The Digital Divide: Writings for and Against Facebook, Youtube, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking

by Mark Bauerlein

  >>> the button marked “publish”

  At the end of every year, the National Book Foundation hands out its medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at its awards dinner. In 2008 it gave the award to Maxine Hong Kingston, author of 1976’s The Woman Warrior. While Kingston was being recognized for work that was more than thirty years old, her speech included a retelling of something she’d done that year, something that should have made the blood of every publisher in attendance run cold.

  Earlier that year, Kingston said, she had written an editorial praising Barack Obama, on the occasion of his visit to her home state of Hawaii. Unfortunately for her, the newspapers she sent the piece to all declined to publish it. And then, to her delight, she realized that this rejection mattered a whole lot less than it used to. She went onto Open.Salon.com, a website for literary conversation, and, as she put it, “All I had to do was type, then click a button marked ‘Publish.’ Yes, there is such a button. Voilà? I was published.”

  Yes, there is such a button. Publishing used to be something we had to ask permission to do; the people whose permission we had to ask were publishers. Not anymore. Publishers still perform other functions in selecting, editing, and marketing work (dozens of people besides me have worked to improve this book, for example), but they no longer form the barrier between private and public writing. In Kingston’s delight at routing around rejection, we see a truth, always there but long hidden. Even “published authors,” as the phrase goes, didn’t control their own ability to publish. Consider the cluster of ideas contained in this list: publicity, publicize, publish, publication, publicist, publisher. They are all centered on the act of making something public, which has historically been difficult, complex, and expensive. And now it is none of those things.

  Kingston’s editorial, it must be said, wasn’t any good. It was obsequious to the point of tedium and free of any thought that might be called analytic. The political discourse was not much enriched by its appearance. But an increase in freedom to publish always has this consequence. Before Gutenberg, the average book was a masterpiece. After Gutenberg, people got throwaway erotic novels, dull travelogues, and hagiographies of the landed gentry, of interest to no one today but a handful of historians. The great tension in media has always been that freedom and quality are conflicting goals. There have always been people willing to argue that an increase in freedom to publish isn’t worth the decrease in average quality; Martin Luther observed in 1569: “The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure of limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name; others for the sake of mere gain.” Edgar Allan Poe commented in 1845: “The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age; since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information by throwing in the reader’s way piles of lumber in which he must painfully grope for the scraps of useful lumber.”

  These arguments are absolutely correct. Increasing freedom to publish does diminish average quality—how could it not? Luther and Poe both relied on the printing press, but they wanted the mechanics of publishing, to which they had easy access, not to increase the overall volume of published work: cheaper for me but still inaccessible to thee. Economics doesn’t work that way, however. The easier it is for the average person to publish, the more average what gets published becomes. But increasing freedom to participate in the public conversation has compensating values.

  The first advantage is an increase of experimentation in form. Even though the spread of movable type created a massive downshift in average quality, that same invention made it possible to have novels, newspapers, and scientific journals. The press allowed the rapid dissemination of both Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses and Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, transformative documents that influenced the rise of the Europe we know today. Lowered costs in any realm allow for increased experimentation; lowered costs for communication mean new experimentation in what gets thought and said.

  This ability to experiment extends to creators as well, increasing not just their number but also their diversity. Naomi Wolf, in her 1991 book The Beauty Myth, both celebrated and lamented the role women’s magazines play in women’s lives. These magazines, she said, provide a place where a female perspective can be taken for granted, but it is distorted by the advertisers: “Advertisers are the West’s courteous censors. They blur the line between editorial freedom and the demands of the marketplace . . . A women’s magazine’s profit does not come from its cover price, so its contents cannot roam too far from the advertiser’s wares.” Today, on the other hand, almost twenty years after The Beauty Myth appeared, writer Melissa McEwan posted on the blog Shakesville a riveting seventeen-hundred-word essay about casual misogyny:

  There are the jokes about women . . . told in my presence by men who are meant to care about me, just to get a rise out of me, as though I am meant to find funny a reminder of my second-class status. I am meant to ignore that this is a bullying tactic, that the men telling these jokes derive their amusement specifically from knowing they upset me, piss me off, hurt me. They tell them and I can laugh, and they can thus feel superior, or I can not laugh, and they can thus feel superior. Heads they win, tails I lose.

