Alan Jacobs

The Whale and the Reactor (1)

When our politicians and media loudmouths act like fools and zealots, they should be held responsible for being fools and zealots. They shouldn’t be held responsible for the darkness that always waits to swallow up the unstable and the lost.

I’ve become a big fan of tools like Freedom, which effortlessly permit you to turn off the noise. An hour after you haven’t kept up with the world, you may or may not have work product to show as a result. If you don’t, you’ve just called your bluff, haven’t you? And if you do, then you’ve discovered how powerful confronting the fear (by turning off the noise) can be.

In one view, both the revelations of WikiLeaks and of the Telegraph would, if they became the norm, encourage a more truthful public sphere. Conscious that everything was potentially transparent, we—and especially our leaders—would develop into super-rational beings uncomprehending of the notion of mendacity. Politicians would give the whole range of their thoughts on every subject, in support of their party or otherwise; officials would make public their plans at every stage; diplomats would reveal all conversations and the public would have the maturity to understand and take no unfair advantage of these disclosures. But no conceivable society could live in such transparency. It is more likely that a transparency culture simply causes a displacement of the semi-private into the wholly private—with public figures relying more on public relations to act as a shield, and turning an increasingly bland face to the outside word.

Google was designed to play the role of a passive observer of the internet: web content was created for people, not specific Google queries, and Google would look around, take inventory of what was available, and give it to people who asked. Google’s general, big-picture algorithms probably haven’t changed much since the days when this was relatively accurate.

But that’s no longer what web content looks like. Now, massive amounts of technically-not-spam sites are generated by penny-hungry affiliate marketers and sleazy web “content” startups to target long-tail Google queries en masse, scraping content from others or paying low-wage workers to churn out formulaic, minimally nutritious pages to answer them.

Searching Google is now like asking a question in a crowded flea market of hungry, desperate, sleazy salesmen who all claim to have the answer to every question you ask.

The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It’s its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other. That question is:

Why wasn’t I consulted?

Writers and editors, as Harper’s Magazine’s Thomas Frank points out, are being driven into penury by Internet wages — in most cases, no wages. But, as Lawrence Summers once said to me about Mexicans, Americans are free to ‘choos'” to work in 'content mills,’ the editorial equivalent of Mexican maquilladoras, where they can earn $15 for writing 300 words. The result of this 'free choice’ is what Leon Wieseltier calls the 'proletarianization of the writer,’ although what he describes as their 'i'ndecent poverty’ has yet to turn them radical.

I have been radicalized, both as a publisher and a writer, and have instituted a 'protectionist’ policy in regard to the Internet and its free-content salesmen. In the long run, I think I’ll be vindicated, since clearly the advertising 'model’ has failed and readers are going to have to pay (in opposition to Google’s bias against paid sites) if they want to see anything more complex than a blog, a classified ad or a sex act.

Starting early in the 20th century, tens of thousands of scripts were produced by different mediums in several countries over a period of more than 30 years. Known as the ‘cross-correspondences’ because they seemed to be linked together, the scripts contained texts claiming to be messages from deceased psychical researchers, including Sidgwick and Myers, which together demonstrated the reality of life after death. As the flow of scripts continued an even larger claim emerged: the dead had taken on the task of saving the world of the living by means of a post-mortem experiment in eugenics. Scientists who had passed to “the other side” were fashioning an exceptional human being, a posthumously designed messiah-child who would deliver humankind from chaos and bring peace to the world.

Here’s the problem though, today’s English graduate student digital natives are not. Not digitally native, I mean. In part, I am highly skeptical of Prensky’s categories. Clearly there is more to digital literacy than the year of one’s birth. Still, English phd students tend to come from fairly affluent families (especially on a global scale). They are obviously well-educated. In other words, they have had access. English, however, probably self-selects for an aversion to technology. That is, overall, English grad students are less technologically literate than their contemporaries. I don’t think it would be unfair to say that, on a national scale, an English education fails to educate students to support a digital literacy. Just look at the curriculum and try to figure out where such an education might be taking place: in dark corners only.

So English, and maybe other humanities, is attractive to those who cannot figure out the digital world or who find some principled reason to reject it (which is fine in my view, just as it is fine that the Amish reject many technologies). However, while it is fine for an individual or even a community to reject technologies, it probably doesn’t bode well for an academic discipline.

Headphones work best for people who need or want to hear one sound story and no other; who don’t want to have to choose which sounds to listen to and which to ignore; and who don’t want their sounds overheard. Under these circumstances, headphones are extremely useful — and necessary for sound professionals, like intelligence and radio workers — but it’s a strange fact of our times that this rarefied experience of sound has become so common and widespread. In the name of living a sensory life, it’s worth letting sounds exist in their audio habitat more often, even if that means contending with interruptions and background sound.

Make it a New Year’s resolution, then, to use headphones less. Allow kids and spouses periodically to play music, audiobooks, videos, movie, television and radio audibly. Listen to what they’re listening to, and make them listen to your stuff. Escapism is great, and submission and denial, too, have their places. But sound thrives amid other sounds. And protecting our kids’ hearing is not just as important as protecting their brains; it is protecting their brains.