It’s becoming increasingly clear that, despite the speediest modern communications technology, there is a roughly 12- to 18-month news lag between Silicon Valley and New York City — or at least that block of West 43rd Street that harbors the offices of the New Yorker.
The New Yorker has always had a hard time keeping up with developments in the world of technology and telecommunications, preferring the vapid corporate hagiography of Ken Auletta’s profiles to more serious journalism. Every step the magazine takes in this field seems to go awry. For instance, when New Yorker writer John Cassidy tried recently to explain Microsoft’s troubles with the Justice Department in terms of the economic theory of “increasing returns,” he received a thorough drubbing from Slate’s Paul Krugman, who persuasively argued that Cassidy had his economic history all wrong.
But the New Yorker hit a new nadir of sheer out-of-the-loop-ness with its Jan. 19 column by Kurt Andersen, headlined “The Digital Bubble: Waking up from the new-media pipe dream.” Andersen’s shocking thesis: Digital technology and the Internet now sit “at the center of a speculative frenzy of religious intensity, a financial mania, a bubble.” Now, forgive us, but wasn’t that a good description of Wall Street’s infatuation with the new online world in 1995, when Netscape was flying high and the word “Internet” in a company name by itself seemed to guarantee IPO riches? We thought this particular bubble burst long ago — but Andersen writes that it “may be bursting already” (the conditional “may,” presumably, offers a hedge, just in case the Net really does turn out to be a Big Thing).
It’s bad enough that the article essentially rehashes a collection of tropes about the digital world that became clichis long ago — from the requisite comparison with 17th century tulip mania to overdrawn parallels between digital revolutionaries and their hippie forebears (“laptops and fax modems are the reefer and long hair of this overcaffeinated age”).
But the real problem with “The Digital Bubble” lies deeper, in Andersen’s confusion of the personal computer industry as a whole with the smaller and more immature Internet industry– and also with the big media companies that have dipped their toes into the Net. Thus the fact that Microsoft and Intel’s stocks have dipped in recent weeks becomes, in Andersen’s view, evidence of a big bubble-burst — when in fact these dips are most likely simply a reaction to the financial turmoil in Asia, which is assumed to have a disproportionate impact on technology stocks.
Andersen begins with the argument that journalists and Wall Street people are so infatuated with digital technology in their own work that they fail to see that “almost no one else finds computers and the Internet quite so essential.” That statement is at once glaringly obvious and subtly misguided. Certainly we’ve all been bombarded with ridiculously overblown hype about the imminent transformation of our daily lives by technology (much of it spouted by corporate hucksters profiled by Ken Auletta in the pages of the New Yorker). But to maintain that computers are essential only to journalists and stock analysts is as absurd as to maintain that the Internet is already essential to everyone on the planet.
For better and worse, computers have deeply embedded themselves in every aspect of American business. While the digital industry has so far failed to reach the vast mass market of consumers, it has already won the battle for the corporate mind. Most computer companies still make most of their profits selling products and services to other businesses. If these products and services weren’t “quite so essential,” why would so many companies be quaking about the impact of a little problem like the Year 2000 bug?
I’d guess that Andersen makes these analytical errors because (ironically, given his thesis of journalistic myopia) he is himself so immersed in the media industry that he can’t see beyond it. A good chunk of his article is devoted to castigating big media companies for dumping money into Web sites that don’t have clear business models and aren’t making any profits. Certainly, plenty of media mega-sites are a waste of cash. But companies aren’t building them out of peer pressure, “because everybody else is doing it,” as Andersen suggests; they’re doing it out of desperation and fear, because they understand that the Net really is changing the rules of the media economy. As, for instance, classified ads disappear from newspapers and migrate online, the newspaper industry is due for some serious change. That’s no bubble — it’s a tide.
Anyone who’s serious about studying the rise of the Internet knows that it is a medium and an industry still in its infancy. This week alone brings news of new corporate alliances aimed at bringing much higher-speed connections into the home (we’ll see how much they deliver this time) and multibillion-dollar investments in new fiber-optic backbones based on Internet protocols. This industry is still laying its tracks and building its pipelines; it’s absurd to declare it dead already — as we pointed out a year and a half ago, when the bubble-bursters who are now finally surfacing in New York first made their appearances in California.
