The Age of Guilt by Mark Edmundson

Author:Mark Edmundson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300265811
Publisher: Yale University Press

Internet!

How did the Internet become a super-ego machine? It could have gone many other ways.

Maybe it’s best to begin by thinking of the Internet, borrowing a term from Marshall McLuhan, as potentially a global village. In a global village we are committed to exchange. We swap wisdom and information; we exchange goods and services; we exchange warm wishes and good will. Today we all, or almost all, live in the same village. We are part of a tribe. We are, in a manner of speaking, One.

If you know how to use the Internet, you can draw a great deal from the global village. It teems with information, some of it accurate. You can explore, learn, develop in a dozen different directions. And this is all to the good.

News travels quickly on the Internet. Some of it is true—and if you know how to look, maybe most of what you encounter will be true. The technology is an astonishing resource. McLuhan teaches that media are extensions of the human. The shovel extends the arm and hand; the steam shovel provides a superextension of hand and arm. Not for nothing do we call a revolver a firearm.

And the Internet, what would McLuhan say about that? He’d tell us, I suppose, that the Internet is an extension of the human mind. It remembers what we have forgotten—or brings us what we never knew. It calculates numbers beyond our meager capacities. It translates texts from languages we half know or don’t know at all. It can make projections into the future that far exceed our scope. It knows so much more than we do—though it is up to us to determine whether what it knows is actually so, and then what to do with that information.

Can the Internet have a psychology? Does it possess an interior life? If the answer is yes, it could only be the one we collectively give it. Perhaps we transfer some part of our psychological life into our electronic technology.

And what kind of life is that? The life of the Internet could easily be defined by openness, creativity, art-making of all kinds. It could be a collaborative work, a festival, a joy. It could be the place where people test their ideas, make their inventions and projections known, to be discussed, developed, adapted. Instead it is often a sink of the most repressive, judgmental bile conceivable. The Internet has become not only a second brain but a second psyche, where judgment, often toxic judgment, reigns.

The Twitter mob in too many ways defines the current Internet. The objective of the mob is to stamp out apostasy. We are righteous. We are correct. We conform to the current patterns of behavior—and you’d better too. Ultimately, what the mob enforces is manners. One must always say the right thing. Saying the wrong thing will be punished, often through official channels. The objective of the Twitter mob is not merely to vilify but to ruin the career and public life of the transgressor.

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