One striking thing about the net is that it provides sealed-off venues.
I don't follow.
1. Each magazine story was a sealed-off story. You had to move to another story to get a different viewpoint. And in some magazines the whole magazine is a sealed-off viewpoint (e.g. Nation, National Review), and you had to get multiple magazines to get a variety of perspectives. In the case of books, you had to go to the bookstore or library to get a different viewpoint
2. On the web, I can surf and skim 20 widely divergent viewpoints in less time than it takes to read a single New Yorker story or a single chapter of a book. True, many individual sites may be sealed-off, but there are a VAST number of viewpoints out there waiting for me. If I start with a good search engine and put in a decent search term, just hit the back button to return to the search engine, click a new link, and I'm at a totally different site with a totally different viewpoint.
In the days of text culture, varying viewpoints were expressed in proximity to each other.
On sites like SI there are a vast number of viewpoints expressed in immediate proximity. In five messages on the Clinton threads I can go from rampant hatred to neutrality to rampant adoration and back in 30 seconds. What magazine can give you that variety in such close proximity?
Another way of saying what i'm trying, confusedly, to say, is that we seem to be
seeing a gradual retreat from the competitive formation of identity and
identity-related opinion to a new paradigm where entrepreneurs of a particular
worldview or identity are able to create 'sufficing' realms impervious to contradiction
or reality-testing in general. This is particularly noticeable in the explosive growth of
hate websites and fundamentalist religious websites, and cult sites generally.
This was always the case. The Catholic Church had its Index, and if you read anything off it, you could be excommunicated. No competitive ideas allowed. The NAACP, B'nai Brith, KKK, ACLU, Catholic Church, Mormon Church, etc. each had a viewpoint and presented materials pushing that viewpoint. If opposing viewpoints were presented, it was as straw men to destroy, not to look for a diversity of opinions and constructive dialogue.
all aimed at making ideological
encapsulation, or identity encapsulation, a comfortable experience.
Isn't this exactly what every church, the Freemasons, the Elks, the Rotarians, the KKK, the Democratic Party, etc., etc. etc. were all designed to do before the web came along?
What I object to on the web is not the lack of diversity of opinions, but that there is too much shouting and not enough talking, too many people blindly pushing agendas without any interest in dialogue or discussion. Not too few but too MANY ideas dashing mindlessly back and forth without ever taking root in any brain and being thought about seriously. |