In his final paragraph, Andersen looks for support from the unlikely direction of Wired publisher Louis Rossetto. Andersen praises Rossetto — a one-time “avatar of the digital bubble” — for “sensibly moving beyond it.” And Rossetto gives Andersen just the quotes he’s apparently looking for: “The Web is not about reading … It’s not about developing long ideas. It’s about getting to mission-critical information.” (Statements like this may explain why morale is so abysmal among the dozens of once-idealistic writers and editors Wired has hired for its online news operations at HotWired and Wired News.)
Obviously, here at Salon we disagree with Rossetto. But even if he were right, and the Web were only good for info-bits rather than in-depth writing, his view hardly supports Andersen’s thesis that the Net is just a bubble. All it suggests is that the Net might not support traditional print-media-style businesses — other kinds of enterprises could thrive. It’s surely the ultimate act of journalistic hubris to assume that, if the Internet isn’t going to support in-depth journalism, then it will wither and die.
Maybe “The Digital Bubble” is so confused and self-contradictory because it’s so brief — it delivers its obituary for the “new-media pipe dream” in a scant single page of text. That may be the biggest irony of all here: Though other New Yorker writers may not be adapting, Andersen is evidently quite ready to make the leap to the new medium — where, Rossetto now tells us, the only good story is a short story.
You want information? I’ve got information. True, I don’t exactly know what to do with it, I can’t find it when I need it and I don’t physically have room for it in my apartment. But I’ve got it, and unless something drastic happens to me or to the world, I’m going to keep on accumulating more of it. A rough inventory: I have, oh, perhaps 4,000 news articles stashed away on various disks and my hard drive, some 50 megabytes of sheer information — very little of which I’ve actually bothered to do more than skim. I have several thousand books, all sorts, stacked two-deep on shelves and stuffed into cupboards and boxes. I have more magazine subscriptions than I can afford, and more old magazines and newspapers and clippings and printouts than I can even imagine how to count. My TV is on 10 or 12 hours a day, sometimes with the radio on as well — and as far as I can tell, in my info-addled state, it’s sending vast chunks of what the technically minded call data my way. (Admittedly, some of this data involves shouting matches between miniskirted grandmas and their mortified grandchildren on the Jerry Springer show, but it’s still data of a sort.)
My name is David, and I’m an infoholic.
I’m not, of course, the only one with this problem. According to a recent congressional report, the Central Intelligence Agency faces a case of information overload at least as severe as mine. The Agency spends billions of dollars on expensive data-gathering missions — investing heavily in spy satellites and high-tech listening devices and so on. It just can’t figure out what to do with the data it gathers, much of which, apparently, sits unwanted and unloved on hard drives or in storage boxes like the Charlie-in-the-Box on the Island of Misfit Toys. Of course, no one really wants to stop gathering all this stuff; the report suggests merely that we spend more money trying to process it all.
A decade ago, as Barbara Ehrenreich once noted, Americans began to look on busyness as “an important insignia of upper-middle-class status.” To be successful is to be busy; ergo, to look busy is to look successful. You can’t just eat lunch; you have to do lunch, and preferably do a deal while you’re at it. You can’t just yell at other drivers or sing along with the radio while commuting home in your car; you have to be cold-calling potential clients on the cell phone.
Or so I’ve heard. I never really got into the “cult of conspicuous busyness,” as Ehrenreich called it. For one thing, it seemed to involve too many fervid workouts at the gym. Luckily for me the busy cult is giving way to a new religion, one that almost requires you to spend a good deal of time lying prone on the couch reading a newspaper, with the TV on CNN and PointCast downloading stock quotes to your PC: the cult of info overload.
Sure, nearly everyone complains about the flood of information they’re forced to wade through every single day, just as they used to complain about their busy schedules. But there is more than a hint of pride in this sort of complaining. In our media-saturated culture, there’s a race on to see who can become the most media-saturated of all.
