Sotto Voce.

Columbia Journalism Review is part of my daily breakfast reading. But this morning, when I clicked on the tab to take me to the CJR home page, I was amazed to see a familiar face completely out of context: a young Dr. J. Allen Hynek, astronomer, astrophysicist, and — yes — pioneering UFO researcher. What was the man who coined the phrase “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” doing on the home page of CJR?

Apparently, serving as a stand-in for the stereotype of “The Expert” circa 1955 — the button-down brainiac with the goatee and the glasses. For Dr. Hynek’s visage accompanies an article titled “The Trouble With Experts” by Alissa Quart. (NOTE: Unfortunately, the photo no longer accompanies the story. I’ll try to find a copy somewhere else.) Decked “The Web allows us to question authority in new ways,” the article takes a look at how the web has propelled the rise of the “fauxpert” — people “who have emerged online because they write well and/or frequently on their subjects, rather than becoming an expert by acclamation of other experts or because of an affiliation with a venerated institution.” (It’s a thoughtful and well-written piece, BTW.)

In the photo, Hynek — who isn’t even mentioned in the article — certainly looks the part of an acclaimed product of a venerated institution: young yet wise, suitably straight-laced, seated at a table apparently shoulder-to-shoulder with other grandees, the inevitable stereographic-projection world map behind him subtly reinforcing the message that men of knowledge collectively possess mastery of the world. But Dr. Hynek is, in many ways, the antithesis of the quintessential “Expert” discussed in Quart’s article, because he is perhaps best known as an expert who came to question his own expertise.

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One of the original reasons I created Sotto Voce, back in the pre-blog days when it was completely invisible, was so that I could use it as a “messy workbench” — a place to build written things out of agglomerated found objects, to throw ideas on the wheel and turn them until they take shape, to just toss scraps of paper (like my typecasts). A long searchable index of ideas that can be read thematically, chronologically, or randomly to help me mark way stations, make free-form associations, trigger inspiration, and point me in new directions. This post is one of those.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about my imagination since moving to Annapolis and returning to my creative life. I definitely wasn’t using it much in Baltimore. But now, having set up my hobby space in the basement with Zorak the halogen lamp, my blue tackle-box of tools, and (of course) my brother Mike’s dirtbike painting, I’m feeling ye aulde feelings again. Nothing like a little styrene therapy, the smell of hot airbrush thinner.

This morning I was listening to the latest Alan Watts Podcast (Taoist Way #5, for future reference) and he reminded me why kids have such active imaginations, why so many people lose theirs as they grow up, and why I haven’t entirely lost mine yet:

“If you see, then, that ‘what you experience’ and ‘you’ are the same thing, then realize also, going beyond that, that you are in the external world you’re looking at. You see, I’m in your external world, you’re in my external world. But I’m in the same world you are. My inside is not separable from the outside world. It’s something the so-called outside world is doing, just as it’s doing the tree and the ocean and everything else that is in the outside world.

“Now isn’t that great, you see? We’ve completely got rid of the person in the trap, the one who either dominates the world or suffers under it. It’s vanished, it never was there. And when that happens, you see, you can play any life game you want to. Link the past and the present and the future together. Play roles. But you know you’ve seen through this . . . great social lie — that one accumulates, owns experiences, memories, sights, sounds, and from that other people, possessions, so on; building up always this idea of one’s self as the ‘haver’ of all this. If you think that, you’ve been had.”

This also obviously deals with the whole “transactional” issue that I’ve always wrestled with in regards to creativity — how can you transact what you never really possessed? The real value lies not with the artifact of the creation (the words, the painting, the sculpture, the song, the dance) but with the passion and the creative spark that created that work, and that can never be transacted, though it can (in the Zen sense) be transmitted. Otherwise it’s like trying to own the finger that points to the moon. It’s my fable: the man who bought the ashes because he wanted to own the fire.

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So I’m listening to Nicholas Carr being interviewed on NPR about his latest book about how the Internet is surgically removing our reading ability, and he explains how the idea for his grand thesis — which he buttresses with studies, surveys, interviews, and empirical and anecdotal evidence out the wazoo — came from observing his own diminished attentive capacity whilst browsing the Web. Suddenly, I had a realization: I’ve heard this interview before.

Jack . . . tell me, Jack. When did you first . . . develop this theory?

Well, I . . . first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.

Hmm.

Yes . . . a profound sense of fatigue . . . a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.

In Kubrick’s fable, General Jack D. Ripper’s insecurity over his impotence leads inexorably to the nuclear destruction of the world. Similarly, Carr concludes that his flaccid attention span must be the result of the Internet sapping his precious neural fluids, and therefore he must launch a book-length first strike to prevent a vast conspiracy from taking root.

Yeah, yeah, whatever.

An article of mine was recently published wherein I interviewed a college professor who wrote a book that was not, but should have been, titled The Kids Today: Why Today’s Whippersnappers Won’t Get Off My Lawn. In it, he claimed that today’s students were functionally less intelligent than previous generations of students in large part because they spend all their time string at tiny screens and only talking to their friends. His grand thesis — reinforced by the usual freight train of statistics — was sparked by his annoyance at the distracted behavior of his students and his own kids whenever he pontificated at them.

I don’t think it’s the Internet that’s sapping our precious bodily fluids.

Personally I blame the schools.

I’ve been reading a lot of the passionate articles and blog posts being written about both sides of the “death of the book” argument, and I’m beginning to sense a broad, vague, and completely unquantifiable pattern (one that I am not planning on launching any nuclear strikes over) — there seems to be a relationship between people’s opinion about the outmodedness of books and the way they experienced reading in school. The quick-n-dirty version of my gut feeling is this: People who claim that the Internet is freeing us from stuffy old boring literature probably weren’t inspired by their English teachers.

