Meghan Daum’s essay in the Believer on internet commenting is, I think, a fairly even-handed example of the species. She acknowledges that our discourse has always had its share of venemousness, that she isn’t actually required to read these comments. But I think she’s a bit too quick to dismiss comment moderation and community building:

But there is a world of difference between the traditional notion of public participation in a newspaper or magazine and the cacophonous, sometimes libelous free-for-all that passes for it today. Whereas the old-fashioned letter to the editor involved crafting a letter, figuring out where to send it, springing for a stamp, and knowing that its publication-worthiness would be determined by an actual editor who might even call and suggest some actual edits, today’s readers are invited to “join the conversation” as if the work of professional reporters and columnists carries no more authority than small-talk at a cocktail party. And although some sites are making efforts to weed out the trolls by disabling anonymous posting, filtering comments through Facebook, or letting readers essentially monitor themselves by flagging or promoting comments at their own discretion, most are so desperate to catch eyeballs wherever and however possible that they’re loathe to turn down any form of free content.

Obviously it’s not easy to moderate comments and to foster a community where a health conversation can actually happen. It’s something that takes a lot of your writers’ time if, like me or Ta-Nehisi, you read and moderate comments yourself. And if you don’t want to do that, you have to hire a community manager or managers. But I certainly think there are examples out there of successful efforts. And I think it’s probably worth interrogating the idea that moderation kills traffic or commenting communities: I think it’s much more likely that people don’t moderate because they don’t make the effort. I’m unpersuaded that the people who occasionally show up here to decry liberals or inform me about the evils of Muslims are carrying more traffic with them than they drive away. It’s a much more fruitful pursuit to figure out how we can create civilized spaces than to lament some sort of collective loss of civility. I think we should be open to a whole gradient of walled gardens, from moderated comments sections, to places like Metafilter where you have to pay to join the conversation as a demonstration of seriousness.

The most interesting question Daum raises, I think, is whether commenting and the internet have changed the way we write. She says she never would have published an essay she wrote in the mid-nineties about sex and HIV if she had to publish it in the environment writers face today. But Emily Gould did write a long essay about her own self-absorption in the New York Times Magazine when she knew she’d likely get dismantled in the comments section. And if web publishing existed in the same form then that it does now, Daum might not have had to cut down her essay to the point of unrecognizability to get it published by a respectable outlet. The way she describes it makes it sound like a perfect fit for The Awl. But even if you lose some ability to be personally revelatory, the huge benefit of blogging in particular is the ability to try out ideas, to play with different parts of arguments, and to test-drive different pieces of evidence, and to refine your ideas into a final product. We might be able to be less personally vulnerable on the internet, but I think it’s probably worth it in exchange for being able to do intellectual growth in public and with the benefit of feedback and allies.

The bridge is yours.

-For the distinguished meth or television connoisseur in your life, Walter White sneakers.

-The cultural exchange that made the Tintin story The Blue Lotus so good.

-Watchmen 2 is a thing. Everything is terrible.

-Sounds like Valentine Wiggin’s going to have true grit.

-Are we on our way to usage-based billing?

This post contains spoilers through the first two sections of Neuromancer. For next week, we’ll read section three.

When Conan O’Brien spoke at Harvard’s commencement in 2000, he joked about a number of predictions he’d made in a (presumably fake) high school graduation speech 15 years earlier:

I would like to make several predictions about what the future will hold: “I believe that one day a simple Governor from a small Southern state will rise to the highest office in the land. He will lack political skill, but will lead on the sheer strength of his moral authority. I believe that Justice will prevail and, one day, the Berlin Wall will crumble, uniting East and West Berlin forever under Communist rule. I believe that one day, a high speed network of interconnected computers will spring up world-wide, so enriching people that they will lose their interest in idle chit chat and pornography.

