Expository Writing: Shaping Information Diane Ackerman

Removal of the intermediary. All those who stand in the middle of a transaction, whether financial or intellectual: out! Brokers and agents and middlemen of every description: ­good-­bye! Travel agents, ­real-­estate agents, insurance agents, stockbrokers, mortgage brokers, consolidators, and ­jobbers, all the scrappy percentniks who troll the bywaters of capitalist ­exchange — who needs you? All those ­hard-­striving immigrants climbing their way into the lower middle class through the ­penny-­ante deals of capitalism, the transfer points too small for the big guys to worry about — find yourself some other way to make a living. Small retailers and store clerks, salespeople of every kind — a hindrance, idiots, not to be trusted. Even the professional handlers of intellectual goods, anyone who sifts through information, books, paintings, knowledge, selecting and summing up: librarians, book reviewers, curators, disc jockeys, teachers, editors, analysts — why trust anyone but yourself to make judgments about what is more or less interesting, valuable, authentic, or worthy of your attention? No one, no professional interloper, is supposed to come between you and your desires, which, according to this idea, are nuanced, difficult to communicate, irreducible, unique.

The Web did not cause disintermediation, but it is what we call an “enabling technology”: a technical breakthrough that takes a difficult task and makes it suddenly doable, easy; it opens the door to change, which then comes in an unconsidered, breathless rush.

We are living through an amazing experiment: an attempt to construct a capitalism without salespeople, to take a system founded upon the need to sell ever greater numbers of goods to ever growing numbers of people, and to do this without the aid of professional distribution channels — without buildings, sidewalks, shops, luncheonettes, street vendors, buses, trams, taxis, other women in the fitting room to tell you how you look in something and to help you make up your mind, without street people panhandling, Santas ringing bells at Christmas, shop women with their perfect makeup and elegant clothes, fashionable men and women strolling by to show you the latest look — in short, an attempt to do away with the city in all its messy stimulation, to abandon the agora for home and hearth, where it is safe and everything can be controlled.

The first task in this newly structured capitalism is to convince consumers that the ser­vices formerly performed by myriad intermediaries are useless or worse, that those commissioned brokers and agents are incompetent, out for themselves, dishonest. And the next task is to glorify the notion of ­self-­ser­vice. Where companies once vied for your business by telling you about their courteous people and how well they would serve you — “Avis, We Try Harder” — their job now is to make you believe that only you can take care of yourself. The lure of personal ser­vice that was dangled before the middle classes, momentarily making us all feel almost as lucky as the rich, is being withdrawn. In the Internet age, under the pressure of globalized capitalism and its ­slimmed-­down profit margins, only the very wealthy will be served by actual human beings. The rest of us must make do with Web pages, and feel happy about it.

One eve­ning while I was watching tele­vi­sion, I looked up to see a commercial that seemed to me to be the most explicit statement of the ideas implicit in the disintermediated universe. I gaped at it, because usually such ideas are kept implicit, hidden behind symbols. But this commercial was like the ­sky-­blue billboard: a shameless and naked expression of the Web world, a glorification of the self, at home, alone.

It begins with a drone, a footstep in a puddle, then a ragged band pulling a dead car through the mud — road warriors with bandanas around their foreheads carry­ing braziers. Now we see rafts of survivors floating before the ruins of a city, the sky dark, ­red-­tinged, as if fires ­were burning all around us, just over the horizon. Next we are outside the dead city’s library, where stone lions, now coated in gold and come to life, rear up in despair. Inside the library, ­red-­coated Fascist guards encircle the readers at the table. A young girl turns a page, loudly, and the guards say, “Shush!” in time to their ­march-­step. We see the title of the book the girl is reading: Paradise Lost. The bank, too, is a scene of ruin. A long line snakes outside it in a dreary rain. Inside, the teller is a man with a white, spectral face, who gazes upon a black spider that is slowly crawling up his window. A young woman’s face ages right before us, and in response, in ridicule, the bank guard laughs. The camera now takes us up over the roofs of this ­post-­apocalyptic city. Lightning crashes in the dark, ­red-­tinged sky. On a telephone pole, where the insulators should be, are skulls.

