Torn-Down Fences

 

I5B5uBAThis paragraph from Chesterton is dear to the conservative heart:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

I was thinking of these words just now as I walked down the street and saw what’s now a familiar sight: hundreds of people looking at their phones. The advent of the Internet, coupled with our ability — every one of us — to maintain a non-stop connection to it, really is a massive revolution in human affairs. One of the biggest in history.

It’s changed the experience of being human — socially, intellectually, politically. And there’s no going back, is there. In the next few decades, people who can even remember the pre-Internet, pre-iPhone world will become increasingly rare.

As we get older, we’ll become the last living connection to a world most people can’t really understand: to a certain conception of privacy, for example. To a world full of physical artifacts such as maps and books. People will still know what those were, of course, but they won’t understand how we really depended on them in our day-to-day lives, how there was once a time where if you lost the map, you lost the ability to figure out where you were going.

It’s a cliché to say this election is a huge rupture from past elections. How much of this can be explained by the way our cognition has been changed by the Internet? 

Any of it? None?

If so, how?

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  1. Ball Diamond Ball Member
    Ball Diamond Ball
    @BallDiamondBall

    Claire Berlinski, Ed.:It’s a cliché to say this election is a huge rupture from past elections. How much of this can be explained by the way our cognition has been changed by the Internet?

    Any of it? None?

    If so, how?

    I dare say that this election is a reaction to the phenomenon you describe, and which has been recognized for over a decade.  Let’s cut to the chase.  Trump’s successful candidacy is the rejection of the internet-moron-driven Obama/Clinton culture.  We are all familiar with various lies and forms of lying, and for some, the schtick gets old.  Your original point is an interesting and profound one, and it has been well-discussed.  So what do you think of our predicament as a reaction to, rather than the arrival of, the phenomenon you describe?

    • #1
  2. Claire Berlinski, Ed. Member
    Claire Berlinski, Ed.
    @Claire

    Ball Diamond Ball: Trump’s successful candidacy is the rejection of the internet-moron-driven Obama/Clinton culture

    Seems to me it’s a new and even more disastrous version of it. Let’s accept just for the sake of argument that it is — I realize that’s a big thing to accept for the sake of argument, but I’m going somewhere with this. If this change in human cognition tends to give rise to Internet-moron-driven politics, what do we do? If Internet-driven-moron politics are an authentically new feature of human nature, conservatives have a tough time adhering to the principle of, “Don’t change anything, or if you do, change it slowly and cautiously.” If this way of looking at things is correct, something has already changed, radically, and it’s making it impossible for us (or much harder) successfully to govern ourselves. So now what?

    • #2
  3. Casey Inactive
    Casey
    @Casey

    Claire Berlinski, Ed.: I was thinking of these words just now as I walked down the street and saw what’s now a familiar sight: hundreds of people looking at their phones.

    That’s interesting because one of my takeaways from my visit to France was how much less of this I saw. So imagine…

    Now too, I noticed far, far less in Nancy as compared to Paris. Almost none of this actually. Teenagers were gathered in the park chatting, couples on benches, parents interacted with their kids, people looked at each other across restaurant tables. It was actually quite jarring. In a pleasant way. Like traveling back in time 20 years.

    • #3
  4. Casey Inactive
    Casey
    @Casey

    As for the politics of it, it allows everyone to virtually cocoon themselves in a world of perpetual agreement. More deeply entrenching and solidifying ones own beliefs and make the beliefs of the others seem more wild and insane.

    Also, the sheltering effect. If you bumped into someone on the sidewalk you’d both turn, apologize, maybe smile, and move along. If someone cuts you off in traffic you’ll call on God to damn that guy to hell. Internet people are even more anonymous than car people.

    So the more we interact with anonymous people, the more we dislike and distrust people generally.

    I think this is why people under 30 are attracted to the idea of using government force to force generic people to leave specific people alone.

    • #4
  5. KC Mulville Inactive
    KC Mulville
    @KCMulville

    I don’t know if Trump is a reaction against it – after all, Trump communicates and campaigns by Twitter.

    I’ll argue instead that this is not the birth of a new revolution, but the death throes of the last one – the TV & media revolution. Political consultants love to glorify it as “the air war,” but Obama proved that a ground game still counts – and probably decides. People talk about Trump spending little while Hillary blows millions on TV attack ads (that look identical to every other attack ad), and she’s getting almost no bang for the buck. Maybe this is more about the possibility that the public has simply developed an immunity to media politics. The air war is ineffective.

