How can a literary writer and reader avoid mentioning the internet, without seeming boorish? Laura Miller explains how, delicately, and with a fine nose for cyberfear. In fact, she neatly maps out how people fear digital media by skating around the edges of that anxiety.
It's a tricky article, trying to engage the internet itself without coming too close.
For instance, Miller keeps up a running comparison with tv. She begins by raising the Shirky idea of tv's inferiority to the internet, whereby tv's passive audience is replaced by the active internet population. But that opposition is ultimately upended, as Miller lets us feel better about tv. If we're passive tv watchers, then tv is really an alien thing, and we're not to blame. The internet, on the other hand, well:
TV's power is serenely impervious; it does all the talking, and we can only listen or turn it off. But the internet is at least partly us; we write it as well as read it, perform for it as well as watch it, create it as well as consume it.
Moreover, the internet's liberation of individual creativity doesn't really matter, since "thousands upon thousands of people are saying pretty much the same stuff in pretty much the same words." We might as well be watching tv, and at least be less pathetic and more honest.
Our judgments matter, but primarily in aggregate, which makes us not so different from the faceless mass of television's audience as we are sometimes led to believe. The main distinction is that the crowdsourced are active collaborators in the commodification of their opinions...
The internet is a fearsome and/or sad thing: this is the theme Miller ultimately sings. If that's the case, the literary response is either to identify that truth, or to work it into plots. For example, Miller identifies novelists whose internet depiction she seems to approve of. Unsurprisingly, those visions are negative:
There is no reliable boundary between what is true and what people want to be true or say to be true
the internet feeds a fuel of deluded fantasy into the forces pulling them apart. [cue Wikipedia reference]
It is what the internet lures out of us – hubris, daydreams, avarice, obsessions – that makes it so potent and so volatile.
[I]the internet facilitates the apotheosis of [one protagonist's] passive-aggression.
By allowing him finally, finally to express himself to the world, and to congregate with people who wholeheartedly agree with him, the internet presents Walter with this unsavoury fact: he is a crank.
Can the internet do anything right? Miller uses Gary Shteyngart to raise the idea of community life, then brings down the hammer:
It helps to bear in mind that 17th-century Salem was a community, too.
Ouch. And, also bad:
traditional communities survive in large part by virtue of most members knowing when to keep their mouths shut, while online social networks are formed in a climate of perpetual disclosure...
Miller reins back immediately, making sure a delicate sensibility is maintained: "The internet did not create scapegoating, feuds and cliques, and virtual lynchings are nowhere near as fatal as the real-life kind." Whew. Internet fear is summoned up, used, then set aside carefully.
The internet as social connector, as expanded source of knowledge, as enabler of creativity - either Miller doesn't want to admit these realities, or insists that literary ("realistic") fiction cannot.
What about science fiction, a field which has spoken to issues of science, technology, and communication for centuries? Miller namechecks three science fiction writers (Gibson, Doctorow, Suarez), but is careful to avoid coming anywhere near sf for the rest of the article. It seems that genre policing and/or disdain ("hacker and brand-ninja characters exist primarily to explain or propound ideas about bleeding-edge technology", "thriller writers... concoct ingenious but outlandish tales about the potential nightmares lurking in same") helps keep the article's non-technophilic literacy credit high.
For serious literature, for Miller, sf can't have anything real to say to us; Miller here reruns the ancient genre slam. That Jonathan Lethem, prominently noted in the article, has done substantial sf work is politely not mentioned. That sf has been exploring and discussing the internet and human life for decades... perhaps it's best not to raise that in polite company.
In her defense, Miller (I'm inferring that "rellimarual" is her) claims a lack of room, and a narrow scope:
[W]riters who specialise in realistic, character-based narratives" have avoided addressing how new technologies has affected everyday life. This is a problem precisely because their brief is realistic depictions of everyday life...
Which is neat, but begs the question: why not address the two simultaneously, sf and non-sf together? Miller could use the "slipstream" term, or just the idea that the boundary between the two is slippery, rather than reasserting the terminus. That terminus is stark enough that nothing crosses over, no influence, no ideas. Moreover, Miller spends most of the essay referring not to realistic novelists (whatever "realistic" means), but to "novelists" and "writers" generally.
But back to the crossover problem. Notice the ways those realistic novels approach today's digital media: inventing new technologies, coming up with new social arrangements, creating a future world or two, imagining new ways that people interact under the impact of new technologies... hey, it's science fiction! But because these are realistic, serious novelists, this can't be described as such. Realism: the cloak of genre abuse, another word for tortured literary history.
(thanks to Charles Cameron!)
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