by John Freeman
Ticker tape, which was developed from the telegram for the purpose of business and urgent news, has found a twenty-first-century use in transporting the news about ourselves on sites such as Facebook, which encourages you to broadcast what “you are doing” to your friends, or Twitter, which allows you to post short messages to a “channel” that can be accessed (and commented upon) by handheld or computer. In fact, given how much time many people spend on these sites—or interacting through e-mail—it’s fair to say that we are now the news. It’s a fascinating reversal from just seventy years ago. In John Dos Passos’s epic U.S.A. trilogy, bursts of ticker-tape news interrupt the story, putting the lives of his characters into the shadow of an ever more rapid present: these snippets of news also continuously called into question what was the defining context of a life—the swell of history it rides upon or the thoughts of the travelers in the moment? “I wish I was hard enough so that I didn’t give a damn about anything,” says one character. “When history’s walking on all our faces is no time for pretty sentiments.”
A lot has changed in postwar America and around the globe— not just economic circumstances—to make this not so. Advertising promoted the idea of individuality to the point that people’s desire to appear special, different, and other actually made them seem more like a crowd, a trend Hal Niedzviecki has described hilariously in Hello, I’m Special, such as the generation of disaffected teens who bought carefully distressed, grubby-looking clothes at Urban Outfitters and all wound up looking the same. Also, as Jean Twenge argues in Generation Me, an entire generation of children was raised to believe that self-esteem was the most important thing in their well-being. This led them to feel more entitled than ever and emptier when their high expectations were not fulfilled. In this way, around the Western world but especially in America, one of the most coddled generations ever created is more miserable than can be imagined.
One offshoot of this new narcissism is “egosurfing,” in which one searches the Internet for information about oneself. A company—egoSurf—was created especially to do this. Google, however, quickly took over the market; you can now simply put a Google alert on your name, and any time you are mentioned on the Internet an e-mail will be sent to your inbox. Even the famous—perhaps especially the famous—are afflicted by it. In Tim Parks’s 2006 novel Cleaver, a disgraced news presenter retreats into the Austrian Alps to lick his wounds. Surrounded by mountain vistas and the ticking silence of a lush remove, he cannot help ducking into an Internet café to Google himself.
As Cleaver discovers, once we project our self out into the world and begin tracking it on the Internet, no amount of feedback is enough. The pit of identity vertigo is bottomless. “Friend confirmations come in every minute,” wrote Brian Palmer, a student in Pittsburgh. “How can I not click onto Facebook and see if someone new has listed me as a friend? But Facebook doesn’t make me feel like I have friends. Friends aren’t supposed to let you sink deeper into an addiction.” No amount of virtual connectivity will ever suffice, either, because face-to-face interaction provides things that online conversation can never deliver: touch, the complex emotional valences of expression and smell, inflection or tone of voice, the awkward but essential jaggedness of being present in the world. “There is a kind of famine of warm interpersonal relations, of easy-to-reach neighbors, of encircling, inclusive memberships, and of solid family life,” says the social scientist Robert Lane. “I have never checked my e-mail more obsessively in my life,” wrote Twenge of her experience in online dating.
The Loss of Public Space in the Physical World
The middle distance fell away, so the grids (from small to large) that had supported the middle distance fell into disuse and ceased to be understandable. Two grids remained… there was a national life—a shimmer of national life—and intimate life. The distance between these two was very great. The distance was very frightening. People did not want to measure it. People began to lose a sense of what distance was and of what the usefulness of distance might be.
— GEORGE W. S. TROW, Within the Context of No Context
In 1980, alarmed at what he felt television was doing to American life, George W. S. Trow published one of the most prophetic essays about the direction of what was then called the Media Age. Trow believed we had been lured from smaller, tangible groups, such as women’s clubs and bowling leagues, out into the false camaraderie of television programs. Tuning in to the tube, we instantly exchange a virtual world for the real one. We have friends because we can tune in to the crew of CSI: Miami most nights. Newspapers, which reported the world, gave way to television news pitched to viewers based on demographics, a contextual shift that eroded people’s sense of history on both a large and a small scale. The vacuum created by the loss of what Trow called “middle distance” institutions was quickly filled. “It is in this space,” Trow wrote, “that celebrities dance.”
The breaking down of institutions that Trow was commenting upon, places where face-to-face interaction was at a premium, has only been speeded up by the Internet. These days you don’t have to leave the house. In 2000, a twenty-six-year-old north Dallas man pulled one of the more successful publicity stunts of recent memory by legally changing his name to DotComGuy and vowing not to leave his home for a year. The move earned him scores of sponsors—United Parcel Service, Gateway, a gym that sent a trainer to the house so he wouldn’t get too pudgy—and millions of viewers to his Web site, which broadcast his life via live webcams. People spent 2 million minutes watching him in the first four days of his sojourn.