    Of course, Trump hasn’t spent much on the ground game, either. The problem is that we won’t know whether that’s changed, or whether (as I suspect) we’ll learn the hard way that it’s just as important as it has always been.

    I also have a suspicion that 95% of the voters knew who they were going to vote for … two years ago. Campaigns change minds far less than they used to. The revolutionary new campaign innovations won’t make much difference.

    • #5
  6. Claire Berlinski, Ed. Member
    Claire Berlinski, Ed.
    @Claire

    Casey:So the more we interact with anonymous people, the more we dislike and distrust people generally.

    I was thinking about that. Not that long ago — maybe ten years ago? — we saw online life as less real than regular life. Our perceptions of human nature were pretty solidly grounded in our F2F experiences of other humans. This is much less true now: We encounter many more people online than most of us do in the rest of our lives, and so many of the people we meet this way seem like real jerks. Maybe this causes people to feel very sour about humans, generally.

    I think this is why people under 30 are attracted to the idea of using government force to force generic people to leave specific people alone.

    Interesting idea. Yes, if all day long all you watch people making beasts of themselves — and if this is pretty much the world, or the majority of it, for you — it would be easier to conclude that humans aren’t capable of restraining themselves and require shutting-up by force of law. Because it’s pretty rare to encounter someone who would say to your face the things they’ll say online, those of us who grew up pre-Internet rarely encountered people who would say such things. Under-30s don’t know that world.

    • #6
  7. Valiuth Member
    Valiuth
    @Valiuth

    All the problems will solve themselves with the death of the previous generations that can’t keep up with the technology and feel alienated by it. Perhaps in the past the shorter life span of humans made such inter generational frictions easier to deal with, perhaps the rate of change was also slower because technology disseminated at a slower pace.

    • #7
  8. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    I think the obsession with people’s noses glued to their phones might represent a kind of insularity: we create our own little worlds so we don’t have to deal with the world around us. It feels much safer in that little world, where we can ignore the chaos, disillusionment, unhappiness and superficiality that reigns. Maybe Trump has blown open people’s protective coverings and promised to make the world safe once again. So people have lined up behind him. Sadly, they don’t realize that the world has always been unsafe. And a strong man can make it all the more dangerous.

    • #8
  9. Casey Inactive
    Casey
    @Casey

    Valiuth: All the problems will solve themselves with the death of the previous generations that can’t keep up with the technology and feel alienated by it.

    The problem of VCR clocks blinking 12:00 will be solved but the problem of a technology that enhances the worst of human nature and hides the best of it probably won’t.

    • #9
  10. Eric Hines Inactive
    Eric Hines
    @EricHines

    Claire Berlinski, Ed.: if you lost the map, you lost the ability to figure out where you were going.

    Not so much then, and not the case today.  Explorers, for instance, by the nature of their business had no map, and understood well enough for their business where they were going: variously there or not here.  And everyone who traveled to a place to which they’d never been, including those places whose location they knew generally but had no route knowledge,  had no map; they constructed theirs from asking directions of folks familiar with the current leg of the trip.  Even Magellan knew with great specificity where he was going; he just had no map for how to get there.  And that’s the key: most folks, mapless, knew or could figure out where they were going; what they lacked was a map of the route.

    Today, we still have maps, we just have different means of generating and of storing them.  Importantly, we have means for generating and storing maps of a far larger variety of regions in our lives, and across a far larger range of dimensionality.  Including maps of the relationships among those maps.

    And so today’s election season.  We would have had–have had–elections like this at break points throughout our history.  A sequence of Athenian elections during a later period of the second stage of the Peloponnesian War comes to mind: a sequence of change vs establishment, including a later buyer’s remorse election.  Today’s season just moves across a broader reach of maps, with information–and mere data–moving at a faster pace than before.

    Eric Hines

    • #10
  11. genferei Member
    genferei
    @genferei

    I’m really not sure that the pre-iPhone era was full of vastly more face to face interaction wherein one’s thinking was challenged. At least, that’s not how I remember it.

    • #11
  12. Eric Hines Inactive
    Eric Hines
    @EricHines

    Valiuth: Perhaps in the past the shorter life span of humans made such inter generational frictions easier to deal with….

