WEEK EIGHT: IN THE SWAMP

As soon as I read Dan Gillmor’s wonderful phrase “Cyberswamp,” I knew what my cartoon this week would be about. In chapter five of “We the Media,” Gillmor talks about the anarchy of information and problems of trust that have unfortunately resulted from the wonderful freedom of communication afforded us by digital technology and the Internet. He shows how the ease with which we can cut and paste information can lead to words being taken seriously out of context. He points out the dangers inherent in our ability to alter images in Photoshop and other image programs. He gives examples of businesses and political factions that have taken advantage the anonymity of the Web to smear competitors or spread rumors in order to sway public opinion. He points to a public relations firm that actually advertises “online word-of-mouth marketing” among the services it offers.

Gillmor says rightly that in this new digital era we need to become active users, not merely passive consumers of information and news. This is a little depressing to those of us who thought that technology was going to make our lives easier, rather than creating more work for us. We need to take information “with a grain of salt,” Gillmor says, and most importantly, we need to consider the source of information to determine if it is reputable and free from ulterior motives.

Gillmor’s advice is correct, but my fear is that we are turning into a society in which people feel they can’t completely trust anything. I’ve run into people who feel like this already, especially about politics. I remember one very frustrating conversation I had with a young man who responded to every point I made with questions like, “What’s your source for that? How do you know he really said that? Were you actually there when he said it?” He believed that any video, audio or written record can be faked and therefore you can’t believe anything unless you have first hand experience of it. After a while I realized it was impossible to have a serious conversation with this person, just as it is with a child who asks “why?” about everything you say.

Attitudes like this are more than just frustrating; they are dangerous, because an atmosphere of doubt stifles progress, tends to support the status quo and shifts decision-making away from reason and toward emotion, wishful thinking and self-interest. For years the tobacco companies had basically just one response to all the mounting evidence about their products’ health risks: “There is no conclusive proof.” That one phrase introduced enough doubt, in many people’s minds, to blow away all the evidence. The exact same thing is happening today with the American attitude toward global warming. All George Bush has to say is “the jury’s still out,” and for many people the whole subject goes away.

There was a time when Walter Cronkite was known as “The Most Trusted Man in America.” Where is our Walter Cronkite today? If anyone has come close to this title recently, it would probably be Rush Limbaugh, but we would also have to give him the title “Least Trusted Man in America” at the same time. I’m starting to doubt that we’ll ever trust anyone the way we trusted people in the past.

I applaud organizations like Media Matters.org who strive to be watchdogs over the media. We need more organizations like these to help us sift through the masses of information, disinformation, spin and opinion that confront us every day. Perhaps some day even major news organizations will see this as their role (once again), instead of seeing it as providing entertainment, selling advertising or supporting corporate agendas. Perhaps the really big winners in the new information market will be those who figure out ways to guide us through the Cyberswamp and win our lasting trust.

WEEK SEVEN: NO TIME TO SAVE THE WORLD

Reading Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons,” I remembered the spirit of global concern that was in the air when I was a kid in the ‘60s. You heard a lot of talk back then about the problems of overpopulation, pollution, nuclear winter, etc. And a lot of people took it very seriously. I remember vowing, when I was about twelve, that I would never pollute the air by owning a car. If I had to ride a horse to get around, I would ride a horse.

I never did get a horse. I owned a car for a while but finally traded it in for a bicycle about fourteen years ago. I recycle, I compost, I conserve electricity, I mow my lawn with a push mower, I don’t eat meat, I try to support local organic farmers, but on the whole I consider myself just about as selfish and lazy and hedonistic as the average American.

My sister took the spirit of the ’60s more seriously than I did. She did a lot of protesting at a nuclear power plant and spent time in jail for it. Then she bought some land in upstate New York and became a veritable Thoreau, living with her dogs in a yurt and hauling water from a well while she painstakingly built a house for herself by hand. Today she’s a nurse and public health administrator, living in a New Hampshire village with her husband who is a nurse practitioner. They are two of the most fun people I know, but when I told them recently how much I enjoyed a trip to Las Vegas, they remarked that they would never go to a place like that because of all the water and electricity it wastes. They have principles.

Today people who took the spirit of the ‘60s seriously are laughing stocks. Damn hippie, tofu-eating do-gooders. The tide of anger and outrage that swelled up around Vietnam and Watergate swept the progressive movement forward in mainstream America through the ‘70s, when it was actually fashionable to care about the world. Then cocaine and the Reagan conservatives brought a new “morning in America” when people woke up, rubbed their eyes and asked themselves, “What was that nightmare I had? Sheez, let’s stop worrying and have some fun! Time to think about ME! Time to party!”

That party is still going on today, not only in America. Globalization has spread a freewheeling, free-market spirit of “more for me NOW!” to almost every corner of the globe. We still read articles and see television stories that warn us of impending perils, but our knee-jerk reaction today is to make jokes about them. Whoever came up with the idea, back in the ‘80s, of the bumpersticker that read “Nuke the Whales” knew exactly where our consciousness was heading.

Hardin’s article is even more depressing to read today that it would have been in 1968, if you think about how much worse the problems he talks about have gotten. In this age of high tech it is startling to read Hardin’s statement that there are no technological solutions to our problems. In this age of Information Revolution it is depressing to read Hardin’s prediction that even spreading information cannot stem the tide of our problems. Most depressing of all is his prediction that voluntary temperance and good behavior not only will not solve our problems but may actually make them worse, by making it easier for others to be intemperate and behave badly. As Hardin says, it only makes sense to grab what you can. Letting your neighbor grab it instead, because of your idealistic notions of doing good for the world, is perverse.