  The essay, titled “The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck,” attracted hundreds of commenters and thousands of readers in an outpouring of reaction whose main theme was Thank you for saying what I have been thinking. The essay got out into the world because McEwan only had to click a button marked “Publish.” Shakesville provides exactly the kind of writing space Wolf imagined, where women can talk without male oversight or advertisers’ courteous censorship. The writing is not for everyone—intensely political, guaranteed to anger any number of people—but that’s exactly the point. The women’s magazines Wolf discussed reached readers who might have had the same reaction as the readers of Shakesville, but the magazines simply couldn’t afford to reach them at the expense of angering other readers or, more important, their advertisers. McEwan was willing (and able) to risk angering people in order to say what she had to say.

  The bargain Wolf described was particularly acute for women’s magazines, but it was by no means unique. Nor is the self-publishing model McEwan used unique—people now speak out on issues a million times a day, across countless kinds of communities of interest. The ability for community members to speak to one another, out loud and in public, is a huge shift, and one that has value even in the absence of a way to filter for quality. It has value, indeed, because there is no way to filter for quality in advance: the definition of quality becomes more variable, from one community to the next, than when there was broad consensus about mainstream writing (and music, and film, and so on).

  Scarcity is easier to deal with than abundance, because when something becomes rare, we simply think it more valuable than it was before, a conceptually easy change. Abundance is different: its advent means we can start treating previously valuable things as if they were cheap enough to waste, which is to say cheap enough to experiment with. Because abundance can remove the trade-offs we’re used to, it can be disorienting to the people who’ve grown up with scarcity. When a resource is scarce, the people who manage it often regard it as valuable in itself, without stopping to consider how much of the value is tied to its scarcity. For years after the price of long-distance phone calls collapsed in the United States, my older relatives would still announce that a call was “long distance.” Such calls had previously been special, because they were expensive; it took people years to understand that cheap long-distance calls removed the rationale for regarding them as inherently valuable.

  Similarly, when publication—the act of making something public—goes from being hard to being virtually effortless, people used to the old system often regard publishing by amateurs as frivolous, as if publishing was an inherently se
rious activity. It never was, though. Publishing had to be taken seriously when its cost and effort made people take it seriously—if you made too many mistakes, you were out of business. But if these factors collapse, then the risk collapses too. An activity that once seemed inherently valuable turned out to be only accidentally valuable, as a change in the economics revealed.

  Harvey Swados, the American novelist, said of paperbacks, “Whether this revolution in the reading habits of the American public means that we are being inundated by a flood of trash which will debase farther the popular taste, or that we shall now have available cheap editions of an ever-increasing list of classics, is a question of basic importance to our social and cultural development.”

  He made this observation in 1951, two decades into the spread of paperbacks, and curiously Swados was even then unable to answer his own question. But by 1951 the answer was plain to see. The public had no need to choose between a flood of trash and a growing collection of classics. We could have both (which is what we got).

  Not only was “both” the answer to Swados’s question; it has always been the answer whenever communications abundance increases, from the printing press on. The printing press was originally used to provide cheap access to Bibles and the writings of Ptolemy, but the entire universe of that old stuff didn’t fill a fraction of either the technological capacity or the audience’s desire. Even more relevant to today, we can’t have “an ever-expanding list of classics” without also trying new forms; if there was an easy formula for writing something that will become prized for decades or centuries, we wouldn’t need experimentation, but there isn’t, so we do.

  The low-quality material that comes with increased freedom accompanies the experimentation that creates the stuff we will end up prizing. That was true of the printing press in the fifteenth century, and it’s true of the social media today. In comparison with a previous age’s scarcity, abundance brings a rapid fall in average quality, but over time experimentation pays off, diversity expands the range of the possible, and the best work becomes better than what went before. After the printing press, publishing came to matter more because the expansion of literary, cultural, and scientific writing benefited society, even though it was accompanied by a whole lot of junk.

  >>> the connective tissue of society

  Not that we are witnessing a rerun of the print revolution. All revolutions are different (which is only to say that all surprises are surprising). If a change in society were immediately easy to understand, it wouldn’t be a revolution. And today, the revolution is centered on the shock of the inclusion of amateurs as producers, where we no longer need to ask for help or permission from professionals to say things in public. Social media didn’t cause the candlelight protests in South Korea; nor did they make users of Pickup Pal more environmentally conscious. Those effects were created by citizens who wanted to change the way public conversation unfolded and found they had the opportunity to do so.

  This ability to speak publicly and to pool our capabilities is so different from what we’re used to that we have to rethink the basic concept of media: it’s not just something we consume; it’s something we use. As a result, many of our previously stable concepts about media are now coming unglued.

  Take, as one example, television. Television encodes moving images and sounds for transmission through the air and, latterly, through a cable, for subsequent conversion back to images and sound, using a special decoding device. What is the name of the content so transmitted? Television. And the device that displays the images? It is a television. And the people who make that content and send out the resulting signal—what industry do they work in? Television, of course. The people who work in television make television for your television.

