Requiem for the Information Age

Thirty years have passed since the Information Age ended, and we are at last in a position to understand why our naive faith in the utility of communications technology proved to be unfounded.

At the beginning of the Information Age, Thoreau famously observed that "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." The problem, as it turned out, was exactly the opposite: Maine and Texas had far too much of importance to communicate.

The apex of the Information Age was reached in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Informative news reports from Vietnam shook public confidence in the advisability and even the morality of American intervention there, and eventually the United States abandoned its South Vietnamese allies. Then in 1974 a flood of information about the involvement of Richard Nixon in organized crime led to his resignation.

The Information Age was turning out to be dangerous. Regardless of whether any individual American supported or did not support Richard Nixon or the armed intervention in Vietnam, he or she experienced a great deal of anguish as a result of the appearance of actual information in the realm of public discourse. The height of the Information Age was a period which scarred the psyche of the United States, and Americans could not have been expected to endure much more of the turmoil which information entailed without enormous harm being done to the Great Republic.

The credit for slaying the dragon of Information goes to Ronald Reagan. By arranging for the passage of legislation favourable to giant media conglomerates, he earned the gratitude of the press, which spent the rest of his two terms treating him as if he were a serious person. Thus the Information Age turned into the Marketing Age in which we now live.

The press quickly deteriorated into a vehicle for the promulgation of press releases. President Reagan's inflation of the national debt was ignored, his complicity in illegal arms deals glossed over, the questionable utility of his armed interventions abroad not even hinted at.

The media mastered their new craft in the Reagan era. Compare, for example, the Watergate scandal to the scandals which led to the impeachment of President Clinton, or the scandal involved in the approval of the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court.

Watergate unfolded despite the best efforts of President Nixon to stifle it. The news media were not to be diverted from their job, as they then saw it, of being media for news. By the time Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, though, the news media were no longer interested in news. They showed little interest in aspects of the Thomas affair which would have had Vietnam-era journalists drooling: the failure to hear testimony from the other women who had complained about Thomas's conduct, for example. They were content to take the Thomas hearings as the Republicans meant them to be taken: as a morality play. Justice Thomas was presented simply as the victim of unsubstantiated allegations, the crucial point being that little interest was shown in finding out whether the allegations could be substantiated. A few years later the media followed up on the scandal by printing allegations about Anita Hill which turned out to have been based on mistaken identity.

As George Edge, a contributor to the late website NEW IMPROVED HEAD, has pointed out, the press was effectively diverted by simple stratagems from pursuing serious questions about the actions of President Clinton. By appearing weak on the issue of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, President Clinton distracted the attention of the press from more serious issues such as the possibility that his staff was used to pay blackmail. Again a simple morality play was staged, and the attention of the public was directed to simple moral issues which the members of the public could resolve to their own personal taste.

In general the Clinton presidency was a masterpiece of marketing. President Clinton failed, for example, to keep the most important promise he made in his first campaign, to reform public health care. He did, however, come up with a plan to reform public health care, one which was unnecessarily complex and completely impractical, and this plan was presented as if it were a major public policy initiative. President Clinton was very successful in presenting his failures as the result of sabotage by the Republicans. In fact the Republicans did often try to sabotage his plans, but that supposedly is what democracy is about. If you make it easy for your opponents to sabotage your initiatives, questions might be raised about your motives in doing so, but none were raised by the media, which by the 1990s were firmly established in a marketing orientation.

After Mr. Clinton, of course, we had the spectacle of George W. Bush being presented as a great President. Even in relative terms this assertion is difficult to support. In my lifetime alone the Presidents of the United States have included Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, three men whose accomplishments dwarf any that George W. Bush could even think up to fantasize about as he drifts off to sleep.

President Bush Jr. understood marketing, though, or he knew someone who understood it. He quickly responded to the terrorist attacks by attributing them to a single demonic person whom he pledged to bring to justice, much as the stars of the World Wrestling Federation pledge to bring their enemies to justice. America seems to be no safer against terrorism now than it was on September 11, 2001 (President Bush even managed to lose a city in his second term), but the American people were united around their leader for a good part of his term.

Of course, these developments are not confined to the United States. The rest of the world, which never had as open a press as the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, could adopt the new approach even more easily than the American media. In the United Kingdom, for example, where the press was more interested in presenting Margaret Thatcher as a moral figure than as a political one (luckily for her, she thought she was a moral figure rather than a political one), the new role of the press as a vehicle for the simplified morality and sensation-mongering of the press release seemed a more natural development than it had in America.

And for all this we can be thankful. If the Information Age had not been done away with, it is doubtful if any American president would finish his term. Wars would be impossible to wage. The conduct of public affairs by our leaders would in effect cease.

For example, if President Johnson had decided to use military tribunals to try protesters against American actions in Vietnam, the press of the day would have gone for his throat. People would have been in the streets, even more riots would have taken place. President Bush's plans to use military tribunals could not elicit even a raised eyebrow from the media. Power is back where it belongs, in the hands of the powerful. Information no longer retains the power to destabilize the most powerful societies on earth, because information no longer exists.

Requiem for the Information Age © 2001, 2010, John FitzGerald

On gentility

[First published in 2008]

Perhaps there is a gene for gentility. No matter how hard we try, we always end up being admonished by prigs about how offensive we are. These days some of the prigs go to the trouble of murdering the offensive people.

We are thinking, of course, of the murderous rampages some Muslims went on following the publication of cartoons of their prophet. These rampages were justified as responses to the offence that the cartoons constituted. This position amounts to a claim that Muslims have the right to determine what cartoons should be published while non-Muslims do not.

Any standard of conduct is an attempt to expand the power of one group at the expense of another. Often the expansion of power is intended to benefit society as a whole. Polite prohibitions of coughing or sneezing without covering your mouth, or against spitting on the public footpaths, are ultimately intended to reduce the spread of disease by increasing the power of the healthy at the expense of the unhealthy. Laws against theft increase the power of the propertied and law-abiding at the expense of the thieving.

However, religious believers’ assertions that codes of conduct or of law should require that non-believers respect them do not produce benefits for society, but only for the believers who want respect. In the Western world the status of religious organizations as arbiters of mores is declining as the number of believers in their mythologies declines. Finding that their threats of eternal damnation have lost the power to persuade people, the religious try instead to appeal to worldly standards of gentility. Why, disagreeing with the Archbishop of Canterbury is too, too vulgar.

The religious, however, feel no obligation to refrain from offending the non-religious, or indeed from offending each other. That is why we can conclude that the real goal of their demands for respect is not conformity to standards of gentility but rather an attempt to shore up their collapsing social status.

Different from the demands of the religious are the demands of various underprivileged groups for respect. These differ in that they are rather reminders to us that they should have as much power as other groups do. While these demands are laudable in intent, they seem to us to have got the relationship the wrong way round.

People do not have power because they are respected, they are respected because they are powerful. To paraphrase Barbara Ehrenreich, legislators are quick to announce their respect for family values, but slower to announce legislation which will promote the formation and expansion of families. Professions of respect do not equal respect.

Of course, the powerful are happy to dish out the respect. These days people in positions of influence are punctilious about the names they give to other groups. In fact, they have managed to transform the struggle for equality into a struggle for polite terminology. They still call the less privileged late for dinner, but they care about what they call them.

In a democratic society, you will not promote important social change by appealing to standards of gentility. The fundamental idea of gentility is always that some people are better than others. Calling for others to respect you encourages them only to be polite. It does not encourage them to share their surplus power with you. For that you need to appeal to universal values, such as justice.

On Gentility ©John FitzGerald, 2008