Digital liberation and the narrowness factor

I'm reading Andrew Keen's The Internet is not the Answer at the moment, and it has underscored an observation that I have made in other areas. The internet came to us with a great promise of liberation in all kinds of ways. The internet was set to have the freedom of the Wild West, and no doubt some of the dangers. It was meant to create a much more variegated economy since it provides new economic opportunities that non-digital economies simply cannot offer. People said it would usher in a new age of democracy since it would create virtual communities, hitherto isolated in the conditions of contemporary consumerist society. There is hardly any need to mention its offer of sexual liberation too, with the proliferation of apps designed to facilitate an easy and rapid hook-up culture.

And yet in all these domains, after initial shoots of growth, we have seen the burgeoning of the opposite tendencies. The internet's economy is now dominated by huge, mega companies like Google, Facebook and Instagram whose business model is barely understood by most people, but which are valued at billions of dollars. Many erstwhile giants of the previous economic model where special manufacturers or service operations provided something people needed, have come crashing down: Keen's case studies include Kodak which folded in bankruptcy about the time Instagram was bought for $1 billion dollars. What about politics too? While it could be argued that the internet has facilitated a break in the propaganda hegemonies of political parties and news corporations, what has replaced them if not a cacophony of contradictory stories, theories and conspiracies beyond the ability of most people to test or discern? At the same time, we have seen a massive collapse in civil discourse in which people can hardly talk to each other online without accusing each other of fascism. Trolling seems not to be a minority pursuit these days, so much as the style in which we express all contradiction. In the field of sexuality of course, the situation is even worse. The app culture has only intensified the decline of respect between the sexes, to the point where normal relations are frequently an afterthought: the primary purpose of the other is the satisfaction of sexual whim. Rape threats are common occurrences for almost any woman who speaks out on anything on Twitter. And let's not get into the cyber-sexual pathologies that have been developing under the reign of what Proudhon labelled Pornocratie over 150 years ago.

So, while the internet still pretends to be the newest thing, it has in so many ways facilitated the old, old story so beautifully captured in these lines from Measure for Measure:

Lucio: Why, how now, Claudio! whence comes this restraint?

Claudio: From too much liberty, my Lucio, liberty: 
As surfeit is the father of much fast,
So every scope by the immoderate use
Turns to restraint. Our natures do pursue,
Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,
A thirsty evil. And when we drink, we die.

I'm not making a case here for throwing out the baby with the bathwater ... me, a blogger and all. The internet is a life raft. It has helped us make connections that bring illumination in the age of feeble, feeble light I tried to define the other day. I welcome its sociability. I prize my online friends. We do indeed form a community of interest and support across the digital divide. My life is enriched by all these things ....

But I am wondering about the narrowness factor, what a risk it represents, whether we suffer it mostly without even realising it, and what we can even do about that. When we choose to look at an app or a webpage rather than talk to the person next to us - a sight I most frequently see in parks where parents take their children and then ignore them -  are we not in danger of becoming those people that Chesterton lamented who called their home Christmas Cottage but went away from it at Christmas? The narrowness factor finds its evil twin in the speed factor of course, but that is for another time.

I suppose one lesson that might be drawn from this concerns how we react to internet news (and that means most news these days). If we are victims of the 'immoderate scope', we are likewise victims of the narrow scope of the supposedly all-seeing eye. Even if we spurn the fake liberation of the internet, do we not risk constantly falling prey to its partiality, thinking that we are in command of all the facts, whereas we are only in command of the strangulated news feed? Ultimately, if we're looking for liberation, my bet is we're more likely to find it in a good book than a digital stream.

In other words, just hand me that saw while I remove this branch I'm sitting on!