Extreme speech. Inflammatory speech. Misleading speech. Misinformed speech. Just plain dumb speech.
I am continuing my Ode to the Gatekeeper. Two weeks into Trump’s twitter ban, more shoes have fallen. But the right has not been entirely muffled. Taking away your unfettered access to a megaphone Is not the same thing. Unfiltered speech is not something we should consume on a daily basis. It needs to exist and be free up to certain limits (hate, inciting violence, shouting fire in the theatre and likely some sports talk).
The Gatekeeper was supposed to hear several sides of an issue and present them fairly, stripping away spin, pointing out omissions doing research to bridge apparent contradictions vs just doing he said/she said. Again, somewhere along the line being a Gatekeeper became a bad thing so we all but eliminated the job.
So, let us go back to Medieval Gatekeeping. The old popes where good at this. You speak out of line and it was thumbscrews and the stake. Any king of the time did the same. Gutenberg’s press made it harder to control the written word, but still there were fairly few printing presses by the early 1600s and it was relatively easy for rulers to clamp down, confiscate books, wreck the machinery and punish the publishers. It took several more decades for the penny press to take root. Cheaper paper, cheaper printing. This was the revolution that Gutenberg had promised.
And it was often used for scurrilous broadsides by anonymous authors. In London in the 1600s pamphlets were everywhere. Accusations could be wild and spread from street to coffee house to palace in hours. Sound familiar? Only with the Internet, “fake news” is out to everyone in seconds and lives forever.
Stephen Marche, writing in the New Yorker in 2018, had the right perspective
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/how-we-solved-fake-news-the-first-time
Marche notes that little has changed over the centuries when it comes to attracting clicks. “Then, as now, successful strategies included exaggeration and hating others (in the pamphlets’ case, Catholics). Elaborate conspiracy theories were popular, too.”
All these opinions coming from God knows where was very destabilizing for a culture that had always been very top down: “The turbulence was severe. “There is nothing more congruent to the nourishment of division in a State or Commonwealth, then diversity of Rumours mixt with Falsity and Scandalisme; nothing more prejudicial to a Kingdome, then to have the divisions thereof known to an enemy.” That was the judgment of “A Presse Full of Pamphlets,” in 1642.”
Then as now, rank and knowledge did not matter: “Expertise was irrelevant….The quality of an opinion in terms of its relationship to reality has never been of all that much importance at the point of sale. The commodity of ideas requires freshness and mass appeal. That is true wherever and whenever ideas are sold,” opined Marche.
In the 17th century this unceasing wave of dreck led to the creation of The Royal Society as a sort of cultural fact checker.
Per Marche: “Its organizers seem to have sincerely believed that the enterprise to which the early Royal Society was dedicated was healing, that it would in some sense escape from politics by bringing together reasonable men from a wide range of ideological positions who could collaborate in gathering information which they hope that all would be able to accept.” The motto of the Royal Society was (and still is) Nullius in verba: “take nobody’s word for it.” I wish that motto were inscribed at the top of every smartphone.”
Marche concluded: “There is an idea out there that the forces of technology are both inevitable and ultimately liberating. It is a philosophy popular among people who prefer their history vague, so that their ideas can stay simple and grand. Making the comparison between the Internet and the printing press has always indulged in this laziness. “Hey, look, that was good in the end. Things worked themselves out for the best there.” No. They didn’t work themselves out. People worked them out. People of great intelligence and good will, able to think beyond their narrow interests, worked them out, and they only worked them out partially, incompletely.
Disruption and creative destruction have been the watchwords of the information revolution. Those who celebrate disruption believe they are serving progress, but they’re just celebrating their own power. There are people who build and there are people who tear down. That’s always been true. It’s true now.”
Allow me to supply a bit more of a bridge to current times. The broadsheets evolved into newspapers. While all were tilted in their view, the tilt was usually well known. But the wily Daniel Defoe defied it all all. He edited nominally Tory papers to serve the interests of the Whig and Whig papers to serve the Tories. But that is a topic for another day. Objectivity (as a journalistic ideal if not a practice) would wait until the late 19th century to bloom.
Here is where the Gatekeepers took over and held sway until about 2008 and the hegemony of Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon and, yes even Craig’s List, took over and “What, Me worry? All opinions are equally good” became the new media mantra.
So now we stand on a battlefield of this great war which asks if this or any media so conceived can long endure. Do we a need a Royal Society for the 21st century? Who is with me?
Wonderfullest Things 