Sobriety

Mrs. P has a very chilling article about recent TV-inspired riots over in Manila, all of which reads like something out of late 70s pre-cyberpunk apoco fiction.

I have this naivety that somehow America is only blessed with maniacal reality TV, forgetting that it's hideously cheap to make and gives the masses a gossamer thread of hope of escaping their negative-branded lives and into some Technicolor Awesome of a better reality. And being that we are in a globalized culture, we exchange carrion as well as gold. As I write, some Kenyan student is probably listening to Coltrane on an iPod while Jerry Springer plays over a satellite connection in a nearby room. I'm reminded of a line from Gibson's most recent novel where one of the characters ruminates about a rapidly emerging shared world where everyone gets to experience the same thing. Taken a little further, the world switches from porno to freak show to riot party in the blink of bandwidth. Share and enjoy, indeed.

All of which makes me wonder about an Internet diet, voluntarily curbing some material in order to prevent a pollution of the incendiary, or the mindless. It's hard to think about this without becoming a Ministry of Truth censor. I have no idea how to police the Web. Yet, I look at something like Wikipedia and can't help but be in awe of this open-source undertaking, building a free resource of all things everything. It's approaching its one-millionth entry, and here's a Tower of Babel that got it right. Intelligently built, easy to use, fair and thorough. People think about what they are contributing because it will be used as gospel. It matters, and it shows as entries emerge and grow into length pages. Compare that with the average snipe bullshittery going on around blogs and message boards. There's an inclusive air about them, especially poliblogs. With us. Against us. Red. Blue. Words thrown around without much regard. We find it terribly easy to blow off steam on the Web, taking it to be the corner bar. We forget this whole Internet was designed to share information. What we say echoes longer than we know in these digital canyons, and we have no idea where it goes. We type it and the words go out to be read. We move on to the next flame or in-tribe compliment for our flame. Self-reflection? Bah, if the Web would have wanted us to think about what we wrote, there'd be a 15-minute delay on blog comments. Right?

I had an editor who, in fits of anger, would shout "Words Mean Things" in a way to defuse anger before kicking us cub reporters in the butt. I flash back to that when I read about the latest blogwars or partisan huffery. The Web is a great thing, maybe the best communication tool since the Gutenberg press, but even a good press requires an editor to smooth out lumpy text, to ask "Is this what you really mean?". We have the ability to say anything, so why not push to inspire rather than defame, elevate rather than trash? It comes down to a choice. Do we want to sound like MLK or Howard Stern?