We are hoping that Lakshmi Chaudhry is ninety years old. Somehow misanthropy, a deep mistrust of technology, and a snarling skepticism about the ability of the masses to make good decisions for themselves goes down a little easier coming from an old windbag. But we have a sense she isn’t aged. And that makes her long screed in the Nation this week all that more dismaying. In a polemic titled “Mirror, Mirror on the Web,” Chaudhry rails against the rise of online user-generated media. This is how she sees us: “So we upload our wackiest videos to YouTube, blog every sordid detail of our personal lives so as to insure at least fifty inbound links, add 200 new ‘friends’ a day to our MySpace page with the help of friendflood.com, all the time hoping that one day all our efforts at self-promotion will merit–at the very least–our very own Wikipedia entry.”
So the idea of a YouTube video of someone “farting to the tune of ‘Jingle Bells'” is not to her taste? Fine. It isn’t really to ours either. But she has a larger, more twisted argument to make. And this is where her cursor drops off the screen, if you know what we mean.
Chaudhry thinks the ease with which we can gain attention for exposing ourselves on the Internet has led to a highly detrimental “democratization of fame.” She claims that fame in this new medium does not discriminate between people who have a legitimate talent (she gives the example of political blogger Kos) and the jingle bell farter. The desire to achieve fame – to feel the heat of public attention – is what people search for on the Internet. And because, as she sees it, this tide lifts all boats equally, the web holds out this chance. This leads her to marvel at what she apparently believes is a new truth: “Celebrity has become a commodity in itself, detached from and more valuable than wealth or achievement.”
She then works up a lather about how young people these days are much more filled with a desire to be famous than ever before, much more narcissistic, and much less willing to believe, as she quotes from one survey, that they shouldn’t be the first people to be saved from a sinking Titanic. All this is the fault of the Internet, of course, with the seeming proximity of celebrity for anyone with a camera, it gives us the perfect outlet for our crazed individualism. Aided by a culture that, she says, for the last thirty years has told us, “You’re special; love yourself; follow your dreams; you can be anything you want to be,” and an “all-pervasive commercial narrative,” that has taken advantage of that message to “hawk everything from movie tickets to sneakers,” the circle is now complete. We are nothing but self-obsessed schmucks trying to come up with new ways to humiliate ourselves and then post it on YouTube so that our uniqueness might be appreciated.
But not to worry, Chaudhry closes with an absurd flourish, saying that once everyone is equally special we might lose interest in being special or… Armageddon might come and our Internet lives will seem very insignificant once we’re dead. “If everyone is onstage, there will be no one left in the audience,” she writes in her closing paragraph. “And maybe then we rock stars can finally turn our attention to life down here on earth. Or it may be life on earth that finally jolts us out of our admiring reverie in the mirrored hall of fame. We forget that this growing self-involvement is a luxury afforded to a generation that has not experienced a wide-scale war or economic depression. If and when the good times come to an end, so may our obsession with fame. ‘There are a lot of things on the horizon that could shake us out of the way we are now. And some of them are pretty ugly,’ Hal Niedzviecki, author of Hello, I’m Special, says. ‘You won’t be able to say that my MySpace page is more important than my real life…. When you’re a corpse, it doesn’t matter how many virtual friends you have.’ Think global war, widespread unemployment, climate change.”
Okay. We get it. The Internet is ruining our lives. But before we take a look at what’s wrong with Chaudhry’s rant, there’s one more Luddite we must turn to. In Slate on Wednesday came an argument by Michael Agger against the camera phone, a technology, he says, that “has only aided the perverted, the nosy, the violent, and the bored.”
Like Chaudhry on the Internet, Agger believes that the technology, though it might have value in and of itself, has been corrupted by its users, sullied by the hands of the unwashed masses, the “thousand jackasses” it has apparently launched. Violence has now been caught on camera phone, ergo camera phones cause violence. “There have also been news reports of graphic videos showing beatings and accidents, such as an unfortunate boy in Birmingham, United Kingdom, who impaled himself on his bicycle,” Agger writes. “Teenagers have employed cell phone cameras for old-fashioned humiliation, too: The parking lot fight is now captured on video and shared. To be an adult is to be grateful to have escaped the digital hazing of high school.” We wonder where Agger went to school – in his pre-cellphonian vision of the world, boys apparently don’t taunt other boys.
The camera phone has destroyed our private lives, made us lose perspective on what is important and what isn’t (that old “democracy” problem again) and allowed us to bug celebrities more than ever (“Let’s say you’re in Asbury Park and you see Bruce Springsteen with his kids. The old impulse would have been to ask the Boss if you could take your picture with him. The new impulse is to snap the shot with a cell phone camera and sell it to a site like Scoopt. No wonder famous people don’t want to hang out with us”).
Both Chaudhry and Agger’s arguments suffer from a deep confusion of cause and effect. Technology did not invent narcissism — or idiocy, for that matter. People have always desired fame, long before American Idol and YouTube made it seem more accessible. People have always been voyeurs and exhibitionists. That the Internet and camera phones have facilitated the ability to show yourself, of that there is no doubt. But by blaming the technology instead of those who are using it, both are terribly misplacing their anger.
And there is something deeper that these essays reveal. They stink of a distrust of any technology that gives people power to project themselves, pining, it seems, for a golden age when only an elite had access to the means of cultural production (and projection). Well, the beautiful thing about democracy and capitalism is that the people get what the people want. The jingle bell farter does not become famous unless he can do something else (Chanukah tunes, maybe?) that makes his fame sustainable. The method of broadcasting the fart has nothing to do with it.
The rantings of Chaudhry and Agger are not really about cell phones and the Internet. They are about their own disgust with what they feel is an epidemic of bad taste that puts the likes of Paris Hilton on a pedestal. If people used YouTube and their blogs to intelligently debate the finer points of Habermas and Derrida, Chaudhry would chill out. If they used their cell phones to take photos of sunsets and not car crashes, Agger would be less derisive. What they are really expressing is their disgust with American cultural tastes. But writing honestly about that might actually expose them for what they are: prigs.
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.