In the wake of the Y2K craze, when suddenly the matrix of computer technology we were becoming dependent upon seemed to have exposed us to a fatal flaw, DotComGuy was a great advertisement for the pleasures of the Internet. Apparently, many people bought into this experience. Online shopping took off, growing from the inception of the Web to a rate of 25 percent per year before slowing—it is the second-most common thing Internet users do after e-mailing—but it’s been at the expense of the real-world commons, that is, the place where one can interact face-to-face in real time, unmediated. Indeed, stores like Barnesandnoble.com began to offer the option to purchase a book online but pick it up in the store for customers who actually liked the chance to be in a physical retail space. “It’s not like you go onto Amazon and think, ‘I’m a little depressed. I’ll go onto this site and get transported,’” said Nancy F. Koehn, a Harvard Business School professor who studies consumer habits. But it is exactly this instinct that pulls us into a beckoning bookstore.
For those who cherish the corner store, the migration of such a huge range of business onto the Internet couldn’t have occurred at a worse time, because these real-world, middle-distance commons—places where you could interact without the emotional strain of carrying a long conversation—as Trow noted, were already suffering. When William Penn was governor of Pennsylvania, the mail service’s delivery times and routes were simply posted on the meetinghouse door in Philadelphia. This community collective has dwindled drastically ever since. “Within the twentieth-century city of housing,” Joseph Rykwert wrote, “the identifiable places of meeting have been drastically reduced.” Retail outlets, fast-food restaurants, chain stores “convey the message that space has been standardized, that its inflections and associations have been ironed out.”
It’s hard to blame us, then, for retreating into a virtual space, withdrawing more and more into the window of our computer screens to do and say things that are difficult in real life. In making this compromise, however, we are buying into a philosophy of space—an ecology of space that is designed and determined by the systems that drive the Internet. As Mark Rothko has written about art, “If one understands, or has the sensibility to live in, the particular kind of space to which a painting is committed, then he has obtained the most comprehensive statement of the artist’s attitude toward reality.” If we agree with cultural critic Steven Johnson that an interface is art, the question remains: What are the
assumptions and worldview of the screen? For starters, one could say a computer screen leads us to believe that all the world is available from our fingertips; that there are no limits; that there is no time but now. That real space doesn’t matter.
And so, by tying ourselves to this machine, we make a trade: virtual interaction for physical togetherness. The millions of people who simultaneously make this bargain one click at a time have had an enormous effect on the institution that brought us together to begin with: mail. In 2008, with the post office running a deficit of £4 million a week, the British government announced a plan of post office closures that would affect 2,500 branches. Many of them were small, irreplaceable meeting places for their communities. It was a particular blow to the elderly, who pick up their pension and benefit checks at the post office, and the infirm. “We have to remember that there are many who don’t have cars, not to mention many who don’t have home computers,” wrote a man in Shropshire. “And even though there have been improvements to public transport, in rural areas buses don’t always run as frequently as people need.” One of the oldest post offices in the country, operated by the earl of Leicester, was closed. Scores of people complained. One community even made a film in protest. Yet the cuts went through.
This erosion of face-to-face interaction is taking place all over, anywhere people traditionally gathered in public. Instead of going to a movie theater, people can download a film over the Internet; instead of walking into a bookstore to browse, customers simply navigate to an online store; shoppers pressed for time do not visit a local grocer, they buy their produce on FreshDirect or a similar site; pickup bars are losing out to Internet dating sites, auction houses to eBay; casinos don’t have to go offshore anymore, as people can go online to play poker; banks’ queues are diminishing as more and more customers go online to perform simple transactions or pay bills; garage sales are going away as people hock their old goods on Amazon.com, eBay, and craigslist; even doctors’ offices can be avoided. About the only thing you cannot do from home, at this point, is vote.
This migration into the virtual space is being felt most strongly by people who grew up without it. But a new generation is being raised to take it for granted. Schools and universities, which used to be designed around quadrangles in order to facilitate meetings, have become as eerily silent as offices now that students gather virtually, updating their Facebook pages at a frenzied rate rather than actually talking to one another. In 2000, a New York Times reporter visited the campus of Mount Saint Mary College, which had installed campuswide wireless Internet access, then a novelty. The new connectivity was an enormous convenience to many on campus, but it had quickly created a dependency. People were on it all the time. “I’ve never seen a student walking around holding their laptop out to listen to music,” said the network manager, tuning the Internet radio to a new station. “But I’m sure that’s not far off.” The service was absorbed so quickly, the reporter wrote, that students and faculty “developed an automatic reflex to go to the Web for information, no matter where they are.”
