Get Herald RSSLast week, I attended a lecture by writer and academic Scott Russell Sanders '67 sponsored by the English department's Nonfiction Writing Program. Sanders spoke about the ethical responsibility of the nonfiction writer and responded specifically to the debates that have arisen since James Frey's fabricated memoir, "A Million Little Pieces," hit Oprah's book club in 2005.
In particular, Sanders emphasized the role of modesty in fueling honesty. The ability to play down the "I," the individual story, in favor of engaging with broader social, political or historical narratives enables writers to see more clearly these macro realities instead of molding the world to their personal biases.
For most of Sanders' hour-long talk, I bought his argument. But towards the end of his speech, he tied the spread of egotism and the resultant lack of truthfulness in contemporary nonfiction to virtual worlds and reality television. With Second Life and the "Real World," he suggested, it's grown acceptable to sell fiction as truth.
In the question-and-answer session, many Brown English professors appeared to agree, asking how they could teach students to "detach themselves from the egomania of contemporary virtual media." As a believer in the positive impact of new technologies on our culture, I cringed.
Sanders was displaying the most common misconception older generations seem to harbor about Web 2.0 and its Generation Y consumers. Certainly, technology makes it possible to lie, and 40-something online stalkers pretending to be 16 are a valid concern. But they are a Web 1.0 phenomenon: The old Internet was about doing things just because you could, faking it just because the technology allowed you to be fake.
In Web 2.0, possibility and permission are not the same thing: Just because we can engage in endless role play doesn't mean we want to. Indeed, most consumer insight surveys, marketing experts and social media watchdogs tell us that Web 2.0 is obsessed with authenticity, that Generation Y consumers are more attracted to politicians, pop stars or memoirists who keep it real. Young readers, after all, turned against Frey as soon as his lies were revealed. They support Barack Obama because his romantic idealism strikes them as coming from the heart.
Moreover, if dishonesty is the result of egotism, Web 2.0 is likely to bring a turn in a more truthful direction. While the Internet enables anyone and everyone to become a minor celebrity with a Flickr page or YouTube video, Web 2.0 does not reward the egomaniacs who try to achieve prima donna status on these content-sharing sites.
For much of history, pop cultural figures have achieved success by asserting their difference, trying to separate their unique perspective from the current mainstream and to create a new mainstream behind their own movements. Modernists made it by separating from 19th-century realists, then became the mainstream of the early 20th century. Nirvana made it by critiquing early 1990s culture, then they broke above ground to make grunge the new norm.
In today's decentralized world, that binary of culture and counter-culture has largely collapsed. But more importantly, today's young consumers are less concerned with finding artists, politicians or writers who can prove themselves adequately cut off from the mainstream.
Even those who begin acquiring fame as outsiders soon find that inside and outside are no longer neat categories. Think of Stephen Colbert: He's made a name as a media "outsider," even talking at media events about how morally bankrupt and asinine the mainstream media has become. That counter-cultural critique has catapulted him eerily close to the presidential ballot.
But last month, when Colbert wanted to promote his electoral run, he did so by writing a guest column in that bastion of mainstream media, the New York Times. Better still, he did so as a column-within-a-column, writing a guest passage to appear in an article by Maureen Dowd ("A Mock Columnist, Amok," Oct. 14).
Reading Colbert's piece gives the impression that the joke is on the old media: he laughs at Dowd for needing him to write her column for her. Reading Dowd's introduction, however, I am inclined to tell Colbert that the joke is on him: She points out that in order to make a counter-cultural critique, he's had to step inside the culture and admit that he's linked to it. Dowd's point is a testament to the Times's ability to adapt as an old media publication to the new media age by inviting the critique inside its pages, allowing user-generated content to flourish on its own blogs.
The key insight is that in the age of Web 2.0, links are capital, and being connected to others - in pop culture or electoral politics - is a plus. Bloggers routinely link their work to the work of others, pointing out as evidence of their own relevancy the fact that others are saying the same thing. The more they do so, the more hits their posts get, the higher their own blogs rise on Google searches.
Fame, in the Web 2.0 age, is shockingly devoid of both the "I" and the mass mainstream: it's about producers who deny allegiance to counter-cultural ideological movements, but who link themselves to others on an individual level. Which means that the young people raised on virtual media and taking nonfiction writing classes today might well grow up into the modest truth-tellers of tomorrow.
There's no "I" in Maha Atal '08.
