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One of the best parts of my day is clicking on my Claris email program and listening to the beeps, watching the messages and subject headings pop up rapidly in a long row on my monitor. I know within seconds if I'm about to be skewered or praised, if I've touched a domestic or international nerve, or had no impact at all. Or if the fiercely protective webheads and citizens of the digital nation have spotted yet another assault on their beloved culture.
When there's trouble, it reminds me of the citizens of Gotham City throwing up the bat signal, alerting Batman to some new danger they've detected, another mindless outrage being perpetrated. Friday, my email program was beeping like mad, and almost every message included the name or initials of The New York Times. This is a familiar, almost weekly, ritual.
"Arrrrrgh," read last Friday's first email, from ThunderRoad, "Have you seen the NYT today? Arrrggggh! Idiocy!" I hadn't seen the paper, but I knew whatever they were reporting, it wasn't about the friends kids made and stayed in touch with on the Net, the way the elderly and the disabled were connecting to one another online, or the remarkable global sharing of research or information now possible.
We were clearly dealing with another Web-alarm story, rapidly becoming an entire genre - a specialty of mainstream journalism, especially at the Times.
"Today's New York Times has another scare story about the Internet," warned Richard.
Some months ago, the Times sent a reporter to Dartmouth to report that the Net had caused students there to forego sex, socializing, and drinking for email. Then there was my personal favorite, a Week In Review story on Internet addiction that offered tips for spotting your own computer addiction, and reported that Internet addiction clinics were opening at schools across the country. Neither the Times nor the schools were even mildly deterred by the fact that none of the clinics had been visited by any patients - but then, these stories are always long on self-seeking experts and politicians and very short on actual victims.
We are all familiar, of course, with the wave of Internet perversion warnings in the Times. A few weeks ago, the paper reported that the Net fostered academic cheating, as free term papers and theses whizzed through the ether. There was the Times story on thievery, the one on hate-mongers and bomb-throwers, the one on easy access to sexy pictures. There have been too many hacker-intrusion stories to count.
So it wasn't surprising to see, on Friday's front page, the latest in this series - "A Seductive Drug Culture Flourishes on the Internet," by reporter Christopher Wren, which reported that even as beleaguered government officials and educators tried to stem drug use, the Internet had become "an alluring bazaar where anyone with a computer can find out how to get high on LSD, eavesdrop in on what it is like to snort heroin or cocaine, check the going price for marijuana, or copy the chemical formula for methamphetamine, the stimulant better known as 'speed.'"
The drug culture on the Net is proliferating in many ways, found Wren. "One is the tolerance or outright endorsement of illegal drugs, especially marijuana, in online forums and chat groups. Another is in explicit instructions for growing, processing, and consuming drugs."
The story included a word from every Washington reporter's most indispensable and ubiquitous friend - an expert from a nonprofit Washington research or lobbying group, in this case the Center for Media Education, which reported that nearly 5 million kids aged 2 to 17 used online services in l996, and that more than 9 million college students use the Internet regularly. Notice that the funding and ideology of these groups is almost never explained or explored, and that their findings are invariably presented as gospel.
Like the Washington "expert," the numbers above represent another integral part of the Web-is-ruining-civilization story, the not-so-subtle juxtaposition of large numbers of children with great menace - all these kids right next to all these dope heads - clearly meant to send already Net-phobic parents rushing for their Cyber Nannies, grateful to their daily paper for the heads-up.
"We're really losing the war on the Internet," said Kellie Foster, a spokeswoman for the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, which plans to put up its own Web site next month. "We've got to get out there." Note yet another vital ingredient of the Web-alarm story - the enemy is nearly at our shores, and we have precious little time to react.
Then there was the Washington reporter's second-best friend - the chatty and alarmed bureaucrat, in this case, General Barry R. McCaffrey, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, ominously reporting in the story that he detected a "campaign on the Internet to undermine the government's anti-drug policies...."
Stand by. The Communications Decency Act will have barely been dead before the Drug Protection Act comes along to make it a federal crime to talk about drugs on the Net, where young people congregate.
Several things struck me as interesting about Wren's story (which quoted me from a Wired magazine piece, saying the Net was the "freest community in American life." The part where I explained that I meant this as a good thing seemed to have vanished.)
I realized reading the Times how dull I, my family, and the vast majority of people who email me every day and their families must be. A diverse lot from all over the world, they seem to have jobs, go to college, enroll in graduate schools, take vacations, play with their kids, read books, go food-shopping. Hardly any of them ever mention using the Net for sex or drugs, or even encountering either there.
