"Criticize the Internet," writes essayist Lee Siegel in "Against the Machine," "and you are accused of criticizing democracy."
(Associated Press)
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
By Clay Shirky
Penguin, 336 pp., $25.95
Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
By Lee Siegel
Spiegel & Grau, 182 pp., $22.95
In the spring of 2006, a computer programmer named Evan Guttman performed a small miracle. He helped a friend retrieve an expensive cellphone that had been accidentally left in a Manhattan taxi.
Though the phone was soon traced to a teenage girl in Queens, its recovery wasn't easy. The teenager refused to give up her new toy, and the police declined to define the property as stolen. But through an assortment of interactive Internet tools - e-mail, a collaborative news website called Digg, and MySpace photos - one man's indignation was transformed into a crowd's roar. And justice, admittedly on a small scale, was served.
Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations" opens with this homely testimonial to the Internet's power to do good. It's telling that he opens with a cellphone rather than Al Qaeda cells, and pays little attention to their ilk. Terrorists, like Internet visionaries, also adore our Brave New Techno World.
Shirky, who teaches at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, is as upbeat about the Internet as Lee Siegel, a senior editor at the New Republic, is pessimistic. You could call Siegel's "Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob" a jeremiad, but that term hardly captures its spirited blend of astute cultural criticism and old-fashioned outrage.
Both authors try hard to achieve balance. Shirky isn't quite a Pollyanna, nor is Siegel a Luddite. Taken together, both books offer a fascinating survey of the digital age. Is it the best of revolutions, they ask, or the worst?
Shirky posits that we inhabit a new social ecosystem created by the extraordinary ease in forming groups - "to share [information], to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations."
His most persuasive example is Voice of the Faithful, the Boston-based lay association that rose to combat sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Because the Internet is such an effective and inexpensive tool for organizing adherents and publicizing church laxity, Voice of the Faithful largely succeeded where earlier groups had failed.
In the same vein, Shirky also cites the guerrilla protest tactics of antigovernment activists in Egypt and Belarus. In these cases, bloggers were able to recruit leaderless, anonymous "flash mobs" that are hard to thwart. The author, however, underplays the fact that Belarus, a despicable tyranny, and Egypt, only slightly more hospitable to democracy, have proved impervious to dissidents. And, of course, bad guys like Al Qaeda can use the same tools, too.
Shirky's prose can sometimes sound oracular - each chapter proposes what amount to laws describing new-media development - but he does have a knack for converting sociological concepts into easy-to-understand prose. What is less admirable is his undiluted praise for Internet amateurism and the outflanking of professional media gatekeepers.
Siegel's contrary view parallels that of Andrew Keen's hard-hitting "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture," published last year. The rise of the blogosphere and sites like MySpace and YouTube, which emphasize user-generated content, social networking, and interactive sharing, has made the Internet a place, Keen charged, where "ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule."
Siegel, a card-carrying champion of knowledge, civility, good taste, and expertise, is appalled by the excesses of Web 2.0. Participatory media, under the banners of openness and democracy, have opened the floodgates to the fallacious "wisdom of the crowd," rumor treated as fact, and the adoption of manners of the bully.
(Siegel should know. After being attacked for his opinions as a blogger for the New Republic, he donned a pseudonym and tore into his attackers. The magazine temporarily suspended him. This book grew out of his reflections on that turmoil.)
Whereas Shirky emphasizes the Internet as a collective experience, Siegel defines it as "the first social environment to serve the needs of the isolated, elevated, asocial individual." It's not about us but all about me.
In the digital age, the solitary self becomes its own arbiter of taste, its own producer of self-expression as art. Standards of excellence are banished for page-rank popularity. The "enchantment of the imagination" once provided by art and literature, he writes, gives way to "the gratification of the ego." Christopher Lasch's "culture of narcissism," a concept nearly three decades old, has never been more terribly realized.
In the ensuing vacuum, Siegel believes, distinctions between truth and lies become trivialized. His primary bete noire in this regard is the anyone-can-be-an-expert encyclopedia Wikipedia. While Shirky lauds it for its "self-correction process," Siegel contends that it lurches "from one prejudice to another . . . from one incoherence to another."
As crossword puzzle fans know, Wikipedia is a prime example of online tools taking center stage in daily life. As any newspaper editor will insist, it's not always reliable. Here is the Internet conundrum in a nutshell - convenience vs. accuracy, crowd wisdom vs. expertise. Let the user beware.
No short review can possibly convey the subtleties of these books. Siegel's is a brilliant indictment of what's wrong with today's Internet; Shirky's, an eye-opening paean to possibility.
Siegel is the more capacious thinker, evaluating the Internet in the light of broader cultural trends. Its great promise is the democratic, universal expansion of information. Yet information, however trustworthy, cannot be equated with knowledge born of reflection.
"Critical detachment," he writes, "not the multiple diversions and distractions of information, is the guarantor of a free society."
Dan Cryer is a contributor to "Good Roots: Writers Reflect On Growing Up in Ohio."
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
