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You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

February, 2011

Nothing's New

Adam Gopnik's New Yorker piece explores different perspectives on the internet's impact.
Just go read Adam Gopnik's New Yorker piece about the current commentary around the internet. He breaks the field of study into three buckets: Never-betters, better-nevers and ever-wassers.
The Never-Betters believe that we're on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don't. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others--that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment.
I tend to fall into the ever-wasser camp, believing that this time, while intense and full of change, is not all that much more intense and full of change than other times throughout history. One of my favorite things to trot out in argument about the internet ruining whatever it's ruining this week is Plato's Phaedrus, where all the same things people say about the web is said about writing (it's going to ruin the kids, no one will remember anything anymore, it's making us stupid). Not surprisingly, then, I particularly liked this paragraph:
The odd thing is that this complaint [that the internet leads to a life of "disassociation and fragmentation"], though deeply felt by our contemporary Better-Nevers, is identical to Baudelaire's perception about modern Paris in 1855, or Walter Benjamin's about Berlin in 1930, or Marshall McLuhan's in the face of three-channel television (and Canadian television, at that) in 1965. When department stores had Christmas windows with clockwork puppets, the world was going to pieces; when the city streets were filled with horse-drawn carriages running by bright-colored posters, you could no longer tell the real from the simulated; when people were listening to shellac 78s and looking at color newspaper supplements, the world had become a kaleidoscope of disassociated imagery; and when the broadcast air was filled with droning black-and-white images of men in suits reading news, all of life had become indistinguishable from your fantasies of it. It was Marx, not Steve Jobs, who said that the character of modern life is that everything falls apart.
All in all, it's well-written, and interesting, and takes a few things that are generally accepted digital wisdom and deservedly knocks them down a peg or two. Delightful.
February 9, 2011
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Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.