Look How Much The Internet Cares

While reading this post, you should be listening to Perfect Bird by Hexstatic and Missalu Aduna by Omzo.¹

Dave Steinberg writes a column on How much do we have to care about? with annotations by Ethan Zuckerman. Both of these men are very intelligent, both write very well and both are concerned with how the internet can improve the human condition. So why are both of them so egregiously wrong?

MAKE ME THE OTHER

Dave and Ethan’s worries can be divided into two questions:

The population of Nigeria roughly equals the population of Japan. Yet, the amount of space given to Nigeria by the US news media makes it about the size of Britney Spears’ left pinky toe. Why?

Because Nigeria has virtually no historical connections to the US, almost no strategic value in relation to US interests, and is a long way away. It’s also because the US news media is a terrifying joke, but that’s a more general observation than the topic under discussion.

How can we get past our homophily — the love of that which is like us — to get to xenophilia, which is Ethan’s term for the love of that which is different. How can we change the media agenda?

Of course, the media agenda is not responsible for our homophily – my hunch is that they’re only tenuously related for the purposes of effecting change, since homophily is about as deep-rooted a human instinct as it’s possible to find. It’s not the only deep-rooted human instinct, though, on which more, later.

In fact, they don’t mean how can we love that which is different. In the cosmopolitan stretches of the world, we already love that which is different (what authentic ethnic cuisine would you like tonight?) to such an extent that we forget that most of the world isn’t like that.

THE POWER OF PLACE

What we have difficulty with is that which is distant – that which happens outside our line of sight. But what is inherently good about loving that which is distant? If we invest in this, we run the risk of diminishing our love of that which is closest – our own culture. Given my professional and personal interests, you’ll have a hard time persuading anybody that I’m xenophobic – but I’m not so egocentric that I think that my interests should be everybody else’s interests.

The power of place will continue to exert a hold on human psychology because humans have to live in a physical world where distance and difference matter. The internet may not see those distances (although I think that the internet just reconfigures those distances rather than eliminates them) and the internet may help those already predisposed to xenophilia to get their fix – but the internet isn’t going to make people care more.

CARING IS NOT ENOUGH

Ethan adds:

You might add something about why this “circle of not-caring” matters. My stock examples for this are the genocide in Rwanda, and terrorist training camps in central Asia. We don’t care about these places until it’s too late…

This is where my alarm starts to go off. Who is this mysterious “we” that Ethan is talking about? It would be nice to think that “we” is the community of humanity, but in reality it means “people like me”, which elides into “a particular type of American”. Quite a lot of people cared about the genocide in Rwanda – I understand that most of the population of Rwanda itself got involved – just the “right” people (i.e. those with the power to do anything about it) and not in the “right” way (i.e. to turn caring into a workable policy).

The Save Darfur Coalition has made a huge number of people in the US care about Darfur – yet as far as I can tell, it’s had absolutely no impact on people of Darfur, except possibly to ensure a constant stream of celebrity access). There’s a danger in thinking that caring means anything, because the bad news is that caring – whether a little or a lot – doesn’t mean anything. Acting can mean something, but there’s a danger in action that is just a form of externalized caring – which is what I’d argue a lot of the Save Darfur campaign is.

CURSING THE FAMILIAR

Kwame Appiah’s book, “Cosmopolitanism”… observes that this opportunity to care about fellow creatures in far-flung parts of the world is very, very new. Two hundred years ago, only the most learned city-dwellers would regularly interact with people of other “tribes”.

I’m looking forward to reading Cosmopolitanism at some point in my hopefully long life, but this argument strikes me as being nonsense. The history of civilisation is the history of contact – Europe has been a patchwork of competing factions (tribal or otherwise) for most of its history, as has most of the world. It strikes me that what this idea overlooks the simple facts of history in order to set up a strawman that supports a philosophical theory – but I haven’t read the book yet, so I could be wrong.

I call this “cursing the familiar” because it underplays the significance of local differences purely because they are so familiar. All those differences between different countries, different groups, different towns – they’re simply not different enough. We need something more exotic to get our juices flowing, right? Our own cultures, our own histories, are fascinating enough and need as much attention as Nigerian ninjas (or whatever you find exciting).

This isn’t an argument for parochialism; it’s an argument for recognizing that the familiar is important as well, particularly in a society such as ours where novelty is emphasized at the expense of continuity.

JESUS CALLED, HE WANTS A REFUND

This idea that we might need to care about all of humanity – or at least tolerate them in our interactions – is brand new, and starkly conflicts with basic human impulses – care for our family and tribe and fear the outsider.

