Don’t Unplug the Messenger
America asked for the Internet.
Big business and marketing didn’t lure us online; established companies and brands came late to Silicon Valley’s game. Individual citizens moved online much faster as we understood the Web’s conveniences and possibilities.
We filled the early chat rooms and embraced their anonymity and experimentation. We chose to browse retail stores and then go home and click. We feared what we might surrender by using search engines and browsers and searched and browsed anyway.
We made the iPhone the most successful product in the history of products.
Corporations, nonprofits, and mom and pop shops equally salivated at the new consumer data. When the nation began to fear a dynasty of Bushes or Clintons, both Democrats and Republicans used the Web to go grassroots with maverick candidates who upended the existing power structures.
And everybody got to publish!
Long before smartphones and even landline phones, the country’s founders set us on this course of interaction. The oral debates, fiery political pamphlets, and complicated checks and balances of the early American government foreshadowed our Internet threads of rhetoric.
The founders wrote the Bill of Rights, the first ten modifications to the Constitution, while the Constitution’s ink was still fresh. They couldn’t let one piece of writing represent us for more than a year. The Constitution is our first interactive document, and by interactive I mean unsettled.
In my book The Interactive Voice, I define true interactivity as intelligent conversation with equal exchange, but I also call that rare. It’s rare because most open and informed conversation is volatile. America has always been in disagreement. Our structure is one of poised opposites.
The Web’s instability isn’t a threat to us; it is us.
America has always been a sleight of hand trick. People from every tribe on Earth come here to pursue freedom, but they never expect the neighbors—every other tribe on Earth.
We dream of post-apocalyptic landscapes now because we don’t want to hear from or see the opposition anymore. If not zombies, then we have to listen to one another—which is what the founders understood almost 250 years ago. We may each have a voice, but the only way voices accomplishes anything is through compromise.
The communications teacher in me marvels at the present access and engagement in the country. Despite the fake news and tunnel vision coming from every direction, even Vladimir Putin understands why our American argument is still the envy of the world—because his propaganda ministers still seek to undermine it.
America is not the order and march and dread of the dictatorship. We are the loud and oftentimes ugly Thanksgiving table. We say what’s on our minds and have the right to do so. Where else will the world’s tensions around resources and beliefs and classes continue to boil over and find expression in the dramas of elections and inventions and major motion picture productions?
The successful transfers of power from Bush to Obama and Obama to Trump should illustrate to Americans and non-Americans alike that there is no cabal, no plot, that no one is running this algorithm but our chosen, imperfect leaders, and us.
If a foreign troll thinks they can ride this many-headed hydra for more than 8 seconds, I’d like to see it.
It’s easier to believe in pattern, conspiracy, and boogeymen because you can stop them. It’s much harder to see your enemies as people who think they are doing the right thing even if it goes against every one of your instincts.
The Internet teaches us the power and the limits of voice. You can spin as many headlines as you want in which your narrative is normative. As much as your horse is ahead, our system assures there’s another race tomorrow.
I thank the founders everyday. They were so good at undermining our instincts. They put us in such a pickle and the only consolation is the other sour faces unfolding their napkins.
If you think all this volatility is about to implode, remember this one important bit of true news: the largest growing demographic in America is young people of mixed race and has been for some time. I find that encouraging.
America is the Internet. If we are broken, then we will fix ourselves. The world’s not going to end and there’s no war anyone can win anymore. We’re going to sit together at the table and eat like civilized people, however long it takes.
That’s what actually frightens us.
Happy Turkey Day.