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Up in flames

The Internet was going to promote great conversation, but instead it's mostly rants.

In a heady moment back in 1998, Matt Drudge - the man known for making an indistinguishable mush of fact and rumor on the Internet - told the National Press Club that online media had "ushered in an era vibrating with the din of small voices. ... The Net gives as much voice to a 13-year-old computer geek ... as to a CEO or speaker of the House. We all become equal."

For years, visionaries rhapsodized about cyberspace's ability to reshape and redefine community, reaching across geographic and political barriers to unite people of similar interests and to fashion communal lifelines to traditionally beleaguered groups like senior citizens or inner-city residents.

To the delight of the insular but self-important media universe in which I toil, a former St. Paul Pioneer Press journalist named Jim Romenesko created a popular Web site, Medianews.org, where journalists from all over get to figuratively sit at the same lunch table, gossiping, trading information, and debating ethics and practices.

Ah, the vibrant interaction of electronic conversation. Isn't it beautiful? In a word: No. And let me count the ways.

For years, thoughtful critics complained of The McLaughlin Group and the Crossfire approach to public discourse. A handful of pundits would be given a few seconds to come up with a glib, off-the-cuff response to the nation's most intractable problems and trickiest issues. Well, in the era of the Internet, we've simply multiplied the problem by a factor of thousands, moving from snap punditry to snap public opinion.

Not long ago, I stumbled upon a day's worth of Web site polls. With the ink barely dry on news of the arrest of FBI agent and alleged spy Robert Hanssen, two major news Web sites were already polling surfers on whether treason is a capital offense and whether the "suspected spy" should go to the gas chamber. (The responses strongly suggested that Quakers, pacifists, and ACLU members are not spending much time online.)

Moving to the culture wars, another Web poll asked if controversial rapper Eminem, he of the homophobic and misogynic lyrics, was "great" or "terrible." Notice the subtlety of that question: great or terrible, with no room for any shading in between. Anyway, terrible carried the day easily.

If asking people to spend about one nanosecond contemplating a public policy issue before dispensing their two cents seems less than enlightening, what about the actual quality of the conversation?

In a shrewd piece posted on his Inside.com Web site, Kurt Andersen explained how "user generated content" has become a financial necessity for the economically hard-pressed online information industry. "And in this case," he added, "it provides a legitimized wrapper for a category of ephemeral amateur content which, in the pre-Internet era, ranged from the pathetic to the curious: vanity-press books, fan clubs, local pageants, personal ads . . . home movies, folk art, graffiti."

One site mentioned by Andersen, Slashdot.org, which identifies itself as "News for Nerds," functions like a stream-of-consciousness rant. Jon Katz is a smart former mainstream journalist who contributes to Slashdot even as he recognizes cyberspace as "a ranter's medium." Much of his writing for Slashdot seems to serve the express purpose of attracting nasty retorts. One correspondent recently asked how he could keep posting commentary on the site "when so many people are outwardly hostile to you."

And that's a crucial point. Many contributors to the enlightened online conversation sound strikingly like a pair of sloshed barflies exchanging insults over mothers' mustaches and fathers' army boots. In recent months, the CNN message boards on the Middle East conflict have often been the linguistic equivalent of the flying bullets and bombs on the ground.

To put it in Freudian terms, there's a lot more id than superego on display in online exchanges, but no shortage of ego.

Romenesko's Web site started out as a clearinghouse for published stories about the media. But as more journalists began e-mailing responses and comments, the site took on more typical online characteristics, becoming dishier and ditzier. Now, it's also a forum for journalists to opine, argue, show off, and occasionally tell each other to "shove it." Is there a wealth of information being exchanged via these e-mails? You bet. And at least these folks use their own names. But does it meet traditional standards of publication? Not usually.

The first thing that's clear about electronic communication is that it places a premium on provocation over moderation. (How many of you have sent e-mails that went well beyond anything you would have uttered in a face-to-face conversation?) Even veteran journalists who are beginning to write for online versions of their traditional publications acknowledge the pull, as one scribe notes, "to be more attitudinal."

And while cyberspace may be redefining community, it can't replicate community. People with glancingly shared interests aren't in the same boat as people - be they neighbors, classmates, or co-workers - who are mutual stakeholders in life. It's hard to think of two more disparate images than the citizen rising to make an argument at town meeting and the anonymous surfer frantically flaming someone online.

I recognize all this makes me a major philistine. But I can't help but look at most online chatter the way I've always viewed rooms full of babbling strangers at big parties: as daunting, flaunting, and dishonest places I'd rather avoid.ufdot