This is nonsense. Christianity is 2000 years old, and has exactly this message; so do almost all of the world religions in some form, some more than others, some older than others. I agree that it conflicts with our basic impulses, which is why it hasn’t been particularly successful. However human society and economy are built on tolerating outsiders, so unless Ethan wants to argue that the last several thousand years of human history didn’t happen, it doesn’t seem a particularly strong argument.²

What was so exceptional about Nelson Mandela wasn’t that he was an amazing and vocal leader for black South Africans – it was that he showed compassion and understanding for white South Africans, including deKlerk. Figures who can care across borders are heroes in a very particular and recognizable fashion.

This isn’t quite true, and it reflects a common misperception about what it means to care about the world. We admire people who “care across borders” because of our philosophical and religious legacy. The Christian model of the martyr is the Christ figure, who sacrifices themselves for others – but there’s no value in a sacrifice if it doesn’t actually make things better for other people. Mother Teresa is a good example – widely admired, caring across borders, etc, and demonstrably an utter loss in actually improving people’s condition. We should admire people who make a significant difference in the material condition of the human race, not just those who fit a discredited religious model.

EQUALITY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

But Ethan is not arguing that newspapers ought to cover every village and every family. Rather, our newspapers should equally cover places that are of equal significance, or at least not be so blatantly out of balance. Nigeria’s population is as big as Japan’s, and while its economy is not on a par with Japan’s, it’s of growing importance to us. So, why the disparity? And, more important, how do we remedy it?

“Equally cover places that are of equal significance” is meaningless. What is “equal significance” for economists might not be of equal significance for environmentalists; what is “equal significance” for musicians might not be of equal significance for mountaineers. If there are more musicians out there than economists, does that mean that the musicians’ definition give their interests more significance? The reason why coverage of Israel and the surrounding countries is so prevalent in the US media is precisely because so many people find it significant – you may disagree with them, but what makes your view more “significant” than theirs?

The strength of the internet is to provide a platform where all these slices of significance can be found – and if they can’t be found, you can create your own slice of significance. Saxophone-playing members of the Austrian school who like base-jumping can (and do) generate their own content. But the message is – it’s not up to you, me or anybody else to remedy the imbalance on behalf of anybody else, no matter how offensive we might find that imbalance. The most we can do is to improve the chances of the victims of imbalance to strike back (which is something that I think Global Voices Online does quite nicely).

But, there is a serious dilemma here…Our interest is determined not by what we should be interested in but by what we happen to be interested in.

I find this frankly odd. I’m not sure why this is supposed to be a problem – if our interest isn’t determined by what we happen to be interested in, then what should it be determined by? Who judges what we “should” be interested in – people like Dave and Ethan, who have a higher state of consciousness? For somebody who’s a big believer in the power of collective individual action, Dave doesn’t seem convinced that the wisdom of crowds is working well in this instance, because it collides with his own perceptions.

MORE TRUE THAN ANYTHING ELSE IN THE ARTICLE

Thus, if newspapers or their online replacements become more proportionally accurate reflections of the world, we’ll just skip the sections we don’t care about. That’s what we do already: Everything you ever wanted to know about Nigeria is online, but you haven’t read hardly any of it, have you? Me neither.

You have just answered your own question about why there isn’t more coverage of these places, haven’t you? If you guys, of all people, aren’t interested enough to follow up on Nigeria, then why on earth do you expect the broadcast media to follow it up?

Maybe one conclusion to draw is that good writing is harder than we thought. Or maybe there is more good writing around than we think, but we need help finding it.

I think it’s safe to say that good writing is harder to find than you think. The vast, vast majority of writing on the web is banal dross, cattleprod cant or porn.

As is so often the case, the question isn’t whether the Web has solved a problem but whether it’s helped.

Absolutely true, and it seems clear that it has helped and will continue to help.

But on the Web there are multiple, overlapping personal and social agendas. Which results in there not being an agenda. There is thus no one putting broccoli on our plates and telling us to eat it.

Yet here you are, telling us that we’re not eating enough from the xenophile buffet?

I don’t want to dismiss Dave and Ethan’s concerns, because they are smart and they are engaged and that’s important - yet if I was being cruel, I would have to say that this whole piece smacks to me of annexing the world in the name of entertaining Americans. Mostly, their complaint is that other people don’t share their particular interests - even while they acknowledge that even they don’t share their particular interests (they haven’t read most of the online material about Nigeria, remember).

There’s nothing wrong with being a xenophile, but you shouldn’t expect everybody else to be a xenophile as well. Even if there are Nigerian ninjas involved.

1. However I couldn’t upload them today, so you’ll have to wait. Read anyway. [↩]
2. If he’s taking a long-term evolutionary view, then you can argue that several thousand years is still brand-new, but I don’t think he is arguing that. [↩]