    I think a major player in inter-generational frictions, such as they were and are today, and the handling of those frictions was that those prior generations actually lived with each other to a far more significant degree than obtains today.  I grew up with my grandmothers living with us in their endgames, and while that wasn’t routine, it wasn’t atypical, either.  My parents’ generation grew up with their grandparents routinely living with them.

    Today, the generations live apart, separated by cities, even continents–and so separated in time and culture.

    Eric Hines

    • #12
  13. Quietpi Member
    Quietpi
    @Quietpi

    In order to have two sets of grandparents living with or even near you, you first have to have two sets of grandparents.  And single-parent households are now the rule.  And there’s a staggering percentage of households that consist, not of a parent, but of one or two grandparents.  The parent generation is missing entirely.  So, I guess, in that scenario, you do indeed have your grandparents living in your house.  Just sayin’…

    Just as gangs provide an alternative to so many of the generation now approaching adulthood – it’s rare to find a gang member who grew up in an intact household – the electronic version of reality fills much of the same void.  Fills it, I say, but with garbage, to be kind.  Sort of a reversal of the lost-wax process, isn’t it?

    • #13
  14. David Foster Member
    David Foster
    @DavidFoster

    When the telegraph was first invented, one journalist marveled:

    “This extraordinary discovery leaves…no elsewhere…it is all here.”

    If wired communications eliminated (or at least reduced) the sense of elsewhere, it seems that wireless communications tends to eliminate the sense of the here and now.

    See my related post Duz Web Mak Us Dumr?

    • #14
  15. RyanM Inactive
    RyanM
    @RyanM

    A great deal of it. Two words: social media.

    Tell me the difference between lefty memes on Facebook and Soviet or nazi propaganda posters. Except that the former reaches more people.

    • #15
  16. Claire Berlinski, Ed. Member
    Claire Berlinski, Ed.
    @Claire

    RyanM: Tell me the difference between lefty memes on Facebook and Soviet or nazi propaganda posters. Except that the former reaches more people.

    The latter were created and propagated by the state; people create and share the stuff peer-to-peer now. They self-propagandize. I suspect it’s more effective.

    • #16
  17. Old Bathos Member
    Old Bathos
    @OldBathos

    I was in a Capital Hill bar one evening many years ago. Two Congressman I recognized were with attractive young companions. Some idiots from a local news channel pushed into the bar with bright lights on the camera to do a story about the revitalized bar scene around the Hill.  A bartender (acutely aware of the needs of his clientele) jumped over the bar and with help from other patrons shoved the iTeam Working For You On Your Side Or Whatever camera crew and reporter out of the door.   I saw at least four four adult males on the floor hiding below their tables during the event.

    That was before camera phones, the internet and campaign finance laws.  It took Congressmen several decades to adapt to the reality that the old ways could not survive in the internet age. Some still have not learned (e.g., former Rep. Carlos Danger (D-NY)).

    I am not persuaded that technology effects Congress as much as we might think.

    Television was the breakthrough political technology in the 1970s. Computer technology gave us the mass mailing operations that that were effective in the 1980s. Clever font- and content-varied computer generated letters and other astroturf technologies appeared in the 1990s. Highly granular databases for voter mobilization appears to be the dominant technology now.

    But in almost every case, both parties adapt and the novelty and impact wears off so Congress itself lumbers along in much the same way for better or worse.

    • #17
  18. James Gawron Inactive
    James Gawron
    @JamesGawron

    Claire,

    I like the Chesterton quote that you mentioned. However, I think it odd that you would use it in this way. The information revolution didn’t come about because people were tearing down fences. It is the result of a creative, productive, free society. I find the inability to digest the magnitude of what is going on in people’s lives more the problem then the acceptance of obviously desirable new technology itself. All I read are gee-whiz techno puff pieces, ludite end of the world predictions, and how much money did Apple make last year stories. Very few people want to analyze what is really very different about what is going on and how we need to shape our attitudes to it. I’ve mentioned before that the wisest thing I know about the information age is the inversion of Marshall McCluhan’s old dictum of “It’s not the message it’s the medium”. What the information age is teaching me every day is that “It’s not the medium it’s the message”. Content matters!

