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Tuesday, 05 December 2006 17:19 |
 | | Mark West |
Recently, Iëve seen an alarming change in the attitudes of the students at the university where I teach ÇƒÓ they wonët go to the library.
These are, by any measure, excellent students. On the whole, theyëre better prepared, more intelligent, more thoughtful and more engaged in domestic and foreign issues than the students I saw in my classes 10 years ago. Theyëre great people, and great students. But they just wonët go to the library, preferring to use the Internet. They believe that books are "old-school."
The problem with the Internet is, of course, that thereës no filter. Thereës no one you can trust watching the gates, and so anyone with an itch to scratch can get online, using readily available tools to create a professional-looking webpage presenting their own cracked view of reality. Usually the crackpots are easy to spot, like the sites (some 20 of them, at last count) marketing various sorts of hats lined with metallic materials intended to ward off the CIAës mind-control radiation.
Some
arenët, though, such as the sober-looking sites which present
seemingly-reasonable articles casting doubt on the existence of the
Holocaust. Students canët be blamed if now they have a hard time
accepting that much of the material on the Internet is bogus, and
telling the bad from the good is difficult. The result is that, as a
professor, I often find myself reading a well-written, well-reasoned
term paper, and then hit some bizarre factoid that just doesnët make
sense. Invariably, that strange fact will be meticulously cited to a
Web page.
Really, no
single individual is able to make all the necessary discriminations
between reliable and unreliable authors. Publishers serve as a first
line of defense, but their primary motivation is profit. Librarians,
though, filter through the mountains of published material to find the
gold ÇƒÏ and then make it available for free.
If thereës a ray
of sunlight in todayës dreary, bottom-line society, thatës it.
Libraries still provide well-selected books you can read for free. No
CIA-ray-beam deflecting helmets, no Holocaust-deniers, and no incessant
pop-up ads or spam describing the wonderful herbal potions available to
enhance oneës love life. Given its expense and annoyances, the truly
remarkable thing about the Internet has been the hype.
As near as I can
tell, the main thing that the Internet has provided has been some
really bad business models (like Amazon ÇƒÏ sell books for less, but make
up your losses via volume! ) and lots and lots of trash (pornography
and on-line gambling, for example). The ads portraying people in less
developed nations accessing vast storehouses of information seem to
have failed to come true, somehow; my experiences in such places are
that only the rich have access, and even then the local strongmen keep
a pretty tight lid on what one can see.
In the U.S., the
struggle for net neutrality indicates that big business would like very
much to colonize the Internet, just as it is attempting to colonize
every last atom of our cognitive space. And, of course, the library is
one of the few remaining refuges in our world where somebody isnët
trying to sell something or promote some political candidate or
crackpot theory. Itës one of the few places in an increasingly noisy
society where quiet is actually seen as a good thing. But funding for
libraries and books have suffered; while funding for the Information
Superhighway and related pipe-dreams have increased.
As always, the question to ask is "who benefits?"
The huge
corporations that span the globe, corporations that used to rely on
telephone and next-day postal services, now use e-mail.
The same big
firms that monopolize space in the malls and time on the airwaves are
monopolizing attention and advertising space on the Web.
Who benefits the
most from the Internet is obvious, and, as usual, the taxpayers are
footing the bill. And if thereës some sort of citizenës democracy
coming about as a result of the Internet, it sure hasnët made itself
apparent in the last, say, six years. Have prices gotten lower? Are the
kids smarter, more decent? Have new and wonderful art forms made our
lives better? How, exactly, has the Internet made the lives of real
people better?
But weëve all
gulped the Kool-Aid. Weëve listened to Dr. Pangloss and his facile
explanations. Weëve been told the Internet is the ënext big thing,ë and
weëve bitten, hook, line and sinker. And, as usual, when the grown-ups
make a mistake, itës the kids who suffer.
As a side note,
Iëve found that I can call the president a buffoon, and nobody seems to
mind. I can accuse any elected officeholder of any sort of perfidy, and
all I get are notes accusing me of timidity. But there are two things I
canët speak ill of ÇƒÏ the Internet and Wal-Mart. Those two topics are
believed, by left and right respectively, to be Good Things, beyond
criticism.
Well, theyëre
not. Theyëre both part of the same movement ÇƒÏ the movement of global
capitalism to destroy community, to make us all unaffiliated consumers
rather than citizens of local neighborhoods. And as such, Wal-Mart and
the Internet are both dangers to democracy; thatës why Big Business
finds them both so worthy of endless promotion.
ï
Mark West is a professor of mass communications at UNC Asheville.
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