Vol. 112: The Internet and its critics

Who’s afraid of ‘mass distraction’?

Do you loathe the Internet? Has it wrecked your interpersonal relationships? Do you resent the way it seduces you into spending your waking hours staring at phones and computer screens when you could be watching TV? Do you pine for that halcyon age when a handwritten letter or postcard brightened your day, even if it appeared to have been run over by a truck?

Now for the good news: You’re not alone.

Three authors recently joined the already swollen ranks of Internet detractors. In Age of Revolutions, the pundit Fareed Zakaria of CNN and the Washington Post declares that the digital revolution has given us convenience and efficiency at the cost of “civic engagement, intimacy, and authenticity.” He blames the digital revolution for damn near everything that’s wrong with today’s world: atomization, job losses, social resentment, and political extremism.

In The Sirens’ Call, Chris Hayes, a TV news anchor, derides our mobile phones as “little slot machines we hold in our pocket” that can “simply throw a million little interruptions at us, track which ones grab our attention and then repeat those.” In Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Are Tearing Us Apart, Nicholas Carr argues— are you sitting down?— that technologies of connection are tearing us apart.

In keeping with the authors’ deeply held convictions about the dangers of modern technology, their works are not available online. Instead, they’ve been carved on stone tablets suitable for delivery to homes and bookstores via oxcart. (Just kidding.)

All of which begs two questions about modern technology and its alleged weapons of mass distraction: First: What else is new? And second: Will somebody please give me a break?

Fear of Gutenberg

In The Hidden Persuaders (1957), Vance Packard shocked the naïve Western world by revealing how advertisers use psychological methods to "persuade" us to buy their products. That was almost 40 years before anyone had even heard of the Internet.

More to my point, today’s Internet critics sound remarkably similar to the 15th-Century party-poopers who went bananas when Johannes Gutenberg invented moveable type. The mass distribution of printed words, they warned, would stir up the peasants, disrupt the existing social order, and trigger a wave of pornography— which pretty much sums up the essence of today’s anti-Internet complaints. All three predictions came to pass (then and now), yet on balance, humanity survived moveable type and even benefitted from it. Or do you believe we’d be better off without printed words?

I write as a journalist who owes much of his trade— the pursuit of truth— to the Internet, and not only because an independent column like this one, aimed at a relatively intimate audience, would be inconceivable without the Internet. Before the Internet, the search for truth was monopolized by the rich and powerful, many of whom believed they already owned the truth. In those days, any idiot rich enough to buy a printing press could set himself up as a high priest. Today, thanks to cheaper and faster technologies like the Internet, a fortune and a printing press are no longer necessary. That means, yes, that any idiot can now pose as a journalist. But it also means that dialogue among conflicting viewpoints— one key to the search for truth— is at least possible.

Researching a gunfighter

Long before the Internet was even conceived, I spent 57 years (really!) researching the life of the Pony Express superintendent Joseph Alfred Slade (1831-1864), an important figure of the early West about whom a great deal was written and spoken, much of it false. Many Western writers and historians, daunted by the challenge of sifting the facts about Slade from the fiction, had thrown up their hands and embraced what some of them called “the higher truth of good fiction.”

“No character in the history of the West more deserves a book than Jack Slade,” the late Western historian Raymond Settle once observed in a private letter. “But in my opinion, no book about him, true to history, will ever be written. There are too many gaps in his life, too many unknowns.”

For decades, my quest for the truth about Slade required traveling to distant archives, haunting libraries, photocopying documents, and conducting snail-mail correspondence with scholars, archivists, and old-timers.

A Google revelation

The advent of the Internet in the 1990s changed everything. Now I was able to access material within minutes, without leaving my office. More important, I was also able to assemble, online, a virtual advisory board consisting of of historians and hobbyists across the country who shared my interest in my subject and were often able to answer my queries within hours, if not minutes.

Perhaps most important, the arrival of Internet search engines like Google enabled me to discover that many published books and articles about Slade, previously accepted as gospel, had all derived from a single source, which turned out to be false.

The result of my labors— Death of a Gunfighter (Westholme)— was published in 2008. There’s no doubt in my mind that, had the Internet not come along, I’d still be working on it today, with little hope of ever reaching the finish line.

Up from the clipping morgue

Back in the ’70s and ’80s, I made my living as a free-lance magazine writer. In those pre-Internet days, most journalists relied for background on the yellowed and crumbling clipping morgues that most newspapers maintained. Magazine writers researched their stories by conducting interviews and clipping newspaper articles. I enjoyed a special advantage over my competitors because I was aware of a wonderful resource called the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. This was a remarkable compendium, updated every two weeks, of articles in hundreds of magazines and scholarly journals, organized by subject.

So— whenever I got an assignment, my first order of business was to head for the central building of Philadelphia’s Free Library to look up the subject in the Reader’s Guide. After noting all the relevant citations, I would then arm myself with rolls of dimes to spend several days within the Free Library’s walls, moving from one department to another to photocopy the articles I needed, fitting together information I gleaned in each room like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Only then would I return to my office, pick up the phone, and begin conducting interviews.

Today, of course, the Internet serves most of my research needs. And it’s accessible to me without leaving my office.

A wedding crisis

If you still take the Internet for granted, here’s one more real-life story :

In 1967, one of my best friends got married in Easthampton, N.Y., on the Sunday following Thanksgiving. For the occasion, I wrote a long epic poem, which I planned to read at the reception following the ceremony. At the time, Barbara and I lived in a small town in eastern Indiana. We planned to fly from Dayton, Ohio, to New York on the day before Thanksgiving, spend three days visiting my parents in New York, then drive on Sunday to Easthampton on the eastern tip of Long Island, and fly home to Indiana on Monday.

Unfortunately for this ambitious itinerary, a blizzard on the day before Thanksgiving forced cancellation of our flight and marooned us for the entire weekend in our home in Portland, Ind. Now I confronted a new challenge: How to transmit my epic poem so somebody else could read it at my friends’ wedding that Sunday.

Today, thanks to the Internet, that challenge would be no challenge: I could email or fax the poem to anyone I chose within a matter of seconds, and at no cost. But in 1967 my options were dire indeed:

I could make a long-distance phone call to another wedding guest and read the poem to him while he transcribed it. This option would be not only cumbersome and time-consuming but expensive: Such a call would have cost about $1 per minute, today’s equivalent of $10 per minute for a call of maybe 30 minutes— this at a time when I was earning $175 a week. So I chose instead a riskier but less expensive option: I made three copies of the poem and sent them via Air Mail Special Delivery (45 cents each) to my brother and two friends back in New York, in the hope that at least one of them would receive the poem in time to read it at the wedding.

Mark Twain’s advice

Theoretically, “Special Delivery” implied delivery even on a legal holiday. But would such a letter be delivered on Thanksgiving Day during a snowstorm? Would it reach at least one of its destinations by Sunday afternoon? These were the sort of ulcer-inducing crises my generation confronted back in the good old pre-Internet days.

As things turned out, one of the three letters— but only one— did indeed reach its intended destination in time for the wedding. My brother Bob, who received it, read the poem that day as planned.

All’s well that ends well, you say? Yes, but I still get the sweats thinking about how all my creative effort could have gone down the drain.

In the 19^th Century, Mark Twain allegedly advised, “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.” In the 20^th Century, A.J. Liebling observed, “Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.” On the other hand, in this century not very long ago, a New Yorker cartoon portrayed a dog happily tapping away at a computer keyboard while exulting, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog!” That’s the price of progress— a price I, for one, am happy to pay.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com