CJR Daily: Is Technology Ruining Your Morals?

Behind the News

Is Technology Ruining Your Morals?

Two recent articles by Lakshmi Chaudhry and Michael Agger show cultural criticism at its boorish, insipid worst.

By Gal Beckerman Fri 19 Jan 2007 04:57 PM

We are hoping that Lakshmi Chaudhry is ninety years old. Somehow misanthropy, a deep mistrust of technology, and a snarling skepticism about the ability of the masses to make good decisions for themselves goes down a little easier coming from an old windbag. But we have a sense she isn't aged. And that makes her long screed in the Nation this week all that more dismaying. In a polemic titled "Mirror, Mirror on the Web," Chaudhry rails against the rise of online user-generated media. This is how she sees us: "So we upload our wackiest videos to YouTube, blog every sordid detail of our personal lives so as to insure at least fifty inbound links, add 200 new 'friends' a day to our MySpace page with the help of friendflood.com, all the time hoping that one day all our efforts at self-promotion will merit--at the very least--our very own Wikipedia entry."

So the idea of a YouTube video of someone "farting to the tune of 'Jingle Bells'" is not to her taste? Fine. It isn't really to ours either. But she has a larger, more twisted argument to make. And this is where her cursor drops off the screen, if you know what we mean.

Chaudhry thinks the ease with which we can gain attention for exposing ourselves on the Internet has led to a highly detrimental "democratization of fame." She claims that fame in this new medium does not discriminate between people who have a legitimate talent (she gives the example of political blogger Kos) and the jingle bell farter. The desire to achieve fame - to feel the heat of public attention - is what people search for on the Internet. And because, as she sees it, this tide lifts all boats equally, the web holds out this chance. This leads her to marvel at what she apparently believes is a new truth: "Celebrity has become a commodity in itself, detached from and more valuable than wealth or achievement."

She then works up a lather about how young people these days are much more filled with a desire to be famous than ever before, much more narcissistic, and much less willing to believe, as she quotes from one survey, that they shouldn't be the first people to be saved from a sinking Titanic. All this is the fault of the Internet, of course, with the seeming proximity of celebrity for anyone with a camera, it gives us the perfect outlet for our crazed individualism. Aided by a culture that, she says, for the last thirty years has told us, "You're special; love yourself; follow your dreams; you can be anything you want to be," and an "all-pervasive commercial narrative," that has taken advantage of that message to "hawk everything from movie tickets to sneakers," the circle is now complete. We are nothing but self-obsessed schmucks trying to come up with new ways to humiliate ourselves and then post it on YouTube so that our uniqueness might be appreciated.

But not to worry, Chaudhry closes with an absurd flourish, saying that once everyone is equally special we might lose interest in being special or... Armageddon might come and our Internet lives will seem very insignificant once we're dead. "If everyone is onstage, there will be no one left in the audience," she writes in her closing paragraph. "And maybe then we rock stars can finally turn our attention to life down here on earth. Or it may be life on earth that finally jolts us out of our admiring reverie in the mirrored hall of fame. We forget that this growing self-involvement is a luxury afforded to a generation that has not experienced a wide-scale war or economic depression. If and when the good times come to an end, so may our obsession with fame. 'There are a lot of things on the horizon that could shake us out of the way we are now. And some of them are pretty ugly,' Hal Niedzviecki, author of Hello, I'm Special, says. 'You won't be able to say that my MySpace page is more important than my real life.... When you're a corpse, it doesn't matter how many virtual friends you have.' Think global war, widespread unemployment, climate change."

Okay. We get it. The Internet is ruining our lives. But before we take a look at what's wrong with Chaudhry's rant, there's one more Luddite we must turn to. In Slate on Wednesday came an argument by Michael Agger against the camera phone, a technology, he says, that "has only aided the perverted, the nosy, the violent, and the bored."

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Comments

Walter Underwood

Fri 19 Jan 2007 07:36 PM

Perhaps Chaudhry and Aggers should read George W. S. Trow's essay "Within the Context of No Context". Way back in 1980, he observed that there were only two social grids that mattered in America, the grid of 200 million and the grid of intimacy. The only people who fully participate in both are celebrities. So of course we all want to be celebrities.

Lakshmi Chaudhry

Mon 22 Jan 2007 04:53 AM

I'm puzzled by the interpretation of my article as an anti-technology screed. It's an odd way to characterize a piece that traces the complex ways in which cultural mores/ideas both shape and are shaped by technology, be it the gatling gun, the automobile or in this case the internet.

You write: "People have always desired fame, long before American Idol and YouTube made it seem more accessible." Umm, really? That is news indeed to someone has a whole section in her article on the long history of fame, and our preoccupation with celebrity.

The article also isn't so much about the internet, as the specific uses of online technology -- be it blogs, myspace, youtube etc. -- that have been the most successful in recent years and received the most media attention. And it points to the disconnect between the rhetoric about the "we" -- community, collaboration, collective wisdom etc. -- and reality that Web 2.0's greatest successes have been fueled by the individual desire for public attention.

There are plenty of other uses of the internet that are truly about activism, social change, collaboration etc. but I was looking mainly at the ones our mediaculture celebrates most noisily because it feeds into the larger cultural fantasy of "making it".

As for the business about being more narcissistic as a generation, well, it's only fair that you or anyone else who disagrees should offer research that counters the studies I refer to. But then again, just calling me a prig just works fine -- especially on CJR which has done stellar work holding journalists accountable for making unsubstantiated, unsourced claims.

But then again what would an ancient crone like me know. Now where did I put my walking stick...

Kevin Arthur

Tue 23 Jan 2007 07:19 PM

Wow, talk about screed. I think this is pretty unfair to Agger's article, which is a bit more nuanced than is implied here. I'd bet the same is true of Chaudhry's article, which I haven't yet read.