As a young man on my first job after college, I made some joke to a group of
co-workers, and one of them-her name was Mary-burst out: "John, you're a
fool!" Because I did not immediately understand that Mary's outcry was
evidence of her love for me, I fell silent. A momentary feeling of
humiliation came over me, which lasted approximately twelve years and nine
days.
However, early in my thirteenth year of brooding about that event, I
realized I'd made a terrible mistake: I had failed to appreciate the fact
that Mary was an extremely well-educated young woman, with a high regard for
the wisdom of the medieval Fool, with a capital F. In that thirteenth year
of meditation I realized, too late, that Mary loved Fools!
The reason I remember all this right now is that I'm thinking about the
widely circulated and wonderfully foolish New Yorker cartoon by Peter
Steiner that shows two dogs at a computer screen with one saying to the
other: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."
What makes the Steiner cartoon so funny? And what is it actually about?
Dogs? Is it a joke about dogs? No, it says nothing true or interesting about
dogs, and a good joke must be truthful in order to rise to inspired
Foolishness, rather than sink to the inane unfunny silliness of the average
TV sitcom. The Steiner cartoon is, of course, about the Internet, and the
reason it's funny is that it uses silliness (talking dogs) to point out
truthfully that the Internet is an impersonal form of communication where
"nobody knows you're a dog."
So the cartoon is both funny and true. Just how funny is it, on a scale of
5? Pretty funny. Give it a 4. How true is it? Give it a 2. First of all, the
Internet is no more anonymous than a telephone call, or a novel, or this
column. Second, people do know when they run into a dog (or a fool) on the
Internet, just as they do when they get a phone call from a fool, browse a
novel by a fool, or read a column by-. But if you don't mind I'd like to
move on now to my next point.
The larger falseness of the cartoon is its implicit suggestion that the
Internet will automatically and effortlessly (electronically!) produce a new
renaissance of public expression because the Simple Honest Internet will let
us toss aside the Bad Old Publishers the way that Marxism did away with
capitalism (though I must have been on vacation when that event took place).
Of course, if the new renaissance actually occurs-and turns out to be
something just a bit more interesting than a collection of commercial home
page designs-it will have to produce giants of at least the stature of a
Paine, a Swift, a Pope, a Zola or a Hemingway. The question, then, is: does
the existence of the Internet and the online service providers make the
discovery of such giants more likely or less likely? The ODTs (optimistic
deep thinkers) say it will, and the PDTs (pessimistic deep thinkers) say it
won't. Yet both talk as though publishing as we now know it is dead-even
though a few of the DTs don't even know what publishing is (they think it's
page design); or what interactivity is (they think it's online chat); or
what information is (they think it�s a factoid delivered "just-in-time" ).
What the DTs do know is what Celebrity is (and, God bless them, a few of
them have the good grace to wish that state of grace on each and every one
of us!).
But let us please not be too foolish about this. Although right now it is
technologically possible to use the Internet to give a work of art worldwide
distribution, the difficult process of building an audience remains
essentially unchanged from what it's been over the ages. The only important
difference is that the Gatekeepers have changed-from publishers to
publicists (and that's a big difference, even though both words have the
same Latin roots).
Sad to say, the new Gatekeepers tend to be people like talk show hosts,
tabloid publishers, and Hollywood agents. Hmm. Now what do we do?
Hard to say. But a new young genius who fails to understand the new rules of
self-promotion will find her- or himself drowning in net surf, with the
people on the beach seeing nothing but a bobbing head far, far from shore.
And-though it would be pretty to think otherwise-no one will know whether
the victim used the Internet, a standalone word processing system, an
Underwood portable typewriter, or a No. 2 yellow pencil to compose his or
her great anonymous (and unread works), collected in glorious color on the
World Wide Web.
Of course, we might hope that an intelligent software agent could be sent
out with instructions to find "great undiscovered works that no one is
promoting," but I fear we would hope in vain.
Well, perhaps it's Foolish of me to think we're spending too much time
fixated on the enabling technology (which may be called the donut) and too
little time on the actual messages it carries (which may be called, alas,
the hole). But I have an uneasy feeling that I've lost something. Something
called the tradition of publishing.
Still, I'm hopeful it will turn up somewhere soon. It was here not long ago.
� 1995 Educom.