The Internet - An Exercise in Reduction

The first topic I wanted discuss is the internet , computers, and productivity. Actually, that's not entirely true. The first topic I wanted to discuss was teenage drinking culture - but it's late and that would take too long for me to put down, because it's not a finished thought. Anyways, it occurs to me that there is a huge disconnect between the way we actually use the internet and the way we say we want to use the internet. We say the internet is useful because it allows us to store and freely access the entire wealth of human information, and because it allows us to converse with each other freely and instantly. In fact, what we want from the internet is exactly the opposite - in its most useful and popular form, we want the internet to immediately sort out the key important information from the extraneous, and to speed up and actually limit conversation.

Perhaps the best example of this is the news aggregation sites, which are effectively killing off the newspaper industry not because they provide comprehensive coverage of all stories, but because they provide short snippets of only the most important stories. The best example of this is Google News. I go there and I get a quick summary of all the articles that Google has deemed most important. I can then click on the stories that most interest me and read the full thing, or I can get the gist just be reading headlines and short blurbs. Of course, I could easily get the former from a traditional print newspaper, but that requires all the tedious browsing through articles I don't care about, reading long articles just to pick out the key facts that give me a surface understanding. Even though the internet gives me access to much more than a traditional newspaper, and the freedom to browse it as I please, I prefer to have the most important ones chosen for me by a computer. Moreover, I want the computer to condense it down for me specifically so I don't have to take advantage of that wealth of information. Not only am I not taking advantage of the information itself, I'm not even taking advantage of the freedom to browse it the way I choose that the internet supposedly provides.

Wikipedia is the same way. It is so popular among youth that it has become the de facto standard for learning about foreign topics. You'd think that with the ability to store vast amounts of data, Wikipedia would encourage longer and more in-depth articles than traditional encyclopedias. And yet, why has the site become so much more popular than the traditional encyclopedia ever was? Not because it offers us access to more human knowledge, but again, because some random person has studied that knowledge and chosen what information we need just so we can get by without having to truly understand the subject. Not that complete information isn't available online - just look to the External Links section of any Wikipedia entry, and you can probably learn a great deal about the subject. But the external links are themselves an admission that the internet is not a uniting force at all. It is not this great collection that binds all human knowledge together, it is in fact this great collection that breaks up that knowledge into easily digestible pieces.

In other words, never before has so little information on so many subjects been so accessible to so many. The internet has revolutionized thought by making it less complete than ever. Now, instead of walking to a library and being forced to read numerous in-depth scholarly books on a subject to write a paper, I simply Wiki the subject, gain a rough understanding, click on the external links and skip directly to the relevant parts of the paper, which I cite in my own effort. Instead of checking out multiple books on the subject from a bibliography like we used to do, I can click on linked words in the Wiki article and simply repeat the process. If you're a high school or college student, don't pretend you've never done that. Maybe you've even JUST used the cited parts of a Wiki entry to write a paper.

The second advantage of the internet is open communication. We can now communicate with anyone, instantly. Instead of writing a letter, which takes days, we can e-mail them. Instead of making a phone call and waiting for busy signals, or answering machines, we can see when a person is available and IM them. So now, we can supposedly truly communicate our feelings and our thoughts at a moment's notice, knowing that the message will get through. And yet, I find that this ability to instantly convey our feelings actually limits the usefulness of the conversation. When you write a letter, you have to think about it and re-draft it endlessly both because you want your money's worth and because you know the person at the other end will spend days ruminating about its contents. When you make a phone call, at least you have to be aware of your tone of voice and have something to say before you dial the numbers.

However, with instant communication all of those considerations are dropped. No one sends page-long e-mails because it defeats the purpose of being able to instantly communicate. Again, we want our money's worth, and in this case, the currency is time. Instead, we hastily replace the real content of the letter with a one-sentence summary of what we mean to say. And yet we still write useless greetings and pleasantries at the beginning and end of all the e-mails we send. So consider this famous letter from Abraham Lincoln to Horace Greely:

Hon. Horace Greeley:

Dear Sir.

