That Internet Sucks Argument
Posted on October 28, 2006
Filed Under For Argument's Sake |
Mathew Ingram and Mark Evans have kept alive a debate that I seem to remember first started kicking off, in a previous incarnation, a couple of weeks back. It got a workout too at Techdirt. The gist of the debate is that an article published in the Canadian mag Macleans, which concluded that the Internet was full of fatal flaws for humanity, was actually not an attempt to put forward a real argument. It was trolling for visitors.
The article was a one-sided view of the Internet or interweb’s downside - child porn, crime, amateurism. And the response in general is de-der-de-der. Of course there are those problems to contend with but don’t go trolling.
Coincidentally the same day(s) I’d been reading and writing aboutHenry Jenkins on the effects of our new information space.
Henry’s observation is that children tend now not to attribute information to any particular source. They see an ocean out there and don’t deconstruct it into drops of water. That might be okay but those drops of water are all regarded as equally valid, which is okay with water but not okay with information. They don’t feel any compulsion to differentiate information by assessing the authority of the source.
In a world where participatory democracy is on the decline, you have to be concerned when young people won’t even pay lip service to understanding the mechanics of veracity. Our media literacy has already slipped. Here we are a better educated society and in danger of slipping further away from critical engagement, though this time not with politics but with information itself.
It doesn’t mean the Internet sucks, it means we’ve made one more substantial transition in our relationship with what we know and how we know things. It’s as important as the establishment of a scientific genre or the discovery of an alphabet. And its ramifications are wide ranging (I never use the word ramifications without “wide ranging”).
I have a lot of respect for the commentators in this debate, on both sides. I think Macleans was trolling but I like heresy and heretics. Mathew and Mark make a lot of sense on many issues. But here is another point that kept me awake at my desk yesterday afternoon.
Can the blog conversation actually push towards constructive conclusions? The old art of debate moved a debate on towards a conclusion, at least in the minds of a few participants. This debate seems all about flow. It’s going somewhere and then it’s not. It’ll come up again, no doubt, so dip in and then dip out.
I hope I’m drawing attention to a change in the way dialogue works. In blogs it is satisfying and sufficient to keep the flow going. In other arenas you want progress, and closure.
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