I Can See Your House From Here - Archives
vol 2 number 28
I've heard it said that the Internet is the most revolutionary thing to come along in a generation, and I don't know that I'd argue. It certainly has been a turning point in (at least) Western culture, moreso than any other artifact could claim to be. The Celestine Prophecy was huge for it's fifteen minutes, only to be replaced by the next feel-good new age fad of the month. Cable television was nothing more than an excuse to get rid of the old UHF dials on television sets. MTV and the microwave oven shortened attention spans and made it impossible to get a record deal without being pretty (or at least plastic). The Internet, though -- hey, free porn!
You've got more than surgically enhanced multimedia, though. There's news and information on anything you can think of with instant access, 24 hours a day. There's entertainment (although, predictably, more and more controlled by corporate entities that flee from originality like Trekkies from showers). And there's the personal page, a place where anyone with rudimentary knowledge of HTML and access to a computer can put up pictures, diary entries, and commentary for all the world to see. And there are discussion forums, where you, too, can shoot off your mouth on subjects of which you are completely ignorant, with little or no thought provided. And there's Usenet, and mailing lists, providing more of the same, as well as the ability to spew venom at people you've never met because their opinions clash with yours.
What this has done, effectively, is water down a new medium before anyone got the chance to really appreciate the possibilities. I've been surfing since the days of text-only bulletin board systems -- when modems were still new and cool, and Netscape still had a chance. I've seen websites that pushed interactive entertainment, that broke the rules of traditional design, that presented information and entertainment in new and provacative ways. Sadly, most of those will never be seen by most people because of all the crap that you have to wade through to get to the good stuff.
And then there's the really ugly side of the Internet -- and I'm not talking about the hate sites, or the nude tributes to Bea Arthur. No, this refers to the overwhelming presence of stupid people on the 'Net. Now that anyone can make a webpage, they are (always remember: just because you can do something doesn't mean you should). I think, at the concept, the access to everyone is a good thing; it certainly limits the traditional powers of the media conglomerates, the film studios and the record labels, the publishers and the printing houses. Unfortunately, as you get away from the core, you find that the fruit is rotten. Seems a little bit of control is good; the price we pay for this new avenue of expression is that everyone's an expert at audio engineering, a book reviewer, a graphic designer, a columnist...
Oops.
The thing is that there are some really stupid people out there that are not only taking themselves way too seriously, but now others are as well. Some examples -- and mind you, these aren't from Mike's News and Reviews on Geocities, but a well-known site that is often mentioned in the same breath as publications like Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone :
From a comic review: "In the latest issue of Felon , our anti-hero finally gets her revenge, and gets really nasty (it case you thought she'd been a little soft in the first two issues). The story has a few confusing moments that I'm not sure on due to some sloppier art this time around, Ray Snyder's inks are highly missed as they had really added to the art of this title. But Felon still has the best breast in the industry so I won't harp on the issue."
From a news item: "Kimberly Peirce, the director of the amazing BOYS DON'T CRY ... as an emotionally taut and telling story as has been told in years... is in final negotiations to direct Arthur C Clarke's wonderful CHILDHOOD'S END . Serious science fiction fans have loved this book for nearly 50 years now, and it is nice to see a director with such a strong sense for HONEST storytelling... who can wrench such emotions and create such tension to be brought to this project."
From a movie review: "We moved into the theater, at the time it was a two screener. We had seen ALIEN here, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND here. This was a special place. This place showed good films. Ones that now populate my collection. "
(A message for Paul Riddell: large sums of cash are yours if you can make something horribly embarassing happen to the person responsible for this site. More horribly embarassing than the writing, of course. You know who it is as well as I do, and you're well within driving distance.)
It's one thing if you run into this on an AOL homepage -- anyone that would give this a second glance is related to the writer, or perhaps at gunpoint. But when writing like this appears on "respectable" web sites, what incentive do the budding Hunter S. Thompsons and Roger Eberts and Florence Kings of the world have? "Sure, it would be great to be published in The National Review or Playboy or Time , but that would require work, education, and practice! I'd rather just email this mental vomit to Bob Website -- he'll print it."
As I see it, the Internet will be the downfall of society as we know it -- our our personal Tower of Babel, if you will. You've got dying attention spans, new and utterly original justification for theft (also known as "peer-to-peer file sharing"), and a guaranteed if meaningless fifteen minutes of fame. And we haven't even talked about discussion forums, yet...
Beyond the existence of flame wars (usually the product of bored thirteen-year-olds) and "experts" with as much knowledge on a given topic as one of my socks, the beauty of forums (bulletin boards, Usenet groups, and the like) is the ability to speak and respond without thought. It wasn't bad enough that we've all had to learn to interpret intent and written emotion (how many times have you said something sarcastic in an email, only to be taken seriously with grave consequences?); a lot of us have had (or need ) to learn restraint. It's far too easy to drop the usual filters between our brains and our mouths (or keyboards in this case) when our identities are hidden and there's no time between composition of thought and deliverance of message (and perhaps no time in the first stage at all).
From our own book forums: "Did you see the 1/22 feature? Is this Alan Kevin J.M. Salvatore-Foster-Stevens guy for real? The samples are horrible! absolutely abyssmal! What the hell?!? It's already a book, you moron! No one needs a novelization, let alone a bad one, of a movie BASED ON A FREAKIN' NOVEL!!"
From our email stash: "Apart from the fact that whoever wrote this has less talent than a junior high creative writer, and has managed to butcher not only one of the greatest classics as well as film, it seems that he has forgotten that it is *already* a novel. The author (and I use that word most loosely in regards to him) has obviously forgotten that the film is based on a book, and has taken in the idea that he could attempt to scrawl out a poorly defined, structured and realized concept."
Yep, it's in reference to Joe Crowe's The Lord of the Rings: The Novelization . It's a humor piece; admittedly, it wasn't labelled as such, but with an 'excerpt' like "One of them yelled, "I'll cut you, bitch!"," did it really have to be? For that matter, isn't the fact that the movie is based on classic books pretty much a dead giveaway that this is a joke?
Obviously not. Not only did we receive a staggering amount of angry email about the "news," but bulletin boards at plastic.com , fark.com , and others filled up with people criticizing the idea and the writing. Because people believed it. They were convinced that someone, somewhere, was paying money to an amalgamation of authors to adapt a movie that was adapted from a book. While I would normally say that this is a sign of deepening cynicism toward Hollywood, I can't do that here; the best I can do is hope that the authors of these emails and forum posts have plenty of education ahead of them.
It's things like this that make me want change in the way things are. I'd really like it, for instance, if parenting was licensed, to prevent abuse and neglect. In this same Stalinistic way, I'd love to see faces, real names, and home telephone numbers attached to emails and other Internet writings. Sure, there are plenty of people out there that are convinced that their review of Vanilla Sky is spot on, or that they're perfectly justified in bringing a reasonable debate down to the level of "your mama" insults. There are plenty more, though, that would think twice before being forever associated with such things. I know I would.
No comments from the peanut gallery, please.
Kenn McCracken is waiting for the cheap and easy responses to come rolling in.