The internet kills off ideas

Another take on the classic internet-makes-us-stupid meme appeared in The New York Times over the weekend.  This time the author blames cyberspace for killing off Big Ideas.

"Ideas just aren’t what they used to be," complains Neal Gabler, and idea-makers aren't celebrities any more.

It's useful to see which forces Gabler exludes, or doesn't mention.  An anti-science, anti-reason growth in American culture?  Changes in university culture? Bad mass media practices? A shift in magazine publishing? Yes, yes, 

But these factors, which began decades ago, were more likely harbingers of an approaching post-idea world than the chief causes of it. The real cause may be information itself. 

First, there's too much information.  The man has just discovered information overload.

[I]f information was once grist for ideas, over the last decade it has become competition for them. We are like the farmer who has too much wheat to make flour. We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to.

Second, it's the wrong information.  It's social and celebritized:

what each of our friends is doing at that particular moment and then the next moment and the next one; who Jennifer Aniston is dating right now; which video is going viral on YouTube this hour; what Princess Letizia or Kate Middleton is wearing that day. In effect, we are living within the nimbus of an informational Gresham’s law in which trivial information pushes out significant information, but it is also an ideational Gresham’s law in which information, trivial or not, pushes out ideas.

In the wake of this deluge, Gabler imagines a kind of Grand Inquisitor scene:

We have become information narcissists, so uninterested in anything outside ourselves and our friendship circles or in any tidbit we cannot share with those friends that if a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention...

It's a pretty easy piece to poke holes in.  For our purposes it's worth noting several fearsome internet features.

First, other potential causes for this hypothetical problem don't appear in Gabler's "get off my lawn" world.  For example, one economist suggests changes in the global economy might be responsible; any broader market argument doesn't merit address, it seems.  The role of the internet in actually disseminating big ideas gets shoved off the sofa very quickly.  The article narrows things down rapidly - into his Big Idea (aimed at next year's Atlantic, no doubt).

Second, it's a good example of technological back-formation.  As we've noted many times, fear of a new medium lets us romanticize previously disliked media.  So Gabler sees tv as a better medium for communicating ideas than the internet, or at least offers nostalgia for it:

A generation ago, these men would have made their way into popular magazines and onto television screens. Now they are crowded out by informational effluvium.

[W]e get instant 140-character tweets about eating a sandwich or watching a TV show...

[I]ntellectuals like Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal would even occasionally be invited to the couches of late-night talk shows. How long ago that was...

Third, the existence of digital forms of prior practices isn't worth noting.  A swarm of public intellectuals use social media as platforms, for example.  Even in text!  But Gabler (and his Times editors) are happy to ignore 'em.

Fourth, the fact that other humans might have had similar ideas (if not Ideas) is off the page.  The recent spate of internet-rots-our-brains books (Carr, Lanier, etc): not cited.  That information overload is actually centuries old: nope.  Technology as a topic liberates American writers from having a sense of history or intellectual maturity.

Comments

[Andy Havens]

"We are like the farmer who has too much wheat to make flour."

Well, that's the dumbest thing I've read on teh Intertubes in a long time. A) No such thing as too much wheat (unless you're being paid to dump it by the government). B) Farmers don't make flour; millers do.

Geez. Find a metaphor that works, people.

[Bryan Alexander]

Good one, Andy. Perhaps he was thinking of the dump version, and couldn't be bothered to distinguish between grower and miller.

I wonder if this kind of metaphor will become more widespread (like a cover crop) as fewer people live in the country.