Metafilter's Talking Cure

Here's a new piece of mine in the LRB on Metafilter:

The word ‘resources’ sets my spine tingling. My old hippy-but-curmudgeonly soul had high hopes of the World Wide Web. The future, in some respects, was living up to expectations, providing videotapes of movies you didn’t have to leave home to see again, music remastered to a complexity not heard even in the concert hall let alone your own bath; and now here was a space that couldn’t be pictured, and didn’t require going out to be in, where minds from anywhere on the planet, full of knowledge and knowhow, wit and wondering, could chatter together, collaborate, pass information and the time of day. The internet would be a planetary depository, freely available, a dream library of everything. Borges and Brautigan thought of it but never fully imagined the weird airiness of its actuality.

So it has turned out: Project Gutenberg puts great texts freely online, Google plans to digitise the universe (which makes some people’s spines tingle for quite different reasons), Wikipedia has users collating and collaborating to explain everything, and everywhere bloggers are witnessing the world, one hundred million of them. But in no time at all, abundance became too much. The noise is deafening. The best of the planet did not exclude the worst of the planet. The internet filled up with garbage, and the good stuff sank to the bottom. I gave up, being of a giving-up nature....the rest is here

Comments

[michele roohani]

came to you from your LRB article. the first two paragraphs almost made me weep! the rest of the article made me realize how torn i am between "freedom and function". can we treat the opinions of all citizens as equal in value? i would go with socrates on this one.

loved your post about being sensitive to noise.

[Misfit#2]

Actually, if by "Mickey" being banned from Metafilter for "interrupt[ing] the discussion too often with irrelevant and infuriating comments" refers to what I think it refers to, I differ with your characterization of "Mickey's" comments in that thread as "_irrelevant_": the topic of that Metatalk thread, and one or two others going on at the same time, was where to draw the line between "necessary policing" and the moderators' "abuse of power."

Remember, that thread started with a callout from one member complaining that "the mods" were "closing [MetaTalk] threads so early and so often" and "forgetting the 'community' part," that "it's getting a little heavy handed." Some of the now-barred individual's comments did stray somewhat from the thread-opener's specific complaint about closing threads, but a huge majority of "Mickey's" many comments in that thread did direct address the overarching subject of the site moderators' (mis-?) use of Authority. Nor was "Mickey" the only "anti- authoritarian" in that thread: if I recall correctly a few others, including you, were also present and accounted for.

Anyway. If you haven't noticed, the "Mefites" are discussing you and your discussion of them yet again; and I'll bet you already intuited that "Mickey" has also heard about this from various sources. It might be merely symptomatic of his "bipolar condition and/or personality disorder" that "Mickey" is tickled purple at being made (albeit pseudonymously) infamous among an even wider public, but some wonder what it says that so many Metafiltrists are pleased that their favorite website has attracted your criticism.

And by the way, "Mickey" (and his longtime companion) are moving to another city; we are pleased to report that the new city's public library's website does say it stocks _Only human_ and _Stranger on a train_.

[David Nix]

Fascinating article, Jenny. Thanks.