    As for tearing down fences without knowing what they were for, I’d be a lot more concerned about the end of Monogamous Heterosexual Marriage as the only legally recognized form of marriage. Heterosexual Monogamy had a nice ~1,000-year run. Now it’s yesterday’s news. I’d worry.

    Regards,

    Jim

    • #18
  19. Old Bathos Member
    Old Bathos
    @OldBathos

    Now to argue against my previous comment:

    Technology has made interest groups better armed and informed,  heightened partisanship, created information silos and caused or at least hastened the demise of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans.  Technology helped destroy the genteel inertia that was at the core of Congressional culture.

    Now, politicians are expected to  simultaneously deliver polled-tested verbiage (information technology) to sustain sufficient constituent support while at the same time being authentic and somehow project an image of standing apart from it all (media technology).

    That conflicting demand has finally broken the system:  We have Hillary who is an utterly ridiculous construct of phony poll-driven verbiage delivered with palpable insincerity and Trump who is almost a parody of raw authenticity.  I blame technology.

    • #19
  20. Casey Inactive
    Casey
    @Casey

    David Foster:When the telegraph was first invented, one journalist marveled:

    “This extraordinary discovery leaves…no elsewhere…it is all here.”

    If wired communications eliminated (or at least reduced) the sense of elsewhere, it seems that wireless communications tends to eliminate the sense of the here and now.

    See my related post Duz Web Mak Us Dumr?

    Interesting… where once we read a morning paper for 30 minutes or watched evening news for 30 minutes and walked away to live our lives, we now find ourselves experiencing the news in our lives.  Or perhaps even as our lives.

    • #20
  21. Valiuth Member
    Valiuth
    @Valiuth

    Eric Hines:

    Valiuth: Perhaps in the past the shorter life span of humans made such inter generational frictions easier to deal with….

    I think a major player in inter-generational frictions, such as they were and are today, and the handling of those frictions was that those prior generations actually lived with each other to a far more significant degree than obtains today. I grew up with my grandmothers living with us in their endgames, and while that wasn’t routine, it wasn’t atypical, either. My parents’ generation grew up with their grandparents routinely living with them.

    Today, the generations live apart, separated by cities, even continents–and so separated in time and culture.

    Eric Hines

    I think you are probably right. Technology has separated us physically, but on the other hand it is also bringing us together in new ways. My mother lives 800 miles away from her grand children but she is able to see them routinely over skype, and my brother and his wife post photos nearly daily. That level of connection may not be the same as living in the same house but it is better than what we had before. I think once again the boomer generation finds itself at a strange inflection point. I note that I spend much quality time with my friends playing video games though we all live in different states. Technology like beer is both the  cause and solution to all of life’s problems.

    • #21
  22. Valiuth Member
    Valiuth
    @Valiuth

    Casey:

    Valiuth: All the problems will solve themselves with the death of the previous generations that can’t keep up with the technology and feel alienated by it.

    The problem of VCR clocks blinking 12:00 will be solved but the problem of a technology that enhances the worst of human nature and hides the best of it probably won’t.

    Perhaps, but the cream always rises to the the top. Much of the dregs can be avoided if one does not look for them. Certainly if you are on Twitter it may be hard to avoid the scum of the internet sending you hateful things, but you can always block them and ignore them. I think we are lacking a certain degree of familiarity with the new media to establish proper social norms. Those will come though with time. They always do, and invariably the get up ended and reworked. In the long run no one will remember or much care what hatekitty666 had to say about Jews on 4chan.

    • #22
  23. Hank Rhody Contributor
    Hank Rhody
    @HankRhody

    Did you really get all that much social interaction standing in lines? And if you did, I’m gonna have to ask you to stop. It’s annoying enough to be dealing with the bureaucracy, I don’t want to also make polite small talk with chatty strangers.

    • #23
  24. Casey Inactive
    Casey
    @Casey

    Valiuth: Perhaps, but the cream always rises to the the top.

    Does it?  It seems to me that one of the primary features of this technology is that the cream gets stirred into the pot with everything else. One has to dig and sift to find the cream.

    • #24
  25. Hank Rhody Contributor
    Hank Rhody
    @HankRhody

    Claire Berlinski, Ed.:It’s changed the experience of being human — socially, intellectually, politically. And there’s no going back, is there. In the next few decades, people who can even remember the pre-Internet, pre-iPhone world will become increasingly rare.

