The Wrong End of the Periscope
by Mitch Stone, the Accidental Expert
I'm a technology baby. I can hardly be otherwise, having come of age in the age of a rapidly shrinking globe. Burned into my psyche are images of John Glenn catapulting into orbit in Friendship 7, and men golfing on the Moon. They forged my expectations, and my view of the possible.
Technology, I assumed, would always be humanity's friend, ally and servant. Dreary predictions often challenged this view, but they were counterbalanced by more hopeful voices. I absorbed them all, but my feet always landed firmly on the side of the optimists.
There wasn't much room for cynicism or doubt. Anything could be accomplished, and eventually, it would. It was only a matter of time, will, and applied science -- all things we had in great abundance.
To a confirmed technophile like myself, the Internet could only be greeted as the doorstep to a world made unbounded by time, distance or culture. Democratized communication would serve to bring people closer together, to promote peace and understanding. And for a time, it seemed to be a perfectly valid theory.
It took a war to shake that confidence.
Shortly before the outbreak of the second Gulf War, one of the many images appearing on our televisions was of Iraqi teenagers playing American computer games. They're a lot like our kids, was the message. Or was it?
As it happens, billions may borrow Americanisms, but that doesn't mean they necessarily share our views, purposes or desires. The image of young folks in Iraq playing "Medal of Honor," maybe even over the Internet with some of our kids, is a cultural fragment, completely dissociated from any useful context. Any conclusions we might want to draw from it are likely to be wrong.
A video camera is trained on a Baghdad street corner. For the opening days of the war, the cable news networks ran this feed full time, live, without explanation. Cars, buses and trucks sped by, though nothing newsworthy seemed to be happening at this intersection on the other side of the globe.
So why did this image become so pervasive? Simply because technology made it possible, and certainly not because it actually mattered. That continuous video feed didn't add one bit to our understanding of events. Our world was made more compact, but no more comprehensible.
Driven by the Internet, the 24-hour news cycle demands 24-hour instant news accompanied by 24-hour instant analysis. Talking heads spin the smallest fragments of information into theories and opinions. Then the next, and the next -- in such rapid succession, that we can't possibly make any sense of it all.
Emulating the news cycle, Internet chat boards light up with 24-hour instant debate. In these marathon tag-team bludgeoning matches, views aren't so much shared as hurled back and forth. The screen names may rotate minute to minute, but the style and content rarely does, as one poster after another lashes out angrily at demons real and perceived, all from the safety and anonymity of their computer keyboards.
A doctored photograph is published on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. The photographer took liberties by digitally blending two photos of a British soldier and Iraqi refugees fleeing Basra. The photographer's artistic efforts cost him his job, but the question of whether any image from a war zone can supply us with more then a tiny fragment of the truth is left dangling in midair.
Meanwhile, reporters in the field, firmly attached to combat units, squint at the conflict through their own private keyholes. In the thick of the action, they may comprehend even less then we do.
The staccato succession of opinions and images we receive today inspire little in the way of hopes and expectations. They confuse instead of inform. How, I ask myself, could so much information, and so many technological possibilities, have produced so little?
Truth is, we seem to have taken to looking through the wrong end of the periscope. The view we get is not of the world outside, but internal, and incomplete. What we know, or think we know, promotes fear and confusion instead of hope, because our vast abilities as human beings are being managed so unwisely.
As a child of technology, I know it wasn't supposed to turn out this way. I also know that some day it must change for the better.
On that day, I hope to golf on the Moon.
07 April 2003 |
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