Instead of promise, ruin from the Internet

Marshall McLuhan said “the medium is the message� and set off a whole revolution in media, an expansion which fed itself on the importance of what people were saying, bred the cult of celebrity, provided Andy Warhol the insight to coin “15 minutes of fame,� and, not least, eventually forced the usefulness of the science net of the ’80s to change into the Internet platform for the 21st-century media outlets which are growing daily.

As a Marshall McLuhan of our day, Andrew Keene (author of “The Cult of the Amateur,� a must-read for every high-schooler) is banging a different drum. Rather than point to the opportunities the Internet still has to fulfill, his message howls at the damage to our cultural values, the ruin of real democracy in favor of public-opinion spin, and, worst of all, the total control by the purveyors of the Internet (Silicon Valley) of all Web content via their cash-cows, Madison Avenue and the advertising agencies.

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Of course, he’s not wrong. The single most profitable and most visited portal (Web site) on the Internet is that giant advertising platform, Google, which does offer a service, but never without at least 60 percent of your window being flooded with advertising and paid links to product resellers. “The Internet has been packaged and sold by Silicon Valley as the great seduction.�

And the lie doesn’t stop there. Silicon Valley would have us all believe that we can all have an equal share in this media frenzy, start a business or search for fame with little more than a camera, a keyboard and a $10 Web site — or even piggy back on someone else’s Web site, allowing them to advertise products when people watch your antics on YouTube. Silicon Valley would have you believe you can become the next great writer, the next great Frank Capra or the next great Cecil B. DeMille. So sure is everyone that real talent will immediately become blindingly obvious they are all buying into “new talent� in much the same way as we Americans have always bought “new and improved� toothpaste over our standard, reliable brand. New is supposed to be better, but is it?

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Can new talent emerge this way, with just a camera or a keypad (a blog) and a portal? Sure. But how can anyone sort out the chaff from the wheat? There are 175,000 new images and videos posted every day on the Internet. There are 35,000 new authors posting their thoughts on blogs, every day. Do the publishers and television networks, music industry and movie producers get fooled by the occasional flash in the pan spark of creativity? Yes, they do.

As one in publishing, I can attest that standards are falling... falling away from the literate towards the “hook me in under two pages� or “show me the celebrity,� and always “if the cook’s not on TV or the Internet, we can’t publish the book.�

My family members in the film industry see this phenomenon every day, with “stars� (what were once called wanna-be’s) getting above the title credit, only to disappear within two years. You think it is an accident that Rousch is choosing drivers for NASCAR partly based on how well they appear on camera and on Internet chat rooms instead of concentrating only on their driving ability? Business has shifted to the need, the absolute need, to promote. And the need to promote outweighs talent every time.

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Andrew Keene: “Digital narcissism, that’s what I call it. We’re increasingly watching ourselves, or those almost like ourselves, rather than watching professional actors, or reading professional journalists or writers. We’re watching more and more trivia, more and more irrelevance, more and more of the everyday instead of the excellent. And the new Internet, Web 2.0, is disintermediating the professional outlets and skills, making everybody’s talents seem acceptable.�

Keene goes on to say that, other than rare talent on the Internet, what we see is poor fact checking (Wikipedia) masquerading as democratic knowledge, the cult of anonymity (Web names, avatars), narcissism and addiction (porn and gambling especially). Where is the democratic excellence in any of that Web 2.0 Internet?

The old sayings, “You never get something for nothing,� and “You get what you pay for,� should make us stop and think. Why is MySpace free? Are you not, somehow, paying for this? Is Google not the most profitable ratio company in America? Free content on YouTube is, at least 95 percent of it, worthless, mindless, narcissistic, voyeuristic, sophomoric, amateur fodder that you would not spend 10 cents to see, right? So why look at it simply because it is free?

Because you can. The rare chance is that there might be something good on (channel surfing on the Internet) and your gray cells don’t have to work very hard, it’s all too familiar, it all so amateur you can understand it (and forget it) instantly. It’s pre-digested TV, spoon fed and at your command.

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Paid content may now be dead (and I’m including books, as they slowly fade away from traditional publishing outlets): We’re becoming a 100 percent advertising-centric society. Advertising is based on eyeballs, and getting the most eyeballs means going for the lowest common denominator. In a Web 2.0 world, the lowest common denominator is you, your abilities, your most base tastes and greed, your addictions, your passions, your mirror on real life.

As culture slips to a lowest common denominator to match revenue streams, the very foundation of society will begin to crumble, or at least have no chance for future growth. Gone are the dividing lines on right of ownership. Everyday people copy other creators’ material off the Internet (Keene calls it “intellectual kleptomania�). They copy pictures, copy video and podcasts, burn DVDs, Napster... where is the understanding of creativity, the origin, the need to nurture that creativity, not pirate it and so doom it to fiscal obscurity and abandon? As long as the Internet is advertising-centric, egocentric, the rules of our culture are there to be broken and obliterated. Google and Amazon now offer sections of books, cut and pasted at will.

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The problem is, we’re developing a cut-and-paste life, where nothing is original, no standards are being set to aspire to and no platform is available for talent to build as a business. In a world of 150,000 videos a day, how can a talented filmmaker make a start? How can that producer identify him or her? How can an author who is not a celebrity or a celebrity cook become published without an impactive opening page, designed to grab the attention in a MySpace, Google or YouTube world? Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen would not have a chance.

A final word from Keene: “If we live in a world where people think they have a right to everything, that they don’t have to pay for anything, the natural consequence is that everything gets stolen, which undermines the professional artist to the point where creativity will stop. Technology makes it very easy to steal; you can’t blame technology for that. We need to be more responsible before we irrevocably change the shape of identity and lower expertise in the 21st century.�

(Note: These quotes did not come off the Internet, but were transcribed by the author from a live interview heard on Deutsche Welle radio, “Inside Europe,� June 30, 2007).

Peter Riva lives in Amenia Union.