Book People Archive

Thoughts on the Internet's Founding Myths

Thoughts on the Internet's Founding Myths
By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"

Whenever I put forth on the Internet's numerous newsgroups, discussion fora 
and Websites a controversial view, an iconoclastic opinion, or a 
much-disputed thesis, the winning argument against my propositions starts 
with "everyone knows that ...". For a self-styled nonconformist medium, the 
Internet is the reification of herd mentality.

Actually, it is founded on the rather explicit belief in the implicit wisdom 
of the masses. This particularly pernicious strong version of egalitarianism 
postulates that veracity, accuracy, and truth are emergent phenomena, the 
inevitable and, therefore, guaranteed outcome of multiple interactions 
between users.

But the population of Internet users is not comprised of representative 
samples of experts in every discipline. Quite the contrary. The barriers to 
entry are so low that the Internet attracts those less gifted 
intellectually. It is a filter that lets in the stupid, the mentally ill, 
the charlatan and scammer, the very young, the bored, and the unqualified. 
It is far easier to publish a blog, for instance, than to write for the New 
York Times. Putting up a Website with all manner of spurious claims for 
knowledge or experience is easy compared to the peer review process that 
vets and culls scientific papers.

One can ever "contribute" to an online "encyclopedia", the Wikipedia, 
without the slightest acquaintance the topic one is "editing". Consequently, 
the other day, I discovered, to my utter shock, that Eichmann changed his 
name, posthumously, to Otto. It used to be Karl Adolf, at least until he was 
executed in 1962.

Granted, there are on the Internet isolated islands of academic merit, 
intellectually challenging and invigorating discourse, and true erudition or 
even scholarship. But they are mere islets in the tsunami of falsities, 
fatuity, and inanities that constitutes the bulk of User Generated Content 
(UGC).
Which leads me to the second myth: that access is progress.

Oceans of information are today at the fingertips of one and sundry. This is 
undisputed. The Internet is a vast storehouse of texts, images, audio 
recordings, and databases. But what matters is whether people make good use 
of this serendipitous cornucopia. A savage who finds himself amidst the 
collections of the Library of Congress is unlikely to benefit much.

Alas, most people today are cultural savages, Internet users the more so. 
They are lost among the dazzling riches that surround them. Rather than 
admit to their inferiority and accept their need to learn and improve, they 
claim "equal status". It is a form of rampant pathological narcissism, a 
defense mechanism that is aimed to fend off the injury of admitting to one's 
inadequacies and limitations.

Internet users have developed an ethos of anti-elitism. There are no 
experts, only opinions, There are no hard data, only poll results. Everyone 
is equally suited to contribute to any subject. Learning and scholarship are 
frowned on or even actively discouraged. The public's taste has completely 
substituted for good taste. Yardsticks, classics, science - have all been 
discarded.

Study after study have demonstrated clearly the decline of functional 
literacy (the ability to read and understand labels, simple instructions, 
and very basic texts) even as literacy (in other words, repeated exposure to 
the alphabet) has increased dramatically all over the world.

In other words: most people know how to read but precious few understand 
what they are reading. Yet, even the most illiterate, bolstered by the 
Internet's mob-rule, insist that their interpretation of the texts they do 
not comprehend is as potent and valid as anyone else's.

I wrote in my rant, "The New Dark Age":

"When I was growing up in a slum in Israel, I devoutly believed that 
knowledge and education will set me free and catapult me from my miserable 
circumstances into a glamorous world of happy learning. But now, as an 
adult, I find myself in an alien universe where "culture" means merely 
sports and music, where science is decried as evil and feared by 
increasingly hostile and aggressive masses, and where irrationality in all 
its forms  (religiosity, the occult, conspiracy theories) flourishes.

The few real scholars and intellectuals left are on the retreat, back into 
the ivory towers of a century ago. Increasingly, their place is taken by 
self-taught "experts", narcissistic bloggers, wannabe "authors" and 
"auteurs", and partisan promoters of (often self-beneficial) "causes".

Dismal results ensue: fads like environmentalism and alternative "medicine" 
spread malignantly and seek to silence dissidents, sometimes by violent 
means; the fare served by the media now consists exclusively of soap operas 
and reality TV shows; Reading is on terminal decline; with few exceptions, 
the "new media" are a hodgepodge of sectarian view and fabricated "news"; 
the few credible sources of reliable information have long been drowned in a 
cacophony of fakes and phonies.

It is a sad mockery of the idea of progress. The more texts we make 
available online, the more research is published, the more books are 
written - the less educated people are, the more they rely on visuals and 
sounds rather than the written word, the more they seek to escape reality 
and be anesthetized rather than be challenged and provoked.

Even the ever-sliming minority who do wish to be enlightened are inundated 
by a suffocating and unmanageable avalanche of indiscriminate data, 
comprised of both real and pseudo-science. There is no way to tell the two 
apart, so a "democracy of knowledge" reins where everyone is equally 
qualified and everything goes and is equally merited. This relativism is 
dooming the twenty-first century to become the beginning of a new "Dark 
Age", hopefully a mere interregnum between two periods of genuine 
enlightenment.

Visit Sam's Web site at

http://samvak.tripod.com