The Future is a Trilogy; The Past is a Series

Against the Machine. Lee Siegel August 22, 2010

Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.

I picked this book up at the library because it looked like it would be an interesting exploration of many of the things that I think about when I ponder the implications of the wide use of the internet on our lives. I’m sad to say that I was very disappointed, and often fairly annoyed with it.

Siegel, who at one time was a staff writer at the New Republic, and an art critic for Slate.com, touches on a fairly wide range of topics, among them: the effect of using the internet as a means of communicating with others, on individuals and society; the conversion of leisure time into “work” (by which he seems to mean using leisure time to produce rather than consume or simply rest); the effect of anonymity on what people will write in comments, blogs, etc.; and the effect on culture of things like youtube.com. He spends quite a while commenting on ideas and passages from books by such people as Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point), Alvin Toffler (Future Shock), Bill Gates, and Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism). While he gives a nod of the head to some of the positive aspects of the internet in the early part of the book, he then goes on to focus on negatives (real or perceived). His tone in these discussions is often quite defensive.

My problems with the book are mainly with what’s missing. Siegel makes a lot of generalizations without providing facts to back them up. He makes causal connections without providing data or references to support them. At times he strays into hyperbole to make his points. He hasn’t set out to provide a balanced overview of the effects internet use as a whole so that the reader can come to his or her own conclusions. He has a point to make and he has set out to make it. In many ways this book reads like the sort of extended opinion piece that one often comes across in the very blogs that he criticizes.

Because of these weaknesses, I found myself having trouble believing him. For example, when he discusses blogging he claims that all blogs are written by people aching for popularity and attention, and using their blogs to put forth their opinions on the popular subjects of the day (the more controversial or contentious the better). Now, of course this holds for a certain percentage of people who write blogs, but it certainly doesn’t hold for all of them. Of the total number of registered blogs (he supplies a figure he says was accurate at time of writing) you would surely find that some have been abandoned or were never used, some are private, some are used by people to keep family and friends updated on their activities, some are used to share information on hobbies and interests with others who pursue the same, some are used to publish web comics, shop updates, local community news, and so on and on and on. Knowing this from my own experiences in blog reading, I found myself unable to take his discussion about the downside of blogging very seriously. I had similar problems with other discussions in which he generalizes all internet users into a single type with identical motives and values. In fact, he writes about “the internet” as if it is one single, somewhat malevolent thing, rather than a vast network of computers that is used for many different things.

I also wish he’d provided a broader context for a lot of his claims. Is the internet actually causing the things that he suggests, or is it simply magnifying things that already exist? Are the ways that people use the internet changing them, or are the ways that people (and society) are changing simply being reflected in the ways that they use the internet? Or is the truth a little more complex than an either/or situation?

After reading the book, I came away without any real sense of where we should be going from here. Siegel doesn’t suggest any solutions or make recommendations for change (unless the implied solution is for us to back away from our computers).  This is a shame, because we are in a stage of transition now, with the internet still in relative infancy. People, particularly young people, are making decisions about what they do online that might have effects on their later lives that they can’t imagine now. Things like cyber-bullying, stalking and identity theft are serious issues, and it’s hard to know how much our innocent online activities are making us vulnerable. Is having respect and empathy for an unseen person at the other end of an electronic communication a new skill we need to be learning (and teaching our kids)? Are the decisions being made now by legislators, businesses and news organizations good ones? While Siegel raises some questions that I think are important ones, it’s my opinion that he fails to make a valuable contribution to this discussion.