Cut to a cartoon of ­emerald-­green grass, hills, a Victorian ­house with a white picket fence and no neighbors. A butterfly flaps above it. What a relief this ­house is after the dreary, dangerous, ruined city. The door to this charming ­house opens, and we go in to see a chair before a computer screen. Yes, we want to go sit in that chair, in that room with ­candy-­orange walls. On the computer screen, running by in teasing succession, are pleasant virtual reflections of the world outside: written text, a bank check, a telephone pole, which now signifies our connection to the world. The camera pans back to show a window, a curtain swinging in the breeze, and our sense of calm is complete. We hear the ­Intel-­Inside jingle, which sounds almost like chimes. Cut to the legend: Packard Bell. Wouldn’t you rather be at home?

In sixty seconds, this commercial communicates a worldview that reflects the ultimate suburbanization of existence: a retreat from the friction of the social space to the supposed idyll of private ease. It is a view that depends on the idea that desire is not social, not stimulated by what others want, but generated internally, and that the satisfaction of desires is not dependent upon other persons, organizations, structures, or governments. It is a profoundly libertarian vision, and it is the message that underlies all the mythologizing about the Web: the idea that the civic space is dead, useless, dangerous. The only place of plea­sure and satisfaction is your home. You, home, family; and beyond that, the world. From the intensely private to the global, with little in between but an Intel pro­cessor and a search engine.

In this sense, the ideal of the Internet represents the very opposite of democracy, which is a method for resolving differences in a relatively ­orderly manner through the mediation of unavoidable civil associations. Yet there can be no notion of resolving differences in a world where each person is entitled to get exactly what he or she wants. ­Here all needs and desires are equally valid and equally powerful. I’ll get mine and you’ll get yours; there is no need for compromise and discussion. I don’t have to tolerate you, and you don’t have to tolerate me. No need for messy debate and the ­whole rigmarole of government with all its creaky, bothersome structures. There’s no need for any of this, because now that we have the World Wide Web the problem of the pursuit of happiness has been solved! We’ll each click for our individual joys, and our only dispute may come if something doesn’t get delivered on time. Wouldn’t you really rather be at home?

But who can afford to stay at home? Only the very wealthy or a certain class of knowledge worker can stay home and click. On the other side of this ideal of ­work-­anywhere freedom (if indeed it is freedom never to be away from work) is the reality that somebody had to make the thing you ordered with a click. Somebody had to put it in a box, do the paperwork, carry it to you. The reality is a world divided not only between the haves and ­have-­nots but between the ones who get to stay home and everyone ­else, the ones who deliver the goods to them.

The Net ideal represents a retreat not only from po­liti­cal life but also from culture — from that tumultuous conversation in which we try to talk to one another about our shared experiences. As members of a culture, we see the same movie, read the same book, hear the same string quartet. Although it is difficult for us to agree on what we might have seen, read, or heard, it is out of that difficult conversation that real culture arises. Whether or not we come to an agreement or understanding, even if some decide that understanding and meaning are impossible, we are still sitting around the same campfire.

But the Web as it has evolved is based on the idea that we do not even want a shared experience. The director of San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art once told an audience that we no longer need a building to ­house works of art; we don’t need to get dressed, go downtown, walk from room to room among crowds of other people. Now that we have the Web, we can look at anything we want whenever we want, and we no longer need him or his curators. “You don’t have to walk through my idea of what’s interesting to look at,” he said to a questioner in the audience named Bill. “On the Web,” said the director, “you can create the museum of Bill.”

And so, by implication, there can be the museums of George and Mary and Helene. What then will this group have to say to one another about art? Let’s say the museum of Bill is featuring early Dutch masters, the museum of Mary is playing video art, and the museum of Helene is displaying French tapestries. In this privatized world, what sort of “cultural” conversation can there be? What can one of us possibly say to another about our experience except, “Today I visited the museum of me, and I liked it.”
1the Sun King: Louis XIV, king of France (1638–1715), known for his absolutism and ostentation. — Eds.

2Saint-Simon: A French aristocrat, Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) founded one of the most influential socialist programs of the nineteenth century. — Eds.

3a Tolstoy or a Flaubert: The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy published Anna Karenina between 1874 and 1876; the French novelist Gustave Flaubert published Madame Bovary in 1865.— Eds.

