Well. Jon's guest is Lee Siegel, Sprezzatura himself. The guy who was suspended from his TNR post for sockpuppetry -- apparently in relation to an ill-received post re: Jon Stewart, but I've failed to negotiate this particular web-history maze thoroughly, and I missed that particular blogosphere kerfluffle. He is, reportedly, an ass.
And he's probably here selling his book, "Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob." It's got a pretty cover. Here are some snippets:
Lee Siegel’s "Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob," ... inveighs against the Internet for encouraging solipsism, debased discourse and arrant commercialization. Mr. Siegel, one might remember, was suspended by The New Republic for using a fake online persona in order to trash critics of his blog ("you couldn’t tie Siegel’s shoelaces") and to praise himself ("brave, brilliant"). NYTimes
In "Against the Machine," the swaggeringly abrasive cultural critic Lee Siegel pays a visit to Starbucks. He sits down. He looks around. And he finds himself surrounded by Internet zombies, laptop-addicted creatures who have so grievously lost their capacity for human interaction "that social space has been contracted into isolated points of wanting, all locked into separate phases of inwardness." How long until they wake up and smell the coffee?
Mr. Siegel’s field trip illustrates several things, not least that Starbucks is today’s most hackneyed reportorial setting. His outing captures a vision of connectivity that is the precise opposite of what it appears to be. For him the semblance of a shared Starbucks experience masks endemic computer-generated isolation, a condition that has prompted psychic and ethical breakdowns that go well beyond the collapse of community. Janet Maslin, NYTimes
In a positive review of Lee Siegel's new book, "Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob," Janet Maslin called Siegel an observer of the "sinister side of Internet culture."
He's not just an observer. He is the sinister side of Internet culture. Only after he was found to be misrepresenting himself on his blog did he turn on the medium. SeattlePI.com
It also doesn’t help Siegel’s case that he is so angry all the time. "Against the Machine" is an intemperate book. Siegel is too quick to attribute mercantile or otherwise venal motives to people with whom he disagrees, and the range of interesting thinkers at whom he takes potshots is pretty wide...
The fact that a man as smart as Siegel came to put Lonelygirl15 and Iraq into the same train of argument is a sign of the Internet’s power to make people lose all sense of perspective. The ramped-up affect of "Against the Machine," its air of haste and its ad hominem quality are uncomfortably reminiscent of the blogs Siegel so dislikes. There are moments when it seems that Siegel is baring psychic wounds in public, and the reader comes to suspect that he was much more troubled by his bruising experience with the blogosphere than he is willing to let on. Why is so much to do with the Internet — so much of what’s said on it, and so much of what’s said about it, by its advocates and its detractors — so angry? "Against the Machine" doesn’t solve that mystery. But at least Siegel signs his arguments with his own name.John Lanchester, NYTimes
Granted, we all hate the Internet. Well, given that you are reading this on a computer screen facilitated by said Internet, maybe not hate the thing in and of itself, but hate what it’s come to stand for, that mentality which it represents. The Internet, in its mass hive mind, the vast and wave-like sweeps of its many moods and trendlets, can seem at times like nothing more than the seething representation of our species’ collected id.
...And it is the fact that his book is motivated more by his irritation with today’s online addicts than any serious intellectual engagement with the effects of online culture on our society, that ultimately keeps it from being anywhere near the call to arms that Siegel seems to believe it to be.
..He is quite right in presenting the Internet as a place in which some of the worst aspects of mass human behavior—particularly mob rule and brutally cruel commentary sniped in from safe anonymity—are magnified and exaggerated to an occasionally terrifying degree. But for the most part this book doesn’t delve into that topic with any real seriousness, instead spending its pages berating the second-rate taste of much of what is available online; snarking the snark. Siegel does identify quite astutely one of the Internet’s most worrisome aspects, namely the obsession with ratings and popularity...
...But as you can see, this really is just a gloss of an argument. A gripe, really....Popmatters.com
So, we'll see. |