    As we get older, we’ll become the last living connection to a world most people can’t really understand: to a certain conception of privacy, for example. To a world full of physical artifacts such as maps and books. People will still know what those were, of course, but they won’t understand how we really depended on them in our day-to-day lives, how there was once a time where if you lost the map, you lost the ability to figure out where you were going.

    Quite a bit of science fiction is written by taking things that are happening today and extrapolating them into the things that will be happening tomorrow. You’d think that they’d have a better record for accurate predictions.

    Heinlein wrote a story called “Solution Unsatisfactory” during WWII. He predicted an atomic weapon, that it would be used to end the war (bombing Berlin with radioactive compounds, but still astonishingly accurate). He went on to predict the inevitable result of such a weapon: One world government based on a monopoly control of the superweapon. That part didn’t work out like he expected.

    By and large I tend not to worry about changing technology and changing human nature. Human nature doesn’t. What this present technological trend will do even a decade hence is inherently difficult to guess. What it means will not be seen until we’ve walked to the end of that road.

    • #25
  26. Bryan G. Stephens Thatcher
    Bryan G. Stephens
    @BryanGStephens

    Many people used to live local, insular lives, and not go more than 10 miles from where they were born. Everyone around them was like them, with the same basic religion, accents, and values. Everyone knew each other’s business. In cities, people might travel more, but cities sill were broken down into neihborhoods that were like small towns. If you read a paper, you read the view point you wanted, selecting from one of the many papers out there.

    It has only been in the later half of the 20th Century and forward, that we have seen the ability for people to have such ease of communication over distances. It was only in this time where broadcast media arose to have a single voice. That time is past. What we have now is that like minded people can link up, not just next door, but across the world.

    Personally, I don’t have a problem with this. The idea people need to be exposed to alternate ideas is progressive nonsense. People won’t listen to ideas they don’t like anyway. You cannot force people to change their minds on anything. And all the Liberal memes don’t change minds because they are not meant too. They are meant to say “Look how smart/right/good I am, and how stupid someone else is”. At best, the suppress speech, but they don’t change minds.

    Viva la reveloution’

    • #26
  27. Claire Berlinski, Ed. Member
    Claire Berlinski, Ed.
    @Claire

    Casey: , we now find ourselves experiencing the news in our lives. Or perhaps even as our lives.

    Exactly. I remember when I was a kid — maybe eight or nine — reading that Israelis listened to the news on the radio all the time because what happened in the news had such direct relevance to their survival. This was presented as a way of life that was totally foreign, precarious, and unimaginable for Americans. Now Americans (along with the rest of the world) are mainlining the news directly into their veins, all day long. This is a big cultural change, and one that’s clearly stressing people out a lot.

    • #27
  28. genferei Member
    genferei
    @genferei

    I wonder if it is as big of a change as you think, Claire. In the days when what appeared in the Illustrated London News changed foreign policy through popular outcry, weren’t people similarly mainlining (what celebrity journalists and pundits told them was) the news? Obviously I’m thinking Britain, Gordon and Churchill here, but there are parallels with the US, Roosevelt and Cuba.

    • #28
  29. James Gawron Inactive
    James Gawron
    @JamesGawron

    Claire Berlinski, Ed.:

    Casey: , we now find ourselves experiencing the news in our lives. Or perhaps even as our lives.

    Exactly. I remember when I was a kid — maybe eight or nine — reading that Israelis listened to the news on the radio all the time because what happened in the news had such direct relevance to their survival. This was presented as a way of life that was totally foreign, precarious, and unimaginable for Americans. Now Americans (along with the rest of the world) are mainlining the news directly into their veins, all day long. This is a big cultural change, and one that’s clearly stressing people out a lot.

    Claire,

    This is very interesting. Now switch the roles around. Now think of people in country xyz around the world watching our news, sports, movies & tv, politics..24/7. If the news from the world is a shock to us, what about the news of us being a shock to the world?

    Regards,

    Jim

    • #29
  30. RightAngles Member
    RightAngles
    @RightAngles

    Interesting questions, Claire. This may not be on point exactly, but for me, the most dismaying aspect of our digital age and our personal devices is that they’re solitary pursuits, whether we’re surfing the net, checking our phones, or doing what I’m doing right now. For these pursuits, we not only don’t need other people around us, but we don’t even want them. I don’t know what it will mean for our future.

    • #30
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