4Bauhaus: A school of industrial design and architecture that developed in Germany during the early twentieth century. — Eds.

The Reader’s Presence

1. ‑Examine the closing example in the essay, the “museum of me” featured in the title. How does the “museum of me” serve as an extended meta­phor for virtual life? What is lost in experiencing culture on the Web? What is gained? What conclusion does Ullman draw about the possible effects of the Web on our society?

2. ‑Ullman sees parallels between suburban living and the Internet and characterizes both as rooted in a desire to escape. Do you agree that people use the Internet to withdraw from “real life”? Why or why not?

3. ‑Compare Ullman’s more recent report on the effects of the Internet to William Gibson’s 1996 essay “The Net Is a Waste of Time” (page 696). In what ways does the Internet that Gibson des­cribes sound like what Ullman has experienced? How has the Internet today evolved from what Gibson describes? Do you think that Ullman would agree with Gibson’s depiction of the Internet’s meaning?

Marie Winn

TV Addiction

Born in 1936 in Prague, Czech­o­slo­vak­i­a, Marie Winn came to the United States with her family in 1939. After receiving her education at Radcliffe College and Columbia University, Winn became a freelance writer specializing in children’s literature. In addition to having written more than a dozen books for children or for parents and teachers of children, she has contributed to the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, and the Wall Street Journal. Her publications include Children without Childhood (1983), Unplugging the ­Plug-­In Drug (1987), and Redtails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park (1998). “TV Addiction” is from The ­Plug-­In Drug: Tele­vi­sion, Children and the Family (originally published in 1977). The ­twenty-­fifth anniversary edition, The ­Plug-­In Drug: Tele­vi­sion, Computers and Family Life (2002), adds the latest technological “addictions”: video games, toys, and ­baby-­accessible tele­vi­sion.

The word “addiction” is often used loosely and wryly in conversation. People will refer to themselves as “mystery-­book addicts” or “cookie addicts.” E. B. White wrote of his annual surge of interest in gardening: “We are hooked and are making an attempt to kick the habit.” Yet nobody really believes that reading mysteries or ordering seeds by cata­logue is serious enough to be compared with addictions to heroin or alcohol. In these cases the word “addiction” is used jokingly to denote a tendency to overindulge in some pleas­ur­able activity.

People often refer to being “hooked on TV.” Does this, too, fall into the lighthearted category of cookie eating and other pleasures that people pursue with unusual intensity? Or is there a kind of tele­vi­sion viewing that falls into the more serious category of destructive addiction?

Not unlike drugs or alcohol, the tele­vi­sion experience allows the participant to blot out the real world and enter into a pleas­ur­able and passive mental state. To be sure, other experiences, notably reading, also provide a temporary respite from reality. But it’s much easier to stop reading and return to reality than to stop watching tele­vi­sion. The entry into another world offered by reading includes an easily accessible return ticket. The entry via tele­vi­sion does not. In this way tele­vi­sion viewing, for those vulnerable to addiction, is more like drinking or taking drugs — once you start it’s hard to stop.

Just as alcoholics are only vaguely aware of their addiction, feeling that they control their drinking more than they really do (“I can cut it out any time I want — I just like to have three or four drinks before dinner”), many people overestimate their control over tele­vi­sion watching. Even as they put off other activities to spend hour after hour watching tele­vi­sion, they feel they could easily resume living in a different, less passive style. But somehow or other while the tele­vi­sion set is present in their homes, it just stays on. With tele­vi­sion’s easy gratifications available, those other activities seem to take too much effort.

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A heavy viewer (a college En­glish instructor) observes:

I find tele­vi­sion almost irresistible. When the set is on, I cannot ignore it. I can’t turn it off. I feel sapped, ­will-­less, enervated. As I reach out to turn off the set, the strength goes out of my arms. So I sit there for hours and hours.
Self-­confessed tele­vi­sion addicts often feel they “ought” to do other things — but the fact that they don’t read and don’t plant their garden or sew or crochet or play games or have conversations means that those activities are no longer as desirable as tele­vi­sion viewing. In a way, the lives of heavy viewers are as unbalanced by their tele­vi­sion “habit” as drug addicts’ or alcoholics’ lives. They are living in a holding pattern, as it ­were, passing up the activities that lead to growth or development or a sense of accomplishment. This is one reason people talk about their tele­vi­sion viewing so ruefully, so apologetically. They are aware that it is an unproductive experience, that by any human mea­sure almost any other endeavor is more worthwhile.

