THE ANGRY COLUMN – MAY 2007

By Adrian Fry

Internet Ire

Why oh why oh why are we still quite so enamoured of the internet? Am I really the only person here angered by this new media? Angered by the complex and error prone computers that are the gateway to its use, angered at having to spend more of my time looking at a screen than at – well, anything else whatsoever, frankly. Angered, above all, at the sham connectivity of the technology and the anything goes mentality that has filled cyberspace, as surely as NASA has filled real space, with rubbish.

An example: at a polling station the other day for the local elections, I noticed that the election administrators had lap top computers and were busy browbeating voters into voting online. Now voting online is a fine thing if you’re unable to get to the polling station, but these voters had, unlike most Brits whose political apathy is legend, gotten off their backsides and come down to do their civic duty. Given a ballot paper and the traditional stubby pencil, they’d have cast their votes and been in and out in minutes. But when the computer system did what computer systems do best – malfunction and display an error message that made as much sense as a Captain Beefheart lyric – they began quite reasonably to wonder what had been the problem it was intended to solve. Like magpies or moths, we have been captured by the shiny brightness of the internet and have had little thought for the consequences.

Of course, the internet has been ubiquitous for about a decade now – and no, you don’t need to remind me that Tim Beners-Lee invented it in the 1960s as a way of waxing obsessional about Star Trek without having actually to meet his conversation partner – but the novelty doesn’t seem to be wearing off. I equally know it isn’t going to go away, any more than is the telephone or the washroom hand drier (which doesn’t work much of the time either, incidentally).

And look at the way the web has changed culture. It’s brought pornography into the mainstream, facilitated secretive gambling, put Nigerian spam in every in-box and allowed the development of online ‘communities’ which spend most of their energy on futile flame wars and the rest of it exchanging incompetently PhotoShopped images of JK Rowling’s head ‘hilariously’ grafted onto someone who can write for toffee.

Advocates of the new media – they’re many and overpaid – will always point to what they call the democratisation of content. We, the people can now put our own films, photos, stories and music tracks up on the internet without the stifling intervention of middlemen such as editors and publishers. If little Kevin thinks his blurry video capture of his highest scoring game of Zombie Death Apocalypse IV set to the Benny Hill theme tune is really the height of satire – and he invariably does – then up on You Tube it goes. Kevin won’t pause to note the twenty near identical films on the site or reflect that democratisation simply means having to wade through all of the bad stuff to get to the good. At the back of what passes for his mind, he doubtless imagines that some mogul from the legitimate media is going to see and love his little movie, picking him up and shipping him out of Nowhere Idaho before you can say ‘Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.’

For writers and bloggers – I separate the categories deliberately – the internet has been an equally mixed blessing. While reading off a screen remains about as pleasurable as listening to a Mozart concerto on your Granny’s tinnily ill tuned transistor radio, the word processor has made writing at length irresistible to many; there’s a virtual infinity to fill with verbiage, after all. Online fiction has shot off in two opposite directions, elephantiasis afflicting one group of writers as fatally as the mania for attention deficit busting flash fiction afflicts others.

The net has only really spawned one literary form all its own: the blog. This bastard offspring of the diary and the commonplace book allows the writer to have his say on the matters of the day, plug his work with exactly the wrong amount of knowing self-deprecation and regale his readers with anecdotes about goings on at this year’s ShiteCon which might be faintly amusing if you knew who their protagonists were and had been there with them at them at the time, and as drunk..

Anyone expecting plurality from the literary blogsphere is going to be disappointed. Writers seem to start blogging as a means of self promotion in much the way saloon bar bores start talking in an attempt to win friends. I may have been bowled over by Writer X’s vampire story, but if I peruse his blog, I’m going to be steamrollered by his visibly cribbed opinions on everything from George W Bush to global warming. Ever since George Orwell recklessly claimed that all writing was political, writers have gone in for special pleading to the effect that they have a unique take on the world because they – uh, make up stories about it. Everyone has a right to an opinion, of course, but the opinion of a writer carries only equal weight to that of the farmer who recently rang a radio phone-in to protest at British involvement in Iranistan.

What we’ve done with the internet in general and the blogsphere in particular is create something which is a combination of cesspit and landfill site, a zone through which we might pick for years before finding anything of worth. The net demonstrates a curious statistical fact; most of everything is below average; an infuriating and depressing conclusion for the aspiring writer. It’s the playground of writers convinced of their own genius whose revenge on the editors and publishers who’ve spurned their projected quadrilogies is to spew them out into cyberspace so readers (what readers?) can make up their own minds.

Someday soon, we may all grow up and remember that what we want to read is the mediated, edited and well presented best of what the literary world has to offer, not the slush pile publishers and magazine editors necessarily have to sift it from. Conventional magazine and book publishing will survive, with online fiction and non fiction its immature younger brother. Until now, we’ve been besotted by the medium and forgotten the message, just as the cineastes of the early twentieth century were bedazzled by the flung together comedies of Mack Sennett. I predict a future in which most people regard the internet as just another entertainment delivery system, analogous to television or the cinema. They’ll want it regulated and quality controlled. Notwithstanding the objections of the libertarian slackers who currently dominate the net, I’m hoping that’s just what they’ll get.

Go here to commiserate with Adrian on the shortcomings of technology or to tell him exactly why he’s talking out of his USB portal.

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