani, in a conv in the Rant House, pulled back his troops to the borders of ‘you can’t understand/change anyone via the internet’-land I just gave up the conversation. It’s like someone saying ‘well, you’ve got your opinion and I’ve got mine and that’s all there is to it’. There’s no point saying anything more when someone is in that frame of mind, the discussion is effectively ended. Now, of course I could say more in that conversation, even raise that issue with Mastriani in that very thread, but I don’t think I’d get anywhere and I know he’s perfectly capable of reading this here and understanding it without too much rancour.
The ‘notional live audience’ - this assumes that all audiences on all internet messageboards are alike. Now, there is a cretinous genericus in evidence on many messageboards who adopt the same basic patterns of behaviour (probably due to the shared MTV-inspired cultural upbringing, regardless of location). But ILP doesn’t even have the same audience as philosophyforums.com, or sophists.org or wherever else. I can’t remember the last time the ‘peanut gallery’ invaded a thread and ruined it with playground jibes and chants of ‘fight fight fight’.
‘Gestated responses’ - this would appear to be as likely to increase the quality of response as reduce it, though we’d have to do some sort of test.
‘random heckling’ - now come on, this is part of the fun. This actually inspires discussion if the people involved are smart enough.
Not always. I’ve seen epic threads that have ebbed and flowed, taking in periods of puerile ass-kicking contests and then flowing back and taking in periods of sincere discussion. Again, this smacks of ignorance and generalisation on Brooker’s part. He should spend some time here.
He then goes into a phallacious meandering about dick-measuring/waving which isn’t worth considering as an argument.
So in truth, no, I think that Brooker is making a nihilistic generalisation. There’s a lot of shit on the internet. A lot. Of Shit. But inasmuch as fruitful discussion is possible at all, the internet is one place where it can and does take place.
To give you all a taste of the sort of thing Brooker writes on a regular basis:
If any of you have seen this, whether in the UK or not, I apologise unreservedly
All commentary; verbal, written or digitally transmitted; by this poster is expressly a matter of personal opinion, individual belief, personal experience, and is not intended to purport necessity of change(s), implied/perceived, to other posters; physical, mental or emotional. Any attempt to treat this post in a manner contradictory to what has been thusly stated, is erroneous, and is the fault, entirely, of the reader of said post.
Nope, no offense whatsoever. Still my point remains siatd, human communication is not a certainty with respect to understanding … and the internets is even further removed, because of the inherent deficiencies.
So what is your suggestion to resolving this problem? I genuinely do not see that one is available or viable.
P.S. I have a better idea, if you’re willing: let’s take the communication issue to the Chamber and have ben set it up for us … that way, we will have no choice but to bring this to a logically discoursed conclusion - or lose “internets face” … are you game, siatd?
Sure, I’d love to discuss this one through, since it’s instrumental to every discussion here in some way or other. It would also enable a testing out of future ideas for the Chamber, along lines we’ve talked about in the other place.
The internet has turned me into a vegetative, media-hungry maniac who will stop at nothing to do absolutely nothing and spend time with absolutley no one.
