We’ve Always Been Here

Back in 2007, author Mark Helprin wrote a New York Times op-ed in which he bemoaned the lack of a permanent copyright. I responded to it, as did rather a lot of other people. In my response, I called part of his argument “pure nonsense, bordering on outright lies.”

Apparently, many other people used far harsher language, because Helprin later wrote a book (Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto) in which he spent some of the second chapter complaining about the response:

It is not merely training that has unleashed this keypeck ferocity, but also changes in certain fundamental conditions. In the electronic media’s dissolution of barriers—time, space, isolation—and in the vast expansion of received (or, at least, receivable) information, we have become in proportion infinitely smaller. Were you to have lived next door to Ethan Frome in Starkfield, Massachusetts, at the turn of the last century you would have been one of only a few hundred… You would not have felt as if you were merely one in six-and-a-half or seven billion. Now, as mere atoms amidst this mass, the damage we can do is by comparison so much less that rage counts for nothing but a cry to be heard—even if the from a protective and cowardly anonymity. Were anyone to have behaved in such a way…on the real commons of a New England village even as it existed in my youth and young-manhood, he would have been immediately brought up short, if not committed or jailed. In the new “commons,” brutishness and barbarism are accepted…

More recently, Scott Greenfield writes:

I recently had an email exchange with a lawprof who felt deeply hurt by things that were written about his ideas.  He informed me that they were too harsh, too rough, too disrespectful.  Ironically, he wasn’t referring to things I had written.  He was on the verge of giving up blawging, finding it too vulgar for his sensibilities.

These are not the first and second times I’ve heard this sort of complaint about the blogosphere. The pattern is pretty common: A person with some degree of fame or authority—an author, an politician, a movie star, or even a law professor—checks what the folks on the internet are saying about them and is shocked to discover that people are saying terrible things.

Sometimes, like Helprin, they try to come up with an explanation as to why people are being so rude. Often this is tied up in their personal agenda so, for example, some feminists conclude that the blogosphere is a boys club that resents women. Similarly, a lot of professional journalists and pundits have concluded that the blogosphere is filled with amateurs that have no standards.

I have a simple explanation of my own for the authors and politicians and pundits who are shocked by the style of the blogosphere: The people you’re hearing from have always been out here, and we’ve always talked that way. The difference—the only difference, I think—is that now you know about it.

People have been discussing Mark Helprin’s books for as long as he’s been writing, but they’ve been discussing them in private, in coffee houses and classrooms and book clubs, so he’s never heard what they sound like. They sound like the blogosphere.

The same goes for you pundits and politicians out there: Sometimes we think you’re stupid, and we say so. We use harsh language and violent imagery. This is how people have always talked about you around the water cooler at work, over dinner at home, and in the barrooms afterward.

The point is, the blogosphere isn’t some new rude horror. People have always been this way. All that’s changed is that those of you who hold the stage can now hear the hecklers a little better. The heckling itself is no worse than before.