The implications of Hardin's arguments are pretty clear. If things keep going the way they are (and they will), the only possible ways to prevent disaster are political. As population grows bigger and the world, by comparison, grows smaller, we must realize that the earth itself is our “commons” just as the pasture in the middle of a New England village was a commons shared by all inhabitants. If we are to solve the problems of the use of this world commons by political means, the political power to do this must be some kind of world government.

The idea of world government is a pretty scary concept in itself, but it may be inevitable, just as giving up many of our cherished freedoms may be inevitable. Let’s hope we can find a path toward world government that will preserve as many freedoms as possible. Let’s hope we develop a world government that embraces the best aspects of democracy, socialism and free enterprise. Certainly the establishment of the United Nations was a step in the right direction. We must support and strengthen this institution, instead of bypassing it and deriding it as “irrelevant” as the Bush Administration and their ambassador John Bolton have done.

We laugh today at the people who thought that the telegraph, or the telephone or television, would bring world peace and brotherhood and sisterhood. Despite this, I believe that if the Internet can be maintained as a “commons” for free and candid communication throughout the world, it can be a powerful vehicle for bringing about progressive, non-oppressive political solutions to global problems.

WEEK SIX: COMMENTS FROM THE STALL

Forgive my gross cartoon this week. I never dreamed I would be drawing a purple-haired nerd sitting on a toilet, but this week’s reading on “Communities in Cyberspace” got me started on this train of thought.

I have not spent a lot of time in online communities, but I have visited a few user groups for video and audio equipment, where I found some helpful interactions, a lot of merchandise plugs obviously planted by salespeople masquerading as users, a surprising number of smartass comments and some downright rude putdowns. In many cases, the tone of conversation suggested that members of these communities had learned their social graces in the School of Beavis & Butthead.

On my first foray into YouTube, the first and only comment I got on a video I submitted was a death threat. I removed the video immediately and am still so frightened by the incident that I am reluctant to reveal any details about it here on the Web, lest my would-be killer should somehow track me down.

I have peeked around the Internet enough to know that my experiences are not unusual. Indeed, there is a unique style in much of the communications you find in cyberspace, characterized by a breezy, high-handed, cavalier, anarchic and sometimes mean-spirited tone, usually in fractured sentences and exactly the kind of chatty, conversational voice that H.W. Fowler warns against in the end of “Modern English Usage.”

But beyond all that, Cyberspace has a definite ATMOSPHERE: a sense of place so strong that sometimes I think I can actually SMELL it. And what does cyberspace smell like? I could not figure this out until last night, when I was reading about the ugly “flaming,” feuds and “virtual rapes” that occur in online communities. All of a sudden I realized what smell had been creeping up my nose. Cyberspace sometimes smells like…a public toilet.

This is a bit more than just a smartass metaphor. I will explain.

I remember going into the boys’ room on my first day of Junior High school, where I was accosted by the smell of urinal cakes, cigarette butts and other odiferous matter, and by the crudest, meanest writings and drawings, scrawled all over the toilet stalls. How anyone could think such thoughts and visualize such images, let alone scratch them onto the walls, I could not fathom.

When I went to college, I found graffiti of more literary and philosophic character, often arranged in threads of interactions between several writers that flowed down a wall or were connected by links in the form of arrows. Each thread usually ended when some writer trumped the others with an unanswerably crude summation. Does this remind you of anything?

The other night, after several hours of studying under the stained glass windows of Suzzallo Library’s Reading Room (to which I heard an undergrad refer as “the Harry Potter room”), I went into a nearby men’s room and there, in crude scrawls around the toilet paper dispenser, I found that nothing has changed. I wondered which of the scholars with whom I had been studying spend their breaks scratching the nastiest things they can think of into the bathroom wall. I wondered which of them, clicking away at their laptops, might actually be flaming on the Internet as they sat studiously in the great hall of learning.

There are a number of theories why people behave differently in cyberspace than they do in real life. Some people say that the sense of anonymity and the relative lack of repercussion to things said on the Web make people feel free to let loose the dark side of their personality. Some say the opportunity to invent a new identity, independent of physical limitations, encourages people to experiment with different selves. Chris Pirillo told us in class about a theory that part of our brain, where sympathy and humanity reside, shuts down when we sit in front of a machine.

These are all good theories. My own theory is that the Internet can function as a toilet stall: a dark, walled, private place where we can sit and do ugly things and communicate anonymously with other anonymous beings on the walls, all without being observed. Or can we? Congressman Mark Foley and others have recently learned otherwise. There’s a camera in the ceiling! The school principal is about to bust down the door and catch you in the act! Alligators in the city sewers can come up through the pipes and bite you in the…YIKES!

In order to keep cyberspace from becoming an ugly, smelly, dangerous place, like a public toilet, we need to put it into perspective. We need to keep our feet on the ground while our heads swim in cyberspace. We need to stop thinking of cyberspace as a “whole new world,” disconnected from the everyday world, where we can do anything we want. We cannot treat the people we meet there like virtual dragons or robots that can be slain for points in a game. We should not think of cyberspace as a wild frontier, where there are no rules. Instead we should think of it as an extension of our traditional world, where we can carry on our traditional quests for progress, happiness and community, using wonderful new tools. We should bring the best of our traditions, methods, rules and courtesies into cyberspace and let them flourish.