"Did you know they are advocating drugs all over the Internet?" I asked my 15-year-old daughter, who's been online for five years.
"You're kidding!" she said, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically. "Where?"
What's wrong with us? All this depraved and amazing stuff going on right under our noses, and we're squabbling all day about censorship and Bill Gates?
Katz, get a life! There's a wild world out there, just a Web-search away. Why should New York Times reporters have all the fun?
People curious about the genesis of stories like this have to step back and try to understand how journalism and politics collaborate to produce our social and political agenda, independently of common sense, rationality, or truth.
A politician like McCaffrey needs a story like this in the same way that J. Edgar Hoover used to need murderous bank robbers. Danger means purpose, budgets, publicity. The Internet is a gold mine for bureaucrats, since few reporters or politicians seem to have a clue what goes on here, and many are eager to trumpet the save-civilization warning of the week. Nonprofit crusaders for decency need these alarms as badly or worse, since they aren't on the government payroll and have to continuously justify their existence. Without stories like this, they'd have to leave the capital and go get real jobs.
And even worse, reporters would have to leave their offices and talk to human beings, something that only happens in Washington journalism every four years, when the first wide-eyed scribes hit the snows of New Hampshire and are stunned to learn the simple folk there are worried about money and jobs.
So the system works symbiotically and well, at least for them. Journalists get leaked good stories, politicians get to justify their existence, the ideological mercenaries who spoon-feed reporters much of their information get quoted. The only losers are truth and perspective, and, for the bewildered people who work, play, or communicate on the Web, more lost faith in an institution supposedly committed to the truth.
People have been on the Net for some years now, and they know that there are good and bad things here, just as there are out there. It's possible to encounter all sorts of sexuality, drug-mongering, hate, and worse on the Internet if you want, as it is in most towns and cities, and it's possible to never encounter any at all, as is the case for the vast majority of Net users, young and old.
In other contexts, this reality is called life.
The most interesting thing about these stories is that there are rarely any particular victims, just these "experts" and politicians invoking unnamed ones. Everybody sounds the alarm and issues dire warnings; missing are the names of actual people ruined and depraved by their time on the Internet. There's a striking dissonance between the stories we read and the reality we experience.
The answer, in all cases, is exactly the same, even though it never seems to be heard: As in the off-line world, small children need supervision. They need to be taught basic common-sense rules of safety. If they are, in the overwhelming number of cases, they do fine on the Web. Hardly any have been harmed or damaged here, for all the dead trees sacrificed in the name of Internet danger.
Notice too, the presumptions stories like this one contain; that our national drug polices are sane, rational, and beyond question, and that to challenge or undercut them, to raise issues like the legalization of some drugs under some circumstances, is automatically perceived by the so-called objective media as irresponsible and treasonous.
On the Net, we can do what journalists won't or can't - talk openly about the catastrophe our national drug policies represent. How we have the highest incarceration rate in the Western world. How, in some states, more young African Americans are in jail on drug charges than are in college. How rigid sentencing laws passed by hysterical legislators have left tens of thousands of relatively harmless people in prison for years, criminalizing them out of all proportion to their crimes.
How urban police have been militarized, corrupted, and sometimes killed as a result of the creation of military-style SWAT teams, violent cultures, and extreme attitudes that frighten and alienate local communities.
And how, despite all that, drugs pour into America because more and more people want to use them, while those who want to stop using them far outnumber the slots and beds available in treatment programs. It seems that in a rational world with a functioning news media, General McCaffrey would be answering some different questions than the ones he was asked in Friday's story in The New York Times.
Since you won't read a coherent account of our drug crisis in your local newspaper, if you're interested, click over to Amazon and order journalist Dan Baum's Smoke and Mirrors, a brilliant and meticulously documented book on America's failed drug policies published just last year.
If the young are questioning and challenging our disastrous and bankrupt drug programs and philosophies, good for them. If they are exposed to a wide range of credible information about drugs, their history, their use and abuse, effective treatments, then they are more fortunate than most of us.
The idea that the Internet is a place where otherwise well-parented, supervised children would become addicted to drugs, where a great war for the soul of the young is being lost, is just as stupid and false as the notion that they'll be turned into perverts and porn freaks.
Journalism, sadly, is mired in the past. But the young live in a new world, the digital age, in which they are free to gather their own information, and make more of their own choices. May their new freedom help them shape a wiser, more rational and moral world than the one they have inherited.