Hence, perhaps, the media fascination with the king of information overload — and a significant contributor to it in his own right — the one-man media empire known as Matt Drudge. Drudge, as most media-saturated info cultists already know all too well, is the 30-year-old gossip hound behind the Drudge Report, a collection of juicy tidbits about politics and Hollywood that’s e-mailed to some 60,000 subscribers “when circumstances warrant,” which can sometimes mean several times in a day. Drudge has become a deity of sorts in the burgeoning info cult.
Most of those who’ve written about Drudge seem less interested in his work — or in his various “scoops” — than in his working environment. Drudge seems to live and work in the midst of a continual media circus, and a three-ring one at that. The point-and-click investigative reporter “usually works at home in his boxer shorts,” Newsday reports, with “three television sets going at once” while he “monitors the electronic sites of 20 major newspapers.” In a breathless report from Drudge’s home office, Josh Quittner of the Netly News describes in more detail what you’ll find in the now-legendary Drudge “geekatorium”: “one TV showing CNN, another MSNBC, a third tuned to a direct-broadcast satellite. Rush Limbaugh, a fan and spiritual brother, blares out of one of the radios. Drudge’s police scanner is crackling pure L.A. bad will. And of course, there are computers — three of them. … In the past 24 hours, 1,796 E-mail messages have poured into his In box.”
And here I am, bragging about my 4,000 news articles. Clearly, I am not worthy.
But questions of personal worthiness aside, is all this information really worth the trouble it takes to collect it? Many experts, predictably enough, say no. According to some psychologists, our total immersion in the data flow can bring on a nefarious malady called Information Fatigue Syndrome. A study conducted by Reuters last fall argued that info glut can make you sick. The study, based on surveys of 1,300 corporate managers in the United States, Britain, Hong Kong and Singapore, reported that two-thirds of those surveyed felt that information overload increased work stress and damaged personal relationships on the job and off; a third said the info surplus made them ill. “We’re seeing a loss of motivation, loss of morale,” psychologist David Lewis, who analyzed the survey, told CNN. “We’re seeing greater irritability.” Lewis suggests all this information can be quite literally too much to digest: “On the physical level, you might find people having digestive problems. They may, if the stress is chronic, have problems with their heart — hypertension, high blood pressure.”
The real problem, of course, is not the information itself; it’s that, like the spooks at the CIA, no one seems to want to take much time to actually process what they collect. According to a study by the Newseum, in conjunction with the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research and the Media Studies Center, Americans tend to “consume news in vast amounts,” with a third reading, watching or otherwise absorbing news for at least an hour; a fifth of those surveyed reported that they spent two hours or more a day gathering news. And yet very few can manage to transform the vast assortment of data points rattling about in their skulls into anything resembling a coherent picture of the world.
The cult of information is the spiritual heir to another dubious religion: the cult of the fact. Americans have great faith in the power of The Truth — and even more faith in their ability to find it. But too many think The Truth is something one can arrive at through the simple accumulation of facts. You can’t, though, just as you can’t create a house by piling bricks and lumber and pipes and electrical wiring in a heap on an empty lot. You’ve got to actually construct the thing. And before you build, you’ve got to clear away the clutter. Maybe the truth is out there. But — as I have to forcefully remind myself from time to time — you’re not going to find it with three TVs running, a fax machine spitting out paper, Eudora faithfully sorting e-mail from a dozen mailing lists and a police scanner squawking about some random emergency halfway across town. You’ve got to turn down the volume. You need to be able to hear yourself think.
he decision was instantaneous and unanimous: The Communications Decency Act is unconstitutional.
But though the judges wore robes and the proceedings began with cries of “Oyez! Oyez!” the outcome offered little cheer for the assembled audience of activists, lawyers, cypherpunks and “cybercops” at the Seventh Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference in a hotel outside San Francisco airport: The decision wasn’t real.
This was a “moot court,” a kind of Sim-Supreme Court sponsored by the American Bar Association in which legal scholars rehearse a case’s proceedings. The actual arguments in the CDA case take place Wednesday at the U.S. Supreme Court — where the robes will be more confidently worn and the stakes will be unmistakably high.
The case, Reno vs. ACLU, is the Justice Department’s appeal to overturn the landmark ruling by a three-judge panel in Philadelphia last June that declared the CDA unconstitutional. The CDA’s provisions make it a felony to use electronic devices for the transmission or display of “indecent” or “patently offensive” material to minors.
