Internet Culture

The blogosphere is chattering away about Mark Helprin's Digital Barbarism and Douthat's review of the book in New York Times. There's a lot of discussion about copyright policies and general dislike of Douthat. I'm mostly interested in the Helprin's discussion of Internet Culture, at least how Douthat describes it in his review.

“One could write a Talmud,” Helprin notes at one point, “in reaction to the oceans of material supplied by commentators who either deliberately or otherwise (probably otherwise) cannot grasp the meaning of a simple sentence.” True — but this does not mean that one should. In particular, one should never, ever write a book that includes, in its footnotes, “Posting No. 12” from thelede.blogs.nytimes.com, or “Posting 3:41” from missnemesis.blogspot.com — or comments by “Peep,” “Constantine” and “Anon,” from Matthew Yglesias’s blog. Helprin acknowledges the peculiarity of arguing with anonymous commenters rather than training his fire on more intellectually serious targets. “Why talk to the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room?” he wonders, quoting Churchill; the answer, he explains, is that in this case only the monkeys really matter. “The philosophical basis of the war on copyright is crackpot and stillborn,” and “apart from unavoidable forays, it is best to stay out of such thickets.” Instead, the battle should be waged “wherever the gnats in their millions crudely make real the musings of the Mad Hatters.”

As the tone of that last line suggests, alas, it’s hard to write a polemic premised on the assumption that your opponents are monkeys without sounding like a particularly high-vocabulary monkey yourself. Helprin variously describes his foes as “wacked-out muppets,” “crapulous professors,” “regular users of hallucinogenic drugs,” “a My Little Pony version of the Khmer Rouge,” “a million geeks in airless basements,” “mouth-breathing morons in backwards baseball caps and pants that fall down” and so forth. The overall effect is like listening to an erudite gentleman employing $20 words while he screams at a bunch of punk kids to get off his front lawn.

I would love to know the identity of the "crapulous professors."

So, we're all denizens of the Internet culture. Does Helprin make any good points here? Is the blogoshere composed of punk kids engaged in mindless babble? I suppose it depends on where you hang out, doesn't it?

There was another little barb against the blogosphere in the New Yorker this week. In her review of the latest parenting memoir lit, Jill Lepore writes,

If you’ve ever read a parenting blog, and I don’t say you ought to, you have a good idea what lies at the heart of these books: ersatz confession. Lewis finds newborns hard to love; Waldman hires a maid to clean up after her maid. Lewis tells all—all!—about his vasectomy; Waldman provides her sexual history. Waldman insists that how any woman rears her kids is nobody’s never-you-mind. “Let’s all commit ourselves to the basic civility of minding our own business,” she writes. This puts a reader in a tight spot: can I or can I not skip the chapter in “Bad Mother” wherein our author confides her regret over her breasts’ lost buoyancy?

Lepore is disgusted by the explosion of memoirs/blog about parenting and is looking around for books that actually discuss real political and social problems. Her review could have been a been a bit sharper, but it's still excellent. Check it out for the good history of the editor behind Parents magazine.

Comments

[Doug]

Goodness gracious. Lepore is disgusted; well, the internet's a big place. If she doesn't like what she's reading, she's looking in the wrong places. And if she still doesn't like things on the net, she can turn off the computer and go out into the Big Room (the one where the ceiling is blue about half the time).

Life, long as it is, is definitely too short to read Helprin's book. And it's probably too short to read commentary on said book, but since I've already gone this far, Larry Lessig takes the necessary blunderbuss to Helprin, and leaves nothing but smithereens. It's nice to read someone who knows what he's talking about; Helprin sounds like he needs help telling his proverbial parts from a hole in the ground.