It is the adverse effect of tele­vi­sion viewing on the lives of so many people that makes it feel like a serious addiction. The tele­vi­sion habit distorts the sense of time. It renders other experiences vague and curiously unreal while taking on a greater reality for itself. It weakens relationships by reducing and sometimes eliminating normal opportunities for talking, for communicating.

And yet tele­vi­sion does not satisfy, ­else why would the viewer continue to watch hour after hour, day after day? “The mea­sure of health,” wrote the psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie, “is flexibility . . . and especially the freedom to cease when sated.” But heavy tele­vi­sion viewers can never be sated with their tele­vi­sion experiences. These do not provide the true nourishment that satiation requires, and thus they find that they cannot stop watching.

The Reader’s Presence

1. ‑How does Winn characterize addiction? How does she apply that characterization to tele­vi­sion watching? Do you think watching tele­vi­sion is a genuine addiction, similar to addiction to drugs, alcohol, or tobacco? Why or why not?

2. ‑Does Winn rely more heavily on evidence or opinion for her argument? Is her methodology convincing? What evidence do you find most persuasive?

3. ‑Winn describes the feeling of powerlessness over tele­vi­sion that some viewers experience. Compare Winn’s description of tele­vi­sion’s effects to Sherry Turkle’s assertion in “How Computers Change the Way We Think” (page 595) that “our tools carry the message that they are beyond our understanding” and that this “opacity can lead to passivity” (paragraph 25). What does Turkle say computer users take at face value? Is this effect significantly different from the powerlessness Winn describes, or are the effects of computers and tele­vi­sion similar, in your view? Is either effect dangerous? Why or why not?

Tom Wolfe

Hooking Up

Tom Wolfe (b. 1931) grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and graduated from Washington and Lee University. He received his doctorate in American studies from Yale University and began a career as a reporter, eventually writing for such papers as the New York Herald Tribune and the Washington Post. His writing has also appeared in New York magazine, Harper’s, and Esquire, where he has been a contributing editor since 1977. Writer, journalist, and social and cultural critic, Wolfe continues to be an arbiter (and satirist) of American cultural trends. His books The ­Kandy-­Kolored ­Tangerine-­Flake Streamline Baby (1965), The Electric ­Kool-­aid Acid Test (1968), The Pump ­House Gang (1969), and Radical Chic and Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970) ­were models of a flamboyant style known as “New Journalism.” Wolfe’s ­best-­selling work of “extended” journalism, The Right Stuff (1979), won the American Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. His three novels, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1982), A Man in Full (1998), and I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), contain the same blend of ­well-­researched documentary journalism, entertainment, and realistic detail as his nonfiction work. Wolfe received the 2003 Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for lifetime achievement.

Wolfe has argued, “A novel of psychological depth without social depth isn’t worth an awful lot because we are all individuals caught in an enormous web that consists of other people. It is in the social setting that the psychological battles take place.” “Hooking Up: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium: An American’s World” is from Wolfe’s 2000 book of the same name, a combination of fiction, memoir, and cultural and social observation.

By the year 2000, the term “working class” had fallen into disuse in the United States, and “proletariat” was so obsolete it was known only to a few bitter old Marxist academics with wire hair sprouting out of their ears. The average electrician, ­air-­conditioning mechanic, or ­burglar-­alarm repairman lived a life that would have made the Sun King¹ blink. He spent his vacations in Puerto Vallarta, Barbados, or St. Kitts. Before dinner he would be out on the terrace of some resort hotel with his third wife, wearing his Ricky Martin ­cane-­cutter shirt open down to the sternum, the better to allow his gold chains to twinkle in his chest hairs. The two of them would have just ordered a round of Quibel sparkling water, from the state of West Virginia, because by 2000 the ­once-­favored Eu­ro­pe­an sparkling waters Perrier and San Pellegrino seemed so tacky.

