Sometimes, amid the continuing wonder of all that is provided by the web, one sees the downside: the way in which the digital world has lessened our existences. This was brought home hard by a piece in last week’s FT under the headline: 'Friends, not editors, shape internet habits'. The article showed how consumer’s media diets are shaped no longer by editors and journalists in newspapers and news websites but by their mates as the masses begin their day on Facebook and even, incomprehensibly, Twitter, that favoured medium of the Twerp.
This would be all very well if we were sharing pieces on subjects of even medium weight. But we all know that the vast majority of such stuff we ping around to each other is pap: clips of blokes getting their bits caught in zips, kittens doing utterly hilarious things, and YouTube resumes of that really ace moment when the latest snaggle-toothed no-hoper from Humberside is ritually humiliated on the X Factor (God that show is vile). You think I protest too much? Just look at the most-viewed items in a ‘respectable’ news website this morning. In the Telegraph’s Top Five are placed a piece about an Adolf Hitler sex video and some load of balls about Chinese UFOs.
But the key to the problem is the line in the FT article: ‘The people you know are going to pick things that are more interesting to you.’ It may make me sound like an old fart, but I believe it’s actually quite important in a democracy that the media exposes you to stuff that you do not find intrinsically interesting. Such as, for example, seriously tedious items like the pensions crisis, lumps falling off the polar ice caps, local council and court reports and, even, if necessary, the continuing tensions in Nagorno-Karabakh.
In the old days this act of presenting information - i.e. the news - was the job of editors. They told you what was going on in the world – the things they thought people ought to know about. (This didn’t mean wall-to-wall worthy boredom: there was always space for great crime stories or randy vicars to leaven the mix.) Now you are the editors and you go a la carte rather than being forced to stick with the fixed menu.
But if we all only have to read what we like and what titillates us then I fear serious problems may be in store. Because, in this rejection of collective, shared knowledge, what results is a situation where people develop their own parallel realities and live in complete ignorance of the things that affect us all. In the worst cases you take to the hills with your assault rifle and a supply of baked beans because, after months of exchanging crackpot information with your like-minded associates online, you’re utterly convinced the Commies or the Little Green Men are going to take over next week.
By the way, the Telegraph today also includes a thoughtful list of other things that are being killed by the web. A simultaneously amusing and sobering roll call it is, too, including memory, concentration, watching TV together and knowing telephone numbers by heart.