I start our discussion of William Gibson’s Neuromancer because it’s impossible to read this novel, published the year I was born, without thinking about what he thought the internet might look like and what it actually does—for most of us, anyway. I’m intrigued by the novel’s description of the internet as like”

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .

I think for some people, that’s true. But I think for most folks, the internet just makes their world a little bigger instead of a lot larger, it makes their world easier to handle rather than turning it surreal. On the other hand, most of us aren’t actually innovators, we’re not plugged in actively testing the limits of what our enabling technologies can do and what societal rules suggest we ought to want to do. Our personal geography is not like Ninsei, where, as Case tells us, “burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.” Reading a novel’s a form of tourism.
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I’m taking a little time this week to look at some of the earliest pop culture examinations of the Internet. Yesterday, Erica Newland wrote about the extreme prescience of Ghostwriter. Up today: Hackers.

Hackers, which came out in 1995, is not exactly what you’d call a good movie. It’s got ridiculous animations that are meant to make the Internet seem comprehensible to the legions of Americans who were beginning to sign up for web access as the Internet went commercial. Jonny Lee Miller seems so gummed up by the complexities of pulling off an American accent that when Angelina Jolie asks his character, early in the film, “Do you speak English?” the correct answer is really “No, but he’s trying very hard.” The hacker glam is ridiculous in the extreme. But I got obsessed with the movie in high school, Hackers was the perfect aspirational movie for angry smart kids everywhere who spent a lot of time on the Internet, whether they were hacking corporations or spending lots of time talking to teenagers from other states who participated in the same dorkily intellectual after-school activities that they did. And even though I no longer sign into chat programs under my deeply embarrassing first handle, Hackers had some real sense of where the Internet was going — and where we were going with it.

PCWorld gives Hackers credit for having at least some sense of hacker canon:”Before the core crew of hackers allows Jonny Lee Miller’s Dade to enter their group, they challenge him to identify a series of technical manuals considered essential reading among real hackers in the early 1980s. Dade aces the test, which culminates with the Ugly Red Book That Won’t Fit on a Shelf.” But Hackers gets its longevity less from specific demonstrations of technical foresight—the hardware the characters drool over is laughably antiquated today — and more from its portrayal of what would become the dominant attitudes about the Internet and the way we live our lives on it.
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After my appreciate of Ghostwriter last week, my friend Erica Newland, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology, pointed out that not only is the show a model of race and class diversity, but even thought it was filmed before the Internet made its commercial debut in 1995, it was a brilliantly prescient look at the way we’d come to live our lives online. She’s discussed that further here, and for the rest of the week, I’ll be taking a look at some of the pop culture artifacts from the earliest days of the internet to see what we got right, and what we didn’t.

By Erica Newland

Last week, Alyssa wrote about Ghostwriter, a PBS children’s series about thoroughly normal kids from Brooklyn who solve neighborhood mysteries with the help of their eponymous ghost friend. Although it aired from 1992-1995, Ghostwriter works surprisingly well today: in many ways it is a thoroughly 21st century show, and not just because the title character is something of a search engine for the real world. In making computers a central part of the Ghostwriter characters’ lives, the show anticipated the role that the Internet would play in our lives and our television shows.

Television today is awash with Internet-themed episodes. Last season, Brick from The Middle developed an Internet addiction, Liz Lemon of 30 Rock was impugned on a Jezebel-like website, and Chief Webber discovered Twitter on Grey’s Anatomy. But even in these episodes, digital devices and the connectivity they enable are gimmicks that drive a storyline, not the third limbs and backup brains that they have become in the real world. With a couple exceptions, like The Big Bang Theory and iCarly, remarkably few characters on TV while away hours reading blogs, cement relationships over instant messager, make important life decisions via email, or Google a contested point in the middle of an argument.

It can be tough to turn scenes like these into good television—and it’s an open question whether we really want our on-screen doppelgangers as chained to their devices as we are. But the brains behind Ghostwriter deserve extra credit for figuring out a way to turn computer use into entertaining TV.
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