Eu­ro­pe­an labels no longer held even the slightest snob appeal except among people known as “intellectuals,” whom we will visit in a moment. Our typical mechanic or tradesman took it for granted that things Eu­ro­pe­an ­were ­second-­rate. Aside from three German luxury automobiles — the ­Mercedes-­Benz, the BMW, and the Audi — he regarded ­Eu­ro­pe­an-­manufactured goods as mediocre to shoddy. On his trips abroad, our electrician, like any American businessman, would go to superhuman lengths to avoid being treated in Eu­ro­pe­an hospitals, which struck him as little better than those in the Third World. He considered Eu­ro­pe­an hygiene so primitive that to receive an injection in a Eu­ro­pe­an clinic voluntarily was sheer madness.

Indirectly, subconsciously, his views perhaps had to do with the fact that his own country, the United States, was now the mightiest power on earth, as omnipotent as Macedon under Alexander the Great, Rome under Julius Caesar, Mongolia under Genghis Khan, Turkey under ­Mohammed II, or Britain under Queen Victoria. His country was so powerful, it had begun to invade or rain missiles upon small nations in Eu­ro­pe, Africa, Asia, and the Ca­rib­be­an for no other reason than that their leaders ­were lording it over their subjects at home.

Our ­air-­conditioning mechanic had probably never heard of ­Saint-­Simon,² but he was fulfilling ­Saint-­Simon’s and the other ­nineteenth-­century utopian socialists’ dreams of a day when the ordinary workingman would have the po­liti­cal and personal freedom, the free time and the wherewithal to express himself in any way he saw fit and to unleash his full potential. Not only that, any ethnic or racial group — any, even recent refugees from a Latin country — could take over the government of any American city, if they had the votes and a modicum of or­gan­iz­ation. Americans could boast of a freedom as well as a power unparalleled in the history of the world.

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Our typical ­burglar-­alarm repairman didn’t display one erg of chauvinistic swagger, however. He had been numbed by the aforementioned “intellectuals,” who had spent the preceding eighty years being indignant over what a “puritanical,” “repressive,” “bigoted,” “capitalistic,” and “fascist” nation America was beneath its demo­cratic façade. It made his head hurt. Besides, he was too busy coping with what was known as the “sexual revolution.” If anything, “sexual revolution” was rather a prim term for the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000. Every magazine stand was a riot of bare flesh, rouged areolae, moistened crevices, and stiffened giblets: boys with girls, girls with girls, boys with boys, ­bare-­breasted female bodybuilders, ­so-­called boys with breasts, riding backseat behind ­ste­roid-­gorged bodybuilding bikers, naked except for cache-­sexes and Panzer helmets, on huge chromed Honda or ­Harley-­Davidson motorcycles.

But the magazines ­were nothing compared with what was offered on an invention of the 1990s, the Internet. By 2000, an estimated 50 percent of all hits, or “log-­ons,” ­were at Web sites purveying what was known as “adult material.” The word “pornography” had disappeared down the memory hole along with “proletariat.” Instances of marriages breaking up because of ­Web-­sex addiction ­were rising in number. The husband, some ­fifty-­two-­year-­old MRI technician or systems analyst, would sit in front of the computer for ­twenty-­four or more hours at a stretch. Nothing that the wife could offer him in the way of sexual delights or food could compare with the ­one-­handing he was doing day and night as he sat before the PC and logged on to such images as a girl with bare breasts and a black leather corset standing with one foot on the small of a naked boy’s back, brandishing a whip.

In 1999, the year before, this par­tic­u­lar sexual kink — sadomasochism — had achieved not merely respectability but high chic, and the word “perversion” had become as obsolete as “pornography” and “proletariat.” Fashion pages presented the black leather and rubber paraphernalia as style’s cutting edge. An actress named Rene Russo blithely recounted in the Living section of one of America’s biggest newspapers how she had consulted a former dominatrix named Eva Norvind, who maintained a dungeon ­replete with whips and chains and assorted baffling leather masks, chokers, and cuffs, in order to prepare for a part as an aggressive, ­self-­obsessed agent provocateur in The Thomas Crown Affair, Miss Russo’s latest movie.