Internet Culture

The blogosphere is chattering away about Mark Helprin's Digital Barbarism
and Douthat's review of the book in New York Times. There's a lot of discussion about copyright policies and general dislike of Douthat. I'm mostly interested in the Helprin's discussion of Internet Culture, at least how Douthat describes it in his review.

“One could write a Talmud,” Helprin notes at one point, “in reaction
to the oceans of material supplied by commentators who either
deliberately or otherwise (probably otherwise) cannot grasp the meaning
of a simple sentence.” True — but this does not mean that one should.
In particular, one should never, ever write a book that includes, in
its footnotes, “Posting No. 12” from thelede.blogs.nytimes.com, or “Posting 3:41” from missnemesis.blogspot.com
— or comments by “Peep,” “Constantine” and “Anon,” from Matthew
Yglesias’s blog. Helprin acknowledges the peculiarity of arguing with
anonymous commenters rather than training his fire on more
intellectually serious targets. “Why talk to the monkey when the organ
grinder is in the room?” he wonders, quoting Churchill; the answer, he
explains, is that in this case only the monkeys really matter. “The
philosophical basis of the war on copyright is crackpot and stillborn,”
and “apart from unavoidable forays, it is best to stay out of such
thickets.” Instead, the battle should be waged “wherever the gnats in
their millions crudely make real the musings of the Mad Hatters.”

I would love to know the identity of the "crapulous professors."

So, we're all denizens of the Internet culture. Does Helprin make any good points here? Is the blogoshere composed of punk kids engaged in mindless babble? I suppose it depends on where you hang out, doesn't it?

There was another little barb against the blogosphere in the New Yorker this week. In her review of the latest parenting memoir lit, Jill Lepore writes,

If you’ve ever read a parenting blog, and I don’t say you ought to, you
have a good idea what lies at the heart of these books: ersatz
confession. Lewis finds newborns hard to love; Waldman hires a maid to
clean up after her maid. Lewis tells all—all!—about his vasectomy;
Waldman provides her sexual history. Waldman insists that how any woman
rears her kids is nobody’s never-you-mind. “Let’s all commit ourselves
to the basic civility of minding our own business,” she writes. This
puts a reader in a tight spot: can I or can I not skip the chapter in
“Bad Mother” wherein our author confides her regret over her breasts’
lost buoyancy?

Lepore is disgusted by the explosion of memoirs/blog about parenting and is looking around for books that actually discuss real political and social problems. Her review could have been a been a bit sharper, but it's still excellent. Check it out for the good history of the editor behind Parents magazine.