As cheap, easily accessible clearinghouses for news that affects people in a particular geographic region, newspapers—another form of public space—are also in trouble, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, where 150 years ago the telegraph gave them a new life and expanded the sense of how far empathy’s tether should reach. Relaxed FCC laws have allowed corporations to buy up and consolidate more media than ever—but it’s increasingly difficult for newspapers to produce the double-digit growth that made them such attractive parts of a media empire. Newspapers typically made 80 percent of their money from advertising and 20 percent off circulation. Online sites such as craigslist have slowly eaten away at their advertising market, and more and more people are reading the news online. Newspapers are still expected to report and explain the news; they just can’t make money distributing it the same way they used to.
E-mail has played a role in this development. Our inboxes have usurped the morning paper as a shaping context; many of us check it before we even glance at the news, let alone brew that first cup of coffee, making our e-mail (and by extension ourselves) the most important information—the shaping context—of the day. This is an important development. From dawn to dusk, e-mail has become a kind of rolling to-do list that, as more and more information is provided to us electronically—from sales at our local department store to news of a friend’s birthday to important deadlines for work—stretches across all aspects of our life. If this is the first stream of information we dip into in the morning, we begin our days with a contracting sense of the world, rather than an expanding one. The possibility of serendipity, of learning something we don’t already know or at least think we may want to know, diminishes.
This isn’t to say that we cannot get the news delivered to our virtual inboxes. It’s just a very different notion of what news means. Google, for instance, has made it possible to have news delivered to your e-mail address through Google news alerts, which appear embedded in an e-mail as a series of hyperlinks. Simply type in the list of subjects you would like to track, and it will e-mail you alerts as many times a day as you can handle. Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the political blog Daily Kos, which gets upward of a half million visitors per day, told GQ he now gets all his news via Google alerts.
Shopping for news this way, however, puts a modern-day reader into the same dilemma that the Michigan newspaper mentioned earlier was in with the telegraph many years ago. Things like Google alerts, RSS feeds sent out by e-mail, or links on your Yahoo! home page often remove local factors—such as your newspaper—as your defining context, your window onto the world, because it depends entirely upon what is written about and reported over the Web. One would think this would present an opportunity for local newspapers, but as more and more of them have been bought up by corporations, forced to use syndicated copy that comes from someplace else, reduced to a skeleton staff of writers and reporters, these papers, which would have stood to benefit from the overload of information provided by the Web, are actually losing out.
Not surprisingly, then, in the United States, the past few years have been bad ones for local newspapers—that, to be fair, were slower to pick up on the possibilities the Web held for reporting and that had fewer resources to market and promote themselves—and very good ones for papers pitched to a national audience, such as USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. But even these giants face a larger contextual shift away from news, toward a point-and-hunt attitude to information.
Google is a powerful cultural force, but it alone is not responsible for this trend; the customer has shaped and designed the news without knowing it ever since demographics and ratings became a large part of news reporting, especially for broadcast news. The Web and tools such as e-mail have simply put us more firmly into the role of consumer: What do we want? The New York Times has a feature that allows a reader to customize his or her news home page, making their news site into a mash-up of headlines pulled from a series of news sites—from The New York Review of Books to Sports Illustrated to the Huffington Post—on a page you design and lay out yourself. What the newspaper itself considers important and newsworthy and where it ought to be placed on your attention span doesn’t matter.
The struggles faced by regional newspapers in the United States—and now in the United Kingdom—does not affect simply the owners and reporters and paperboys; it affects what citizens can know. National news agencies do not have the resources to cover all the news that is fit to print; local papers have been essential in filling in the gaps. They have exposed corruption, graft, abuse, murders, and rapes—defended the weak from the powerful—in a way that never required an economies-of-scale justification. For a story to be reported in these markets, it need only affect the people in the circulation areas. If local news sources— especially newspapers, which form the backbone not just of radio and television but of many of the blogs that have arisen to fill the
gaps—are allowed to die on the vine, people in those communities will be deprived of an essential watchdog of the commons. Fighting this trend will be an uphill battle. Many of these newspapers are now owned by people who do not even live in the community. Moreover, we have entered a climate in which our frame of reference has shrunk to the smallest aperture ever.
Why Is It So Hard to Read Anymore?
The nature of screens—and how we work on, over, and through them onto the Internet—has effected a huge epistemological shift that goes beyond merely writing our way into existence. It’s changing how we read and what we read, just as the telegram and organized mail did before it. As Nicholas Carr wrote in his essay on Google, “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”
Some of these changes stem from the interface itself. Newspaper and magazine articles have become shorter, breaks longer, and text bigger to accommodate readers’ fractured attention span. We ourselves create this condition, though, by how much time we spend working in word processing programs and on e-mail. “E-mailers tend—there being no space constraints—to insert a line of space between paragraphs,” writes the humorist and language columnist Roy Blount, Jr., in an e-mail. “If readers get to where they can’t tolerate paragraphs without space between, they will develop an even greater resistance to print; or print will have to put space between paragraphs, which will eat up more paper, make books bulkier, leach even more substance out of newspapers and magazines: contribute further to the decline of print.”