I mean, pick up any Clay Shirky interview at random and listen to him chant his mantra about how students won’t have to suffer through War and Peace and In Search of Lost Time anymore thanks to the Web. It’s like listening to the high school shop jock complaining about his English midterm exam. Who needs all that Dead White Male stuff, anyway? I want to go build engines.

And listen to any defender of traditional books; inevitably their argument will invoke the richness and layers of meaning that they found in books, the magical ability to be transported to another time and place in their imaginations, the worlds of possibility that books opened up for them. The Web will replace all that fresh fruit with crowd-sourced applesauce, they wail. They usually admit (with mock-sheepish pride) that they had been bookworms in school — staying up late to read under the covers, wandering through the shelves of used-book stores for hours on end, and on a first-name basis with the local librarian.

I am a writer and a lover of books in large part because I was fired up by passionate English teachers. And because language was the fire in me waiting to be stoked. It may sound trite, but my tenth-grade English teacher assigned the massive tome Of Human Bondage and it absolutely and completely transformed my life. Probably not so much the kid sitting next to me, whose passion maybe was chemistry and whose life was completely transformed by the cool and charmingly eccentric chemistry teacher, and who found the book to be too illogical and emotional. Or the kid in front of me, who was perhaps a gifted athlete and whose talents were fostered by our compact, pugnacious gym instructor, and who thought that reading literature was totally gay. Same book, three completely different and internally consistent reactions that will in some way affect each of their approaches to reading as adults.

Now say that any one of these three students goes on to develop the Internet’s dominant algorithm for assigning value to content. How would each one of them, when interviewed by Wired or NPR, rank the importance of making books like Of Human Bondage available to kids?

Generalizing outward from our own experience is always a risky thing. We’ll always find a study, an expert, a group, a news channel, a party that reinforces what we want to hear, what we “know in our gut” to be true. Big whoop. Doesn’t mean you’re right, just means a lot of people think the same way.

The funny thing is that I’m seeing all these Jack D. Ripper types on both sides of the debate relying on their respective echo chambers to bolster their arguments that the Internet will both free us from and ensnare us in just such a global echo chamber.

I love books, and I love e-books. I love reading on paper. I love reading on a screen. I will read them in a book. I will read them on a Nook. I will read them on a box. I will never, ever detox. I will always read more words, I will always read them, o you nerds.

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If my tree falls into a neighbor’s forest, but it doesn’t make a sound, who’s liable for the damage?

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That’s my intentional over-simplification of an op-ed written by Ben Elowitz, founder of several social media and e-commerce websites you’ve never heard of, writing on Paid Content (I know, getting worked up over something on Paid Content is like taking a bazooka to a goldfish in a barrel, but whaddya gonna do).

According to our man here, credentials, correctness (accuracy), objectivity and craftsmanship may have “made sense for the world of Publishing 1.0, from Gutenberg until 1995,” but in the wonderland of “Publishing 2.0,” those measures of quality are “about as useful as the cubit is in modern architecture.” (I’ll let his poor grammar and mixed metaphor stand uncorrected because I only edit other people’s stuff for money anymore.) He asserts that they have “fundamentally changed and become invalid” and are “no longer useful.”

Let’s let him explain . . .

• . . . why credential is now obsolete: “The audience doesn’t care where the content comes from as long as it meets their needs. Decisions of what content is trustworthy are made by referral endorsements from our friends and colleagues on the social networks, and by the algorithms of search that help weigh authority vs. relevance.”
• . . . why correctness is now obsolete: “The audience can supply the suspicion directly without the publisher doing so as proxy; and the audience values timeliness more than correctness.”
• . . . why objectivity is now obsolete: “The audience doesn’t want a singular objective piece on a topic; the reality is a no-brainer that people utilize the natural multiplicity online. “
• . . . why craftsmanship is now obsolete: “For the vast majority of categories, well-crafted content is consumed disposably by the audience, and investments in craftsmanship are more an indulgence in the creators’ egos than an investment in differentiation that will win audience. “

And people wonder where Fox News came from.

You know what? There will always be plenty of readers who don’t want to pay for those things, and there will always be plenty of writers who are happy to step up and provide work that has none of them. It’s amazingly easy to write quickly, inexpensively, and in great abundance when you’re not worried about giving people accurate explanations of events, or using terms accurately, or writing in a way that clarifies causes and effects, or projecting your biases and prejudices on simpatico readers.

On the other hand, there will always be readers who are willing to pay for accurate, even-handed, well-crafted writing by knowledgeable people. Right now there are plenty of writers who are getting paid their worth to do just that, and even more — all those laid-off reporters — who are hungry for the opportunity.

What concerns me is the ever-widening gulf between the two approaches, and the increasing inability of people to tell the difference between them. This is not a new problem, by any stretch, but it does have more impact now.

Elowitz falls back on the worn-out trope that editors see their role as “protecting” readers from something. Well, for over a decade I’ve worked with dozens of editors of breathtakingly varied skill, and I can say this:

He’s right.

Editors do believe that they’re put on this Earth to protect people from something.

From reading bullshit.

Long live the knowledgeable, skillful, even-handed writer. Long live the knowledgeable, skillful, even-handed editor who pays such writers their worth. Long live the reader who appreciates quality — old-fashioned quality. And let them all continue their noble work together, looking ever toward the day when together they shall inherit the Earth they have worked so hard to understand and to make understandable.

(For a much more well-written, clear, and even-handed rejoinder by a knowledgeable writer, Craig Silverman of CJR — who deliciously dubs Elowitz’ piece a “bit of contrarian linkbait” — go here. )

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