Lewis Lapham, editor of Lapham’s Quaterly, has written a thought-provoking essay in Mother Jones: How the Internet Fails Us. From his essay:
“The times, like all others, can be said to be the best of times and the worst of times. The Internet can be perceived as a cesspool of misinformation, a phrase that frequently bubbles up to a microphone in Congress or into the pages of the Wall Street Journal; it also can be construed as a fountain of youth pouring out data streams in directions heretofore unimaginable and unknown, allowing David Carr, media columnist and critic for the New York Times, to believe that “someday, I should be able to walk into a hotel in Kansas, tell the television who I am and find everything I have bought and paid for, there for the consuming.”
“Carr presumably knows whereof he speaks, and I’m content to regard the internet as the best and brightest machine ever made by man, but nonetheless a machine with a tin ear and a wooden tongue. It is one thing to browse the internet; it is another thing to write for it.”
