After three weeks of book touring, I didn't think there was anything to say about media, culture, morality, and the Internet that hadn't already been said.
I was wrong. Friday I was a guest on my first worldwide talk show, Talk to America, aired by the Voice of America.
Neurotic boomers; moral guardians; CDA, V-chip and Blocking Software supporters; clucking teachers; opportunistic politicians and other mediaphobes should all be dragged on to this program and forced to listen to jarringly different perspectives about the Internet from people in China, Pakistan, India, and Nigeria.
The Voice of America studio is located high up in New York City's federal office building, across from the federal courthouse, where terrorists are perpetually on trial.
Ironically, this beacon of freedom, created in 1942 to counteract Nazi propaganda, is in a virtual fortress, ringed by metal detectors, locked doors, and a small army of security guards. Despite all that, this particular media invokes a rich history, specifically of the Cold War, when clusters of people all over the world tuned in to VOA - often at the risk of their lives - to get hold of more information than they were allowed to get at home.
Decades later, the same government that created VOA on the principle that information ought to be free supported the Communications Decency Act that would choke freedom of speech for people here. Maybe someone in Russia will be good enough to return the favor and broadcast a free-speech radio network to us when the time comes.
Talk to America is broadcast all over the world, and for many of the callers, English is a second language. I thought of Edward R. Murrow, who headed VOA for a while before he ran afoul of Washington bureaucrats. He would, I thought, have had little patience for his successors and their eternal cawing about the decline of civilization.
The callers to VOA are mesmerizing. Their struggle to understand the Net and its implications was the most powerful moment for me on this book tour.
It's a difficult broadcast to do. The callers have to work hard to connect, getting to a phone and an international operator. Few of them spoke English fluently. For the guest, the struggle is to understand callers' questions, haltingly phrased. The host, who was in Washington, patiently guided the callers, sometimes even interpreting for them.
On this program, I heard some poignant questions about media, questions that put America's raging cultural civil wars in a brutally different perspective.
While we suffer the spectacle of affluent American parents of safe children rushing to buy V-chips, blocking software, and to lobby for ratings systems and insist that everyone but themselves take responsibility for their kids, the struggle in much of the world is quite different, and desperate: how to get this new technology to people at all.
A caller from China painstakingly spoke of how for most of his life, his curiosity about the world could only be sated by a walk many miles into a nearby village to hear garbled Voice of America or other radio broadcasts. A teacher in his town now has a computer, and he tried to convey how much it meant to him to get "all the information in the world" from this one machine. Would he ever, he wondered, be able to get a computer of his own? And do this more than once every few weeks?
Rahij, a caller from somewhere in India, related the struggle in his village to get the kind of telephone service that would make going online possible. "We have only eight telephone lines in my town," he said. "Service is very poor and difficult. We can't use modems here. Can you help us? We want our children to be on the Internet, too."
I couldn't help. I had no idea what to say. I mumbled silly platitudes about networked computers and cheaper technology before I came to my senses and answered more honestly that it would cost a fortune to wire his village and I had no idea who might pay for it. Computer companies in American aren't volunteering, for sure.
Several callers, especially those from predominantly Islamic countries like Pakistan, asked how pornography could be stopped, and what America was doing to stop it. "Can anything be done about this pornography?" he asked. I said he and I probably differed hopelessly about the dangers of sexual imagery. But I thought the honest answer was that it couldn't be stopped, and people in different cultures need to understand that, but I recommended that they explore the other parts of the Internet as well.
"What will happen to us?" asked a man calling from Nigeria. "We don't have the Internet here, and we will be left behind, economically and politically. What can we do? How can I help my children learn this technology? How will they work? We are the have-nots. We are falling farther and farther behind every day, aren't we?"
By definition, the Net culture is a comparatively affluent and educated one. On a month-long book tour, I haven't yet been to a poor neighborhood or heard from any but educated, intelligent, and mostly affluent callers and news consumers.
Before going on VOA, I'd appeared on a public-television broadcast on WNYC, in which angry and alarmed teachers called to argue about my book and complain bitterly about the impact of media and culture - especially TV, advertising, and rap music - on their mostly inner-city, underclass students.
"Anybody who argues, like you do, that media doesn't influence behavior should spend a week in my classroom," one said angrily and convincingly.
I repeated my mantra. Sure media influences behavior. I would never argue otherwise. But it mostly reflects the circumstances that create behavior. Media didn't cause kids to have kids they can't take care of. It didn't create the drug or gun culture. It isn't the reason there's violence in America. The Internet is not a dangerous place for children. Only parents can influence the imagery and values that form the consciences of their kids.
Do we wish that media and culture promoted more wholesome imagery, like harmony and education? Sure we do, but nobody listening to the broadcast was likely to live long enough to see that. We live in a capitalist democracy. The marketplace rules. The ideology of modern media is that if people buy it, they will make it.
In the meantime, we had to make the necessary but difficult moral decisions regarding our own lives and culture, and make parenting and day care as big a political issue as rap music, explicit TV shows, and pornography on the Net, especially at the dawn of the digital age.
The contrast between that WNYC broadcast and the Voice of America appearance - just 20 minutes apart - was disturbing. I never had much doubt that culture and politics are often the same thing. Now I have none.
The callers on Voice of America will haunt me for a while, though. Especially the fact that I had nothing to tell them that was of any use at all. I admired them.
Perhaps the real heroes of the information revolution aren't online at all, but the determined souls in our own poor neighborhoods and faraway places who see so much more clearly than many of us the moral dilemma at the heart of the information revolution - not that we have too much information and technology in the world, but that so many adults and children have none at all.
