When High Technology Stoops Low
A common response to the president’s recent troubles over an alleged affair with a former White House intern--a response I experienced myself--was one of bone-deep sadness and discouragement bordering on hopelessness.
For many people, this alienation extended to nagging worries far beyond the story du jour. Thoughtful Americans began to fear that something is profoundly sick about our society in general. And because of the role of the Internet in fueling the wild speculations and gossip-mongering that accelerated the Monica S. Lewinsky story--first broken in the Drudge Report, an online gossip sheet run by Matt Drudge in Hollywood--technology itself was caught up in this feeling of despair.
“The Internet made this story,” wrote Michael Kinsley in Time magazine. “And the story made the Internet.”
If so, what have we wrought? A communications medium some of us hoped would be the means to a new age of democratic discourse among genuine and engaged citizens has apparently been swamped by the sewage of sleaze, gossip, celebrity worship and competitive consumerism.
The events of the last few weeks revealed not only some troubling behavior in the White House--whether about sex or mere honesty we don’t know yet--but also how technology takes on the form of the culture in which it is set. And of course the irony is that at the peak of its power and the zenith of its technological capabilities, the United States seems to be bottoming out as a culture, taking technology with it. More and more I hear the phrase “last days of Rome” uttered with seriousness and sadness.
The predicament we are in has developed in the following way: Because of the explosion of technology-based productivity in agriculture and manufacturing, which now employ small fractions of the work force, most people work in the service sector. The very nature of the service economy requires ever-escalating marketing and competition for attention. This has produced the “attention economy,” a phrase coined by political theorist and researcher Michael Goldhaber, who explained the concept recently in the pages of Wired magazine.
Because the basic needs of the middle and upper classes of the United States were by and large satisfied a generation ago, transfers of wealth today are now based on capturing the attention--and thus the income--of the people in these classes.
“Attention, at least the kind we care about, is an intrinsically scarce resource,” Goldhaber writes. Thus, we have developed an immense infrastructure of institutions, roles, jobs and technologies to acquire attention and turn it into money.
Goldhaber says that the Internet is the paradigmatic example of this phenomenon. “Capturing eyeballs” is the a la mode phrase for the business that Internet and other media companies are now in.
The “attention economy” opens the door to two pernicious and corollary effects: a “race to the bottom” in the kind of information that guarantees attention--the O.J. Simpson trial, the murder of Gianni Versace, the Monica Lewinsky case--and accelerating speed in the circulation of such information.
Technology greatly enhances the latter effect, speed, and speed itself exacerbates the first effect by making attention more fleeting and difficult to maintain. “The digital age does not respect contemplation,” wrote James M. Naughton, president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, in the New York Times.
Devoid of contemplation or reasoned deliberation, public communication becomes simply white noise, a cacophony of screams for attention, spiked by scandals, gossip, the troubles of celebrities, or ephemeral trivia. Meanwhile, the task of finding true meaning in a hyper-technologized and increasingly pointless society becomes ever more difficult.
A gnawing feeling of hopelessness grows from the sense that living as a hero, or heroine, in one’s own life is no longer possible. The all-pervasive “system” we’ve created closes off both the value of ordinary virtue and any escape routes. What the events of the last few weeks mean to many people is that the combination of the “attention economy” and the ‘logic” it attaches to technological development points to more of the same, more debasement and squandering of possibilities, forever.
We often hear that technology is just a “tool.” This is typically offered as a shrug and an excuse when we regret what we use it for.
The rejoinder question is almost never asked: “A tool for what?” For simply shoveling bits from computer to computer, from screen to screen, from eyeball to eyeball? For burying contemplation? When we fret over whether students are learning enough about computers, do we also worry about what they’ll use them for? Is the ultimate goal of our engineering ingenuity to get comfortable with gossip, inequality and the frenzy over competitive consumption and news as entertainment?
How long will this go on? How do we smash this particular system and build an alternative we can be proud of?
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Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu
