Emily Gould, whose name I continue to be unable to read without thinking of evil alien parasites, has an article in Technology Review, of all places, in which she continues her new career as a professional haver of mixed feelings about the internet.
Specifically, she’s talking about Clay Shirky’s book, which she characterizes more or less fairly as a triumph of internet triumphalism — one that’s impressive, of course, but which ignores (of course) the ineffable something or other that we’re all losing in this topsy-turvy world.
Like an expatriate who reads every new novel that’s set in her homeland, I read books about the Internet to remember the time I spent working and living there, to contrast my memories with the authors’ impressions and see how well they hold up. In Shirky’s descriptions of the way new Web-based social tools are restructuring businesses, communities, and relationships, I recognize familiar scenery. He knows what he’s talking about–he’s lived there too. You get the sense, though, that he’s somehow managed to avoid walking down any dark alleys, or staring too long at any piles of fetid garbage.
To make her case she invokes Walter Benjamin’s famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which I probably should already be familiar with but in fact just read this morning.
Shirky even believes that technology is creating and enabling “love”; when he talks about the hundreds of thousands of people who are collaboratively building Wikipedia, he says they “love one another in its context.” He fails to mention–or maybe he fails to notice–that the “love” and “freedom” he describes don’t mean quite what they did back when our meat acquaintances outnumbered our Facebook “friends.”
Maybe, in the same way that Benjamin says the difference between “follow[ing] with the eye, while resting on a summer afternoon, a mountain range on the horizon” and experiencing that same mountain range at a remove (imagine a picture postcard) makes it harder to appreciate the real thing (“Gosh, this mountain is beautiful! Just like a postcard!”), social-media technologies are creating simulacra of social connection, facsimiles of friendship. By ignoring that difference, as Shirky mostly does, we keep moving heedlessly toward a future where the basic human social activities that these new technologies are modeled on–talking, being introduced to new people by friends–are threatened.
But Gould is simplifying what Benjamin actually says. His essay’s most relevant portions concern the changing nature of art in the face of technology that can reproduce it. And yes, he says that something is lost:
Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence.
[...]
One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.
This isn’t just wistfulness, though. Sure, Benjamin notes with sadness the loss of opportunities for considering art on its own terms, rather than the mass-production-enabled use of it as grist for the culture’s neverending cocktail party chatter. But he also notes aura’s exclusivity and the elitism that’s only possible through scarcity. He’s not bemoaning the decline of aura, per se, just observing it. Dude’s a Marxist — the democratization afforded by reproduction and the “emancipa[tion of] the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual” is right up his alley.
So here’s where Gould gets it wrong. Yes, there is something missing from online interactions. But that’s not some privileged insight about the nature of our new, electronic world — it’s the most basic one. Worse, it’s a dead end. Noting the validity of holisticism is fine, but the only place you can go from there is mysticism, and that’s no use to anybody.
Gould thinks Shirky is a callow idealist, but he’s not. He’s just noting the incredible bounty that technology can afford us while politely declining to complain about the places where it falls short.
Not only is Gould preoccupied with the latter, she’s blind to the former. And hey, I can relate. Digital technology has its own Benjaminian aura, you know — excitement born of novelty, and exclusivity, and revolutionary rhetoric. Once that novelty wears off, though, things can start to look kind of drab. I mean, it’s exciting that the world has collaboratively built an encyclopedia! But it is an encyclopedia. And the idea of an encyclopedia — a comprehensive reference document written without passion or position — is actually kind of boring. The same holds for social communication and our lofty rhetoric about the triumph of a world where information can flow freely. Once you’re done patting yourself on the back you need to start paying attention to what people are actually saying. And that’s hard. Sometimes it’s even boring.
It’s depressing when you realize how much of your excitement about a thing was tied up in its aura; to find out that superficial considerations formed the basis of your enthusiasm. I struggle with this myself: I’m overcome with contempt at every useless, vowel-less internet startup I see, its founders desperate to think of themselves as brilliant revolutionaries despite no one — least of all them — actually caring a whit about what they say they’re trying to do. But that contempt is motivated in no small part by feeling the exact same ignoble impulse.
But this is my own failing, and, I suspect, Gould’s. It doesn’t make any less important those advances, the ones we thought we believed in. It just means that we overstated their importance in the first place, or exaggerated our level of interest in them as we fell in love with their aura. Either way it was self-flattery, and we have only ourselves to blame.
