Fighting the dark side of the web

/Jo Marchant
Lee Siegel has had a worse time online than most. In 2006, as a culture critic for The New Republic, his articles attracted a stream of anonymous online abuse which his editors refused to remove. So he posted comments praising himself under the alias Sprezzatura (after the ideal 16th-century courtier’s ability to maintain a facade of effortless skill and charm). He was found out, humiliated and suspended from his job. Now he’s fighting back in Against the Machine, a book inveighing against the internet’s dangerous influence on our culture. Jo Marchant asked what’s bugging him
What’s wrong with the internet?
There are some great things about the internet. We’re in touch with each other like never before. We have access to resources that we never had before. But the internet hasn’t evolved far enough to be self-critical. When you’re online, anything goes. All of the things that plague human nature are still present, even amplified, on the internet. There’s bullying, selfishness, egotistical scribbage everywhere you look. The internet can make these things even more hurtful and extreme.
So the problem is behaviour isn’t regulated online.
That’s right. If I called you the names that people call each other on the internet, you would just close up your notebook and walk out of the room. Most sites do edit and modify things now, but people are still adapting to the lack of inhibition on the web, and they are still expressing some extremely hostile and injurious sentiments. People say, “just get used to it, get a thick skin”, but it’s not about that, it’s about a new culture being created.
Calling people names is childish, but is it harmful?
It is creating an atmosphere where the threshold gets lower and lower. If you have that on the internet then it’s going to affect our intercourse offline, too. For example, I think the internet is making us all impatient. We’re so used to getting what we want online, when we want it. Now we get frustrated when we don’t get everything we want in our social lives. I don’t know what to do about it, but it is vital to at least be aware of it.
Aren’t you just bitter at being suspended?
Two years before I was attacked online, I was arguing that there was too much envy and resentment online, that it was intimidating journalists and making it hard for them to work. The Sprezzatura thing came out of my frustration, my exasperation. I’ve spoken about my foolish pride but it was also my principled disgust with this new convention.
What were they saying about you?
One person called me a paedophile, they said: “Siegel wants to fuck a child.” My editors said: “This is the way it is now, we can’t do anything about it.” So that’s still somewhere out there, my son will grow up and see that. What I did was rash and silly, but now it has led to this book and to a debate about anonymity. Plus The New Republic no longer allows comments like that, so maybe it did some good.
Most sites do moderate comments now. Won’t we find ways to deal with other problems as we go?
Yes, specific problems will have solutions. But I’m concerned about this new atmosphere that the internet is creating. Radio and TV did that too, but they were both subjected to the most untrammelled criticism. There are no great internet critics. Nobody is going online and having fun, in a serious way, with what else is online. You could do it satirically or polemically. You could monitor the internet the way that outsider commentator Matt Drudge monitors politics. There are plenty of people talking about what’s great on the internet, but why not hold up some of the worst types of behaviour and talk about that?
Why isn’t that happening?
It’s something new and nobody wants to be seen as a wet blanket, or to be like that figure in Tiananmen Square, standing in front of an inevitable development. Also, there are too many vested interests: people work as net consultants or own stock. For mainstream journalists, the internet is their future. They don’t want to walk all over their future.
Surely bloggers are not in anyone’s pay.
They are subject to the worst kind of pressure: popularity. It is the bane of the internet. Popular culture is becoming popularity culture, where quality no longer matters. News, for example, is becoming a popularity contest as never before. Editors always had an eye to pleasing the public, but not like this.
How is that different on the internet?
All the major news websites have “most popular”, “most emailed” and “most read”. You never had that before. I have a friend who works for The New York Times, a wonderful journalist and acknowledged as such, and her editor said to her: “None of your pieces are on the most emailed list. Get on the most emailed list!” On some websites, journalists are paid by the number of hits their articles get. That’s a sea change.
But the internet also has room for more diversity of voices than it has been possible to access before.
Sure, that’s one of the marvels and blessings of the internet. But when I go online I don’t see the diversity, I see people looking over their shoulder at others and trying to copy their success. I see an imitation culture.
Many web pages are unimaginative, plagiarised or even abusive, but that’s true generally of what people produce - most of it isn’t very good.
But this low end is much more visible on the web then in other kinds of media, which are more selective. This is lowering standards in the more traditional media, too. Book publishers, TV producers, newspaper editors - they never heard the voice of the crowd before. They don’t know how to deal with it so they start providing what they think the crowd wants. But what they are hearing is only a fraction of the audience. You could have 1000 people on a “comments” thread, but it could be 1000 out of a potential market of 14 million, and these are just the ones who choose to make themselves heard. How can editors judge both the magnitude and the quality of this voice? A lot of them panic because they can’t.
You’re also concerned we are spending more and more time alone at our computers, interacting virtually but not face to face. Is that a problem?
I think people are “acting out” their lives much more, in the psychological sense of doing things which show their subconscious conflicts. It’s making life more fantastical. It’s teaching people, especially young people, to be predatory, in a very sneaky, passive-aggressive way. So on a social networking site, say, your behaviour is premeditated in a way that would not be possible in a “live” social interaction. You can use people’s information about themselves to get a sense of their weaknesses and play on those weaknesses without appearing to. Occupying a purely mental space in a physical vacuum, you can be more calculating than you might be in a real social situation. Young people on the internet are either victims or predators, it seems to me.
“Young people on the internet are either victims or predators”But can’t you just enjoy chatting to friends and organising social occasions online?
You can, but there are dangers. Social networking sites are creating new pressures. For example, the number of “friends” someone has is a prominent feature of their profile. If you have too many friends, you’re a jerk, because you’re showing off your friends. If you don’t have enough friends, you’re a loser. The traumas visited upon us at school are magnified. And what people write on these sites is often accessible to many others.
The problem is not so much an invasion of privacy, although that is an issue. It’s more that it teaches people to “perform” their privacy, so rather than just living and interacting, they are constantly presenting a packaged version of themselves as the truth. It is blurring the lines between truth and falsity. Do we really want a situation where we can’t tell truth from falsity, reality from performance?
Surely people have always tried to present a certain image of themselves.
But here’s a technology that makes it so much easier, that intensifies the magnitude of the deception. Human nature doesn’t change, but technology amplifies that nature, both for bad and good. Unfortunately the bad is often louder and more aggressive than the good.
Is there evidence to support your criticisms?
The one US organisation that publishes a lot of reports relating to the internet is the Pew Research Center. But eight of the 12 people who wrote the Pew’s report on the internet have some kind of financial interest in the internet. As far as I know there have not been any rigorous studies funded by people who don’t have a dog in this race.
Should we regulate people’s behaviour online?
It makes me nervous to call for regulation. If bloggers keep trying to take someone down, like they’re doing with Barack Obama now, maybe a high-profile lawsuit would not be the worst thing. But many of the rules that govern how we treat each other as a society aren’t legal, they are enforced socially. Those rules could apply to our lives online as well.
Profile
Lee Siegel coined “blogofascism” to describe the intolerant name-calling on the net. He studied at Columbia University, New York (BA, MA and M. Phil), was an editor at The New Leader and Artnews, then a full-time writer, and went on to win the 2002 National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism. His books include Falling Upwards and Against the Machine: Being human in the age of the electronic mob, published by Spiegel & Grau (US)/Serpent’s Tail (UK).