I have just read yours of the 19th. addressed to myself through the New-York Tribune. If there be in it any statements, or assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them. If there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here, argue against them. If there be perceptable in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.

As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing" as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.

Yours,

A. Lincoln.

As an e-mail, it would read like this:

Dear Sir,

I just read your letter to me in the New York Tribune. I'm not going to pretend to defend myself if indeed I made false statements or jumped to false conclusions in my policy. Also, I'm so sorry if I offended you by sounding impatient or dictatorial. I did not mean to at all, and I apologize, old friend.

With regards to my policy, my only goal is to save the union. I will only change my policy on slavery if I believe it helps our cause.

Yours,

A. Lincoln.

P.S. That said, as I've said before, I still believe that everyone should be free.

Notice how we are still obsessed with the trivial apologetic nuances, but much of Lincoln's substance has been lost in the e-mail version. In fact, I would contend that 90% of today's e-mails are formality, and 10% actual content. By sending e-mail, we lose the political aspect of speech. We assume that the recipient will take the basic text we provide and fill in the gaps for us. In return, he is free to respond in the same manner, which takes less of his time. In this way, words become more subject to interpretation and less communicative, because we're really writing in short-hand.

I'm particularly fascinated with the ubiquity of post scripts in e-mails. Surely with the ability to go back and edit e-mails after we are finished, replacing and adding sentences without having to re-compose the entire message, we should have done away with the post script. And yet, they are probably more common now than when we wrote letters by hand. Why? Because the e-mail is a uniquely constructed space. It is the space for the explicit and the explicit alone. The post script is therefore a way of breaking out of this boundary, and as such it has taken on a new meaning in e-mails. It is no longer a place to put things you forgot in the main body of text so as to save time. Instead, we waste time with it. Far from forgetting the information, we deliberately take content out of the main body of the text and put in the post script. The post script is an electronic waste drawer for the necessary information that we consider irrelevant to the e-mail itself; qualifications of previous statements, asides, responses to the other person's implicit questions, etc.

The instant message is the same thing, taken to an extreme. It's true, we now have lengthy conversations over IM much the same way we had over the phone. However, these conversations lose their value because they lose the subjective nature of voice communication and as a result they frequently cover far too much ground to usefully synthesize. Just look at the lexicon that has developed around the instant message: gtg, brb, rofl, wtf, etc. These are all ways of conveying a thought without having to truly express it. Typing out 'got to go' or 'be right back' is just as trivial, because like e-mail, these are understood as shorthand. Conversations are no longer private, they are public, because 'got to go' means the same thing for every person who types it. Thus the very purpose of a conversation, the communication of a thought in a free and personal way, is lost.

Moreover, how do you send a message usually conveyed via tone of voice over the internet? Use sarcasm as the example. Sarcasm is of course the lovely art of stating something in a tone of voice so that the listener knows it in fact has the opposite meaning. To do it online, you often have to specifically point out that a statement was sarcastic, and thus you defeat the purpose of the joke. So conversation loses this entire dimension online, and thus our options are very limited.

Because we write in short hand, and because we cannot include audible devices in online conversation, we often advance from subject to subject without truly encoding the information. I frequently find myself re-reading conversations to let them sink in, and I know lots of people who compulsively save IM conversations to their computers so they can look at them the next time they talk to the person. In this way, online conversations do not enter our consciousness, they enter our hard drives. To me, this defeats the purpose of having a conversation at all.

Don't get me wrong, I believe the internet is a wonderful thing. Certainly, information flows more freely and communication is much easier. But we should not pretend that the advantage of the internet is the freedom to access all information and communicate openly. In fact, we want the opposite out of it. We want to have our knowledge sorted and compiled for us into small useful piles and large useless mountains. We want to reduce communication down to the essence. This is not necessarily bad, but it is bad to see the internet as a replacement for traditional communication when it does not provide all the benefits. Do not forget to talk to your friends in person once in a while.