May 21, 2004
Response to Alex Knapp
I posted this comment to Alex Knapp's essay on instant gratification and the War in Iraq. I also suggest you read Alex's supporting essays he cites here and here.
Begin comment.
Good work Alex. Just one observation. Your last sentence:
It's certainly true that in the Information Age, it's a lot harder to prosecute such wars, but that doesn't make it impossible.
I'm not sure this is true. In fact, I sincerely hope it is profoundly untrue. Unlike your example of unpopular wars won anyway, there truly is no precedent about how the Information Age affects the outcome of a conflict.
Having the facility to join in in any of a million informal caucuses on the war (exactly like this one right here), and more importantly, to bypass the relatively uniform negativity of the mainstream American and foreign media, may be one of the seminal "fronts" which allow us to achieve victory in Iraq. Just look at the unbridled enthusiasm and "hubris" of the organization Spirit of America (www.spiritofamerica.net).
I am in fact much more optimistic than the commenter Mike who states that "most people have little more to go on than the pronouncements of national leaders". There has never been a time in the history of civilization where we had to rely on the pronouncements of our national leaders less.
End comment.
Having read Alex's supporting essays (please do so now as my response will make more sense), I continue to disagree with his conclusion: It's certainly true that in the Information Age, it's a lot harder to prosecute such wars, but that doesn't make it impossible. Here's why.
Alex writes:
We live in an age of immediacy. At our fingertips is a broad array of information, products, and entertainment, all of it available virtually instantaneously. Want to know about the history of Livia's involvement in the Julio-Claudian age of emperors? No sweat--you google it, or you go to Amazon and order a book, and it's at your house a couple days later. Want to know what movie reviewers in Taipei think about Chicago? Go online and read the review. Want to grow a bansai tree in your backyard? Go to a nearby nursery. Want to see this weeks Question Time in the British House of Commons? Flip on C-Span.
Let's label the age of instantaneous access to information the "Google Age". Google as a widely accepted tool has been around for perhaps five years. Google as a newly coined verb has been around for perhaps two years. I recall an article which had a quote something to the effect: "I always google my blind date before meeting him to make sure he is not blowing hot air."
Two paragraphs down, Alex speculates on the downside:
But there's a downside, as well. In an age of instantaneous information, we come to expect instantaneous results. We're irritated if our package from Amazon comes a day late. We get upset that our new plan of diet and exercise doesn't give us the body we want in a month. We sell stocks when, after getting a new CEO, a company's earnings our down in the first quarter he's in charge. We're don't understand why the brand new coach can't turn around a team that's been losing for a decade in just one season, so we demand he be fired. And we become impatient on spending too long a time on any one thing.
This, in my opinion, is an erroneous conclusion. The Google Age is not much more than five years old, and as such, there are simply no people who grew up in the Google Age. Contrast this with the "children of the Depression", people who believe that there is no such thing as "good debt", e.g., low-interest home mortgages, business loans for sensible expansion. Everything is paid for with cash. The Google Age as a shaper of human and cultural behavior is simply "too new" to have had any substantive effect of the depth that Depression-era folks appear to exhibit.
In other words, I posit that instant access to information is not synonymous with, nor does it necessarily lead to, expectations of instant gratification. I don't deny that Americans (and the West) are largely an instant gratification crowd; we just didn't get there via Google.
So how did we get where we are today? Television. Television is the land of happy conclusions after a half and hour, of soundbytes, of fractured attention spans, of "bad news sells". As one of your commenters mentions, television (not just sitcoms, but broadcast news as well) is in the business of selling soap and cola, period. As a typical evening news broadcast has a fifteen minute news hole, what they have to broadcast has to be a) short, and b) highly impactful. We have lived for fifty years (two generations!) in the era of television. We are the "children of TV".
But just as there are many notable exceptions among the "children of the Depression", there are signs we may be breaking out of the attention deficit disorder TV culture in which we grew up. Instapundit posted this on October 22, 2003 (this quote is from the Instapundit post; take note that it is the "voice" of Bill Carter of the New York Times):
And men between 18 and 24 are apparently deserting television in droves. So far this year nearly 20 percent fewer men in that advertiser-friendly demographic are watching television during prime time than during the same period last year.
Alex writes in conclusion to his latest post:
However, as I mentioned in the article, if instantaenous access to informaiton [sic] could be combined with patience and big picture thinking, a much more complete view of the world could emerge. And here, portions of the blogosphere are serving that purpose. Glenn Reynolds, for example, has been linking to many 1946 newspaper accounts of the post-war occupation in Germany and Japan.
"Portions of the blogosphere" also happen to include the very excellent and thoughtful blog "Heretical Ideas". Alex, you are the vanguard of the solution. The absolutely delightful irony here is that you are the very cure for which you despair doesn't exist! How many hours of unbroken attention did you have to devote to your latest essay? Many hours for sure. I have spent the last two or three hours of undivided attention in my rebuttal. Multiply our teeny tiny ten hour effort by a googal or so and you may begin to imagine the impact. But probably not. It's that hard to imagine. But exist it does. What would possess John Carroll of the LA Times, clearly one of the most influential newspaper editors in America, to deliver this op-ed (via Catherine Seipp writing for The National Review)? A googal of bloggers?
Posted by nopundit at May 21, 2004 11:10 AM