| Word Watch Woe is us! We live
in a degenerate age. Nobody reads anymore; everybody just visits his favorite
blogs. Nobody writes anymore either; everybody just sits at a computer, emitting
emails. How many times have you heard that? Well, it's not true, and even
if it were, it wouldn't be as bad as it's made to appear — often by people
diffusing such sentiments in emails, or posting them on their favorite
blogs. Believe it or not, people are still reading. Borders and
Barnes & Noble aren't as successful as they are because Americans have
stopped reading books and journals. Although many people use these places as
surrogate churches, coffee houses, dating services, and public parks, I have
actually seen people buying books in them. And the books aren't necessarily bad.
We're going through a bad patch right now with novels, and a worse patch with
poetry, but history, biography, natural history, and many other incitements to
read are flourishing mightily, both in quantity and in quality. And
"reading" isn't confined to books, you know. When I read Emily Dickinson online,
I am actually reading Emily Dickinson. The same goes for the Anglo-Saxon text of
Beowulf or the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. And the same goes
for current political discussion, which occurs in books and journals but also
occurs online. The advantage of books and journals is that their texts tend to be
much better considered, and their contents much more enduringly accessible, than
the texts one sees on blogs or bulletin boards. They look, feel, and smell a lot
better, too. But more real writing is going on now than ever before, and more
writers have access to the tools of writing, because the new electronic media
exist. So what if people don't send letters anymore? They can write more
messages, and write more urgent and responsive messages, if they write online.
They can also write to an incomparably wider audience. A letter that you post on
the Internet is still a letter, still a personal communication; but with luck it
can become a letter written to millions. I have visited blogs that are so
horrible that, like the world's great poetry, they can never be evoked in any
other terms than their own. Suffice it to say that I have visited blogs written
by girls with screen names like Pixie, and guys with names that I don't like to
repeat, even to myself. I have also visited blogs that publish articles and
comments of great scholarly interest, great political insight, and great artistic
merit. I have seen the way in which the web can organize spontaneous communities
of intelligent individuals: not academics, not people who are paid to write, but
people who want to write and who care about writing and whose writing has an
immediacy and a capacity for development that one seldom sees anywhere else. (I
wrote about some of these people in my article "The Truth Versus 'the Truth'" in
the Sept.-October 2003 issue of Liberty, in an article that's available
online.) I can't see that any of this destroys the market for
books and journals, or furthers the process of literary debasement already so
well begun by our public schools. Indeed, it demonstrates that even the public
schools cannot completely kill people's hunger for intelligent and expressive
writing. I have to admit, of course, that the Internet has done some bad
things to language. It promotes (as well as exposes) fads and frauds; it seldom
reproves, even by example, the growth of subliterate locutions ("alot," "LOL"),
and it positively encourages the habitual use of jargon that evokes its own
ambience: "interface," "virtual," "flame," "firewall," etc. And, as we recently
saw in the saga of the Bird and the Dominoes, it is a perfect agency by which
vapid sentiments can institutionalize themselves. In case you didn't hear
the news that was all over the Internet, some company in Holland decided to beat
the Guinness World's Record for the number of dominoes set off in a single chain
reaction. So far, the story was appropriate to the world of print media. The
placement of the four million dominoes was reported by newspapers; their
successful flattening would be noted by one of the world's best-selling books. It
was the advent of the sparrow that ushered the project into the domain of
electronic writing. A common house sparrow, a creature that is
environmentally protected in the Netherlands because there are "only" one million
nesting pairs of them, got into the room with the dominoes and, flitting about,
succeeded in upsetting 23,000 of them. Before this demolition could go any
farther, the sponsors of the event called in a guy with an air rifle, and he
killed the bird. Big deal, right? Well, it's not a big deal to 99%, or more, of
the world's population, but the remaining 1% can start looking really important
when they all get on the Internet and start complaining. And that's what they
did. The result was that the sponsors of the event expressed their grief
and consternation, television broadcasters provided a "commemoration" of the
bird's demise, and a website was created on which people could record, I suppose
for the benefit of remote generations, their own expressions of grief. Thousands
of people did. The bird, in short, had metamorphosed into Princess Di.
This electronic monument to the death of a sparrow was a disturbing new feature
of the European cultural landscape. Given the worldwide reach of the Internet,
there is always the possibility that this kind of thing can spread to America. If
it does, however, we are well prepared to meet the threat. The Internet is a
great medium of nonsense, but it is also a great medium of satire. — Stephen
Cox |
The department says that neither officer did anything wrong, except that it was
"insensitive" to announce that it's "Taser time" — better to let flu-ridden
citizens figure this out for themselves, once they're writhing on the ground,
yelling "Oh my God!" Needless to say, neither cop will be disciplined, even
though their squad car video (linked on the