Dangerous codswallop
I’ve been reading Nicholas Carr on the amorality of Web 2.0. He refers to Kevin Kelly’s “We Are The Web” essay in August’s Wired magazine.
¬†”I doubt even angels have a better view of humanity”, he writes about the Web.
¬†Now, I don’t contest that the Web looks a lot like a searchable version of ‘consensus reality’ -¬†by which I mean the notional sum of what everyone thinks about stuff. But to conflate the Web with this imagined sum total ignores the assumptions built into technology. Such as ‘everything anyone thinks can be written about or otherwise rendered in digital form through a screen’. Or, indeed, the glaringly obvious (though perhaps less so to the editor of Wired) fact that plenty of people don’t use the internet. If we are the Web, then this consensus reality is one that doesn’t include my 92-year-old grandmother and all her experiences. Not to mention leaving out (for example) whole swathes of rural everywhere and the world’s entire population of small children. I mean, hello?
¬†Secondly, to conflate the Web with consensus reality then opens a second, more dangerous possibility: confusing consensus reality with what is actually going on. Just because 50,000,000 flies say that dog excrement tastes great, doesn’t make it true for me. The Colbert Show¬†riffed on this in their ‘Wikiality’ skit.
Of course consensus reality refers to what’s actually going on, but it doesn’t totalise it. To claim so risks an alarming breed of relativism that I would venture to suggest is also contingent on the kind of material comfort and unthinking assumption of pervasive technology that could produce a Web evangelist in the first place.
I wholeheartedly agree that the borders between Web culture and emerging forms of spirituality (and believe me, I hate that word) are a very interesting place to spend some time. But the sheer arrogance of a rhetorical move that sets the Web above the angels (supposing they exist: and we know Kevin believes they do) is not just lax thinking, it’s a step on the way to mutually-assured cultural destruction.
Nicholas Carr is right to take on the cult of the web in Kelly’s article, but he doesn’t get to the heart of it, becoming bogged down instead in the endothermic Wikipedia v Britannica debate. A more valuable critique of We are the Web comes from Stephen L. Talbott, who echoes your own conclusion:
The fundamental confusion coloring nearly every word of Kelly’s essay stems from his implicit equation of technical achievement with positive value….
Spooky godlikeness, for Kelly, appears to be a matter of technical wizardry — the kind of wizardry offering us whatever we want in the most convenient and least disturbing way possible. His god is content to entertain us with signs and wonders in the form of an endless stream of amazing devices with cool uses. The one thing this deity doesn’t seem particularly concerned about is how all these wonders bear upon the inner qualities of our lives or the development of our personal and social character.
If someone else were to recite Kelly’s litany of marvels, referring to the result as “spookily devil-like” (for the devil, too, can work technical miracles), one wonders how Kelly would discriminate between the two possibilities. Nothing in his entire essay acknowledges the need for any such discrimination. He seems unaware that every novel possibility for action gains its meaning only through the endlessly subtle modulations lent to it by the human actor. He also seems unaware that a technological fixation distracting our attention from these human modulations is a guarantor of social destruction.
Very true. But if I start on what I think of the original article, I’ll be here all night.
It’s not fashionable to be frightened when people start anthropomorphising technology in tones of such reverence, but I assure you I am. Very.