  You can buy a television at the store so you can watch television at home, but the television you buy isn’t the television you watch, and the television you watch isn’t the television you buy. Expressed that way, it seems confusing, but in daily life it isn’t confusing at all, because we never have to think too hard about what television is, and we use the word television to talk about all the various different parts of the bundle: industry, content, and appliance. Language lets us work at the right level of ambiguity; if we had to think about every detail of every system in our lives all the time, we’d faint from overexposure. This bundling of object and industry, of product and service and business model, isn’t unique to television. People who collect and preserve rare first editions of books, and people who buy mass-market romance novels, wreck the spines, and give them away the next week, can all legitimately lay claim to the label book lover.

  This bundling has been easy because so much of the public media environment has been stable for so long. The last really big revolution in public media was the appearance of television. In the sixty years since TV went mainstream, the kinds of changes we’ve seen have been quite small—the spread of videocassette tapes, for example, or color TV. Cable television was the most significant change in the media landscape between the late 1940s (when TV started to spread in earnest) and the late 1990s (when digital networks began to be a normal part of public life).

  The word media itself is a bundle, referring at once to process, product, and output. Media, as we talked about it during those decades, mainly denoted the output of a set of industries, run by a particular professional class and centered, in the English-speaking world, in London, New York, and Los Angeles. The word referred to those industries, to the products they created, and to the effect of those products on society. Referring to “the media” in that way made sense as long as the media environment was relatively stable.

  Sometimes, though, we really do have to think about the parts of a system separately, because the various pieces stop working together. If you take five minutes to remind yourself (or conjure up, if you are under thirty) what media for adults was like in the twentieth century, with a handful of TV networks and dominant newspapers and magazines, then media today looks strange and new. In an environment so stable that getting TV over a wire instead of via antennae counted as an upheaval, it’s a real shock to see the appearance of a medium that lets anyone in the world make an unlimited number of perfect copies of something they created for free. Equally surprising is the fact that the medium mixes broadcast and conversational patterns so thoroughly that there is no obvious gulf between them. The bundle of concepts tied to the word media is unraveling. We need a new conception for the word, one that dispenses with the connotations of “something produced by professionals for consumption by amateurs.”

  Here’s mine: media is the connective tissue of society.

  Media is how you know when and where your friend’s birthday party is. Media is how you know what’s happening in Tehran, who’s in charge in Tegucigalpa, or the price of tea in China. Media is how you know what your colleague named her baby. Media is how you know why Kierkegaard disagreed with Hegel. Media is how you know where your next meeting is. Media is how you know about anything more than ten yards away. All these things used to be separated into public media (like visual or print communications made by a small group of professionals) and personal media (like letters and phone calls made by ordinary citizens). Now those two modes have fused.

  The Internet is the first public medium to have post-Gutenberg economics. You don’t need to understand anything about its plumbing to appreciate how different it is from any form of media in the previous five hundred years. Since all the data is digital (expressed as numbers), there is no such thing as a copy anymore. Every piece of data, whether an e-mailed love letter or a boring corporate presentation, is identical to every other version of the same piece of data.

  You can see this reflected in common parlance. No one ever says, Give me a copy of your phone number. Your phone number is the same number for everybody, and since data is made of numbers, the data is the same for everybody. Because of this curious property of numbers, the old distinction between copying tools for professionals and those for
amateurs—printing presses that make high-quality versions for the pros, copy machines for the rest of us—is over. Everyone has access to a medium that makes versions so identical that the old distinction between originals and copies has given way to an unlimited number of equally perfect versions.

  Moreover, the means of digital production are symmetrical. A television station is a hugely expensive and complex site designed to send signals, while a television is a relatively simple device for receiving those signals. When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. On the other hand, when someone buys a computer or a mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one. Talent remains unequally distributed, but the raw ability to make and to share is now widely distributed and getting wider every year.

  Digital networks are increasing the fluidity of all media. The old choice between one-way public media (like books and movies) and two-way private media (like the phone) has now expanded to include a third option: two-way media that operates on a scale from private to public. Conversations among groups can now be carried out in the same media environments as broadcasts. This new option bridges the two older options of broadcast and communications media. All media can now slide from one to the other. A book can stimulate public discussion in a thousand places at once. An e-mail conversation can be published by its participants. An essay intended for public consumption can anchor a private argument, parts of which later become public. We move from public to private and back again in ways that weren’t possible in an era when public and private media, like the radio and the telephone, used different devices and different networks.