Mediaphobia, it turns out, comes in more than one flavor. Reactions to media and culture vary by region as well as, as I talked about last time, by gender.
After travels through New York City, Washington, DC, and now Boston, the idea that mediaphobia is a national anxiety and a broad-based political movement seems more credible than I imagined when I wrote Virtuous Reality.
Almost everyone who isn't directly involved with life on the Internet seems to be worried by or frightened about it. Some see it as a nameless threat, a transmitter of hate and filth; others fear a chaotic and de-civilizing force that could displace rational and credible information institutions. What exactly, they wonder, will replace these trusted sources?
But if mediaphobia is more pervasive than I thought, it's also more complex. Every day, I encounter questions and concerns I wish I'd known or thought of when I wrote the book.
New York suffers comparatively little from extreme mediaphobia. Although there's plenty of fussing about the decline of our intellectual life there, there's so much media that people have learned to coexist with it. Or perhaps New Yorkers have enough real-world problems that pornography on the Internet doesn't rank high on anybody's list.
Say what you want about New York, it is a city of world-wise cynics, nearly impervious to alarmist blabberings from politicians or journalists about how culture is destroying the moral fabric of America.
In Washington, on the other hand, self-righteous mediaphobia was rampant, even virulent. It had little to do with media, though, and much to do with the power of politicians and journalists and the alarming ways it seems to be digitally leeching out of the capital and into the hands of the multitudes. I had the striking sense of a subculture - the official and media wings of the Washington establishment - that saw a looming battle for control of information and was prepared to fight hard for its long-standing position as agenda setter and information dispenser. Fears of pornography and other immoral imagery will be the weapon of choice for this war, the stated cause of which will be the moral protection of children.
In Boston, the country's unofficial academic - if not intellectual - capital, mediaphobia also runs deep, but, appropriately, it's more thoughtful. Concerns about new media and popular culture seemed to focus less on phobic distortions about MTV, pornography, and other Internet evils, and more on legitimate, sometimes troubling questions about exactly how all this is going to affect the coherent presentation of information.
Late Thursday night, I sat on a talk show and took calls from men driving around New Hampshire and Massachusetts dialing in on their cell phones. I heard from a hard-working academic, a sociologist, who went online every day to find "scores of people spouting just the most ridiculous and inaccurate things I've ever heard. I don't expect them to meet MIT's academic standards, but don't they have to meet any? Nothing is cited or explained. I understand information needs to be freer, but without any standards at all?"
Most of the callers were guys ticked off at AOL and unsure about who exactly they were supposed to be listening to for reliable information, if the Net was full of pornographers and journalism stuffed with talking heads. They didn't mince words.
"To be honest with you, it's pretty confusing online," said Dan from New Hampshire. "I'm not worried about pornography. If my kid downloads that stuff, good for him. I looked at it when I was a kid. So what? I'm worried about who to believe and who to listen to. You say you write for HotWired? What the hell is that, and who the hell are you?"
Friday, I spent an hour on The Connection on WBUR, an impressive NPR broadcast that turned out to be the conversation I'd been waiting to have ever since Virtuous Reality came out, even though it was the most skeptical and challenging. The real issues were joined quickly and slugged out in the best sense, not the Washington talk-show sense, of the term.
Host Christopher Lydon and his producers put together a smart, freewheeling debate without all the clunky cant I'd been hearing from attack reporters dredged to defend William Bennett and traumatized boomers shielding their kids from The X-Files.
Yet it was far from a free ride. Before the broadcast, the producer told me she was hoping for "heat," and I got plenty. It's easy to dismiss pompous academics or Washington's trained snarlers; since their whole personas are about never changing their minds, it isn't troublesome when they don't. But the questions I got on Connection were too good not to take seriously.
The callers were neither knee-jerk nor oblivious. They were anxious, like Dan from New Hampshire, about who they ought to be listening to, how much weight to give one source or another, who would take responsibility for all the information that was suddenly so free.
They worried about the widening gap between the emerging techno elite and the underclass. They seemed willing enough to accept the idea that traditional media weren't working well - they can see and read for themselves. And that the press are devoid of moral purpose and addicted to confrontation. But even many of those who love going online fear a great digital babble, with so many people participating that rational discourse becomes impossible.
A literary critic phoned in to say he didn't buy any of William Bennett's preachings about morality, but he was still worried about context. "I'm just not sure who will be putting things in context for us. Where is that going to come from?"
Feeling, not for the first time on this book tour, that I was getting in over my head, I said I didn't know. These questions are the right questions. There's a lot of mindless digital cheerleading sometimes, in the face of the deep and legitimate reservations people have about this new culture. Though I didn't have answers, I said I have the strong sense some of these issues will sort themselves. The Web is still a wild frontier, I said. It isn't always clear what form settlement will take. And in my own experience, the bullshit-sniffers of the Web are ruthless about ferreting out inaccuracies, distortions, and exaggerations.
I quoted Hannah Arendt, who said that two things are needed to generate great revolutions: the sudden experience of being free, and the sense of creating something. The Net is revolutionary in precisely those ways. That sense of participating in something free and new is the payoff for me, the reality that underlies the distortions about the Net and other new media that pass for journalism, and sparked me to write my book. But the Web and the Net, I said, aren't holy obligations. People can lead perfectly fine lives online or off.
I theorized that one great era of the Internet - the construction of the machinery and technology of the Net and the Web by geeks, hackers, academics, and scientists - might be winding down. And that another era, sparked in part by the massive numbers of women pouring onto the Net, might bring about the creation of communities in which both men and women can participate. This notion has been kicking around every since the tour started, in part because the questions posed by women focus so sharply on community and coherence.
I left Boston with the feeling that some good questions were finally being kicked around, even if I didn't have all the good answers. The Connection was uplifting in other ways: it proved that conscientious and open-minded journalists and producers could take issues as supercharged as media, technology, and culture and approach them provocatively and intelligently, with both heat and light. This is a rare happening in media, new and old.
