Chekhov’s Mistess

Truth and the Internet: A Report from the Pen World Voices Festival

It’s a good bet that something’s wrong when you hear an academic quote a survey on demographics by an advertising firm, and that’s just what happened at Friday’s “Truth and the Internet” panel as part of the Pen World Voices Festival. The panel confirmed for me that the internet is nearly unfathomable phenomenon when discussed from a bird’s-eye view and the best we can hope for are anecdotes and dubious data in disguise as information.

Introduced by Pen’s new head, Ron Chernow, the panel was diverse enough to shake out some interesting opinions. Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian activist who reported his interrogations and subsequent immigration to America on his blog, “Amarji – A Heretic’s Blog;” Åsne Seierstad, journalist and author of The Bookseller of Kabul; writer George Saunders; biographer (The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times) and journalism professor Susan Tifft; and Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. Jacob Weisberg, political writer and editor of Slate, led the discussion. Interestingly, this panel, unlike most at this festival of international literature, was dominated by the United States.

Perhaps because it was a low turnout or just late Friday afternoon exhaustion, the panelists, save Mr. Abdulhamid, never got very fired up on the topic at hand, never dug into it or struck any contentious points and barely even provoked any questions from the audience. I wouldn’t blame that on Weisberg either, because he, with a good decade of on-line journalism under his belt, seemed excited about the potential of the internet and curious how it had impacted these author’s work.

The tone of the panelists toward the internet ranged from disdainful to awed, and those feelings might easily be coming from the same person depending on what they were talking about. I should point out that I got the distinct feeling that when someone says internet, they mean that, to a high degree, to be blogs – but that may just be me.

Seierstad seemed to miss the point of the panel entirely and declared that the internet wasn’t the same thing as sitting on “a dirt floor” talking to people face-to-face. Can’t argue with that. It’s good to have someone who doesn’t even like the medium in a discussion, just to keep things real. She does appreciate the Baghdad bloggers because reporters can’t talk to the people there now, and she appreciates particularly that one Baghdad blogger has turned her entries into a physical book, which was in line of her theme that paper is better than screen.

On the other hand, Susan Tifft acknowledged that e-mail allows her to do some of her work as a professor without having to see her students face-to-face (she lives outside of the state where she teaches). It was that very same technology that delivered angry and obscene abuse when she wrote an article on the N.R.A. though, and from that she concludes that the internet may end up as a “corrective good,” (i.e. openness that leads to fewer journalist’s mistakes) but it is not good for discourse.

Tifft dragged out the parasite argument and said that much of what passes for journalism on the internet is not journalism because there’s no actual reporting or working with source material (but gee, I says, I even brought my special pretend reporter’s notebook). She said that bloggers just feed on what journalists produce and if the mainstream media disappeared overnight, so would bloggers.

Let’s just say we’ve heard that condescension a time or two and while it’s not entirely without merit, she misses a couple of key points: a) much of what goes on in terms of “feeding” on the mainstream media is of the nature of a conversation – I say to you I like an article, or that I don’t and here’s why, which is very much what people where I come from have always done without the internet. Nobody is pretending to be a journalist in that regard. And b) there is indeed some terrific original journalism going on in blogs, but I think of it them tending toward the format of columns rather than reportorial, for the most part.

While Tifft’s opinions appeared to me to be defensive, Mr. Weisberg seemed electrified by the notion of the strong voices that are emerging from the breakdown in barriers to entry for journalists, even if the cost is that the profession of journalism falls away.

Mr. Saunders, whom I believe is primarily a short fiction writer and essayist, declared the immediacy of the Web a bad thing because constant revision is what’s important in moderating one’s voice: there’s a big difference between the 1st draft and the 50th. The biggest danger of the internet – and here I take him to mean blogs – is being “too easily charmed by ourselves.”

This is an interesting point, particularly in the context of how bloggers and comments sections of blogs so easily get out of hand. I do believe Saunders was talking mostly about the political chatter that goes on rather than other things and he’s right there – political discourse has become quicker and less thoughtful; although said differently, the less thoughtful people have an equal and sometimes louder voice than those whose voices are tempered by careful consideration.

One thing I’ve personally been critical about is the ease with which people can zip out an email or pass along some email newsletter they got from one of their political groups without having to think through what it means – that this passes for activism is shameful in my opinion and I wish (although not really) that there were some sort of barrier – not financial or discriminating – that would cause everyone to think a little more. As Ms. Darr pointed out, the anonymity of the Web allows people to say things they wouldn’t in “real life” (one day “real life” and the internet might not be considered antonymous) and I might add that the exponential audience one can get on the Web allows people to feel like they’re doing more than they could be other means when in my opinion its ease must lower the weight of any one person, email or even word.

Ah, but I digress, which leads me to what was my biggest problem with the panel. I’ve thought a fair amount about this topic of truth and the internet, and in the short space of a couple of hours, talking to a broad, undefined audience, it’s difficult to get into much that hasn’t already been covered quite a bit.

When a grumpy woman accused the panel of not addressing the topic of truth, Ammar Abdulhamid, who was quite animated throughout, jumped in and explained that truth – on the internet – is just as fallible a concept as it was before the internet. Weisberg argued that in terms of even knowing what is the truth, we are all 5th graders going to the library for the first time – as a society we still have a great deal to learn about using the internet.

Oh, and speaking of truth, we should note that on the internet or not, something may be true, but only a little bit. Ms. Darr, the head of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University quoted a study by Blogads, an advertising firm, who surveyed 56,000 blog readers. They came up with an average profile of a 46 year old news and political junky, with a high income and who has a higher than average (40%) probability of having a graduate degree. Sounds pretty nice for advertisers, but is it real? Sure it is, for the readers of the blogs that Blogads has as customers, but nobody else really. I was surprised at the time she cited it, but I suppose such shots in the dark pretty much sum up the otherwise speechlessness of many when talking about the internet

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: May 01, 2006
• Filed Under:
  Reading Railroad: Events

Tags: Pen World Voices Festival

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