The moot court proceedings, held last Thursday, followed the model of Supreme Court argument, in which lawyers begin with their prepared texts and are quickly derailed by interruptions from justices with tough questions about language, precedents, jurisdiction and consistency.
As a potential preview of the kinds of constitutional issues likely to arise at Wednesday’s arguments, some of the tougher questions raised were:
- What if parents send indecent material to their own child as part of an educational process to teach the kid how to recognize different kinds of content online?
- If a particular expression is indecent but also involves political content, would that be outlawed by the CDA?
- One of the problems cited by opponents of the act is the undue burden it places on publishers to ascertain the age of recipients of their material. Would the availability of a free, easily accessible Web site that offered certification that a user was an adult make the CDA more constitutionally defensible?
- Are the standards of indecency the CDA enforces uniform nationally or do “local community standards” apply?
- Suppose there’s a chat room for teenage rape victims in which the participants use indecent language. Could a very conservative person get into such a place and haul in a local prosecutor to shut it down under the CDA?
- Before Congress approved the CDA, didn’t the Justice Department state that it believed existing laws were sufficient to protect minors on the Net?
The moot-court version of the government case to uphold the CDA argued that the act could be interpreted as aimed exclusively at commercial pornography vendors and could be legally defended as a form of zoning ordinance. The pro-CDA brief suggested that the act — denounced by civil rights activists as an overly broad censorship law that would have a “chilling effect” on free speech online — actually promotes freedom of speech on the Net by making parents and children feel safer in the new medium.
The real-world Supreme Court takes its time in issuing rulings after it hears arguments, but the moot judges offered an instant thumbs-down for the CDA. They called the “commercial-only” interpretation “highly creative” but rejected it; they cited the vagueness of the CDA’s reference to indecency “in context,” and its lack of provision for standards of “merit” in distinguishing protected forms of expression from outlawed speech.
In an introductory speech, Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union, predicted that the real court will also decide against the CDA: “It should be a slam-dunk next Wednesday.” But, he added, nothing’s guaranteed: “It’s going to be a game of pick your paradigm. If the Supreme Court finds that the Net is like broadcasting, then we will probably lose.” If, on the other hand, it agrees with the lower court that the Net is a powerful new medium with its own unique traits, “then we will almost certainly win.”
Earlier at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, Ira Magaziner, senior policy advisor to President Clinton, said that the document on Federal Internet policy he is drafting, due for release next month, will recommend against extensive regulation of the Net and will encourage private ratings initiatives rather than further “government censorship.”
Answering hostile questions from the audience about the inconsistency of that statement with the Justice Department’s pursuit of the CDA appeal, Magaziner repeated previous Clinton administration explanations that it must “uphold the law of the land.” But he said if Congress passed another, similar law he would recommend that Clinton veto it: “I don’t think it’s a good act.”
The annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference has become an unusual meeting ground where normally adversarial groups like hackers and FBI agents, cryptography experts and government officials mingle and exchange perspectives. This year’s event took place in the shadow of the forthcoming CDA decision, but it also had its happier moments.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation gave its annual Pioneer Awards to Electronic Privacy Information Center founder Marc Rotenberg and to Julf Helsingius, Finnish provider of the well-known (and recently shut down) anonymous re-mailer service anon.penet.fi.
The EFF also gave a special award to actress Hedy Lamarr — who, in addition to her career as Hollywood bombshell, turns out to have been a formidable inventor. The little-known chapter in communications history came to light thanks to a campaign on Lamarr’s behalf by wireless activist Dave Hughes and others. During World War II, Lamarr and composer George Antheil registered a patent for a frequency-hopping approach to broadcasting that would become the basis for the “spread-spectrum” approach to wireless and satellite transmission. This technique is more and more widely used today to provide digital links in remote or undeveloped areas.
Lamarr, still alive in Florida, taped a message of thanks that was delivered by her son, Anthony Loder. Though she didn’t weigh in on Net censorship, it’s worth noting that some of her steamiest films — like the 1933 “Ecstasy” — would probably be outlawed on the Net under the CDA.
