Virginia Heffernan, a contributing writer on digital media for the New York Times Magazine, has heard all the arguments about the perils of the internet. The virulence, the stupidity, the time wasted!
But in her recently published book Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art (Simon & Schuster), Heffernan posits that far from being a scary, chaotic place — or at least, a place where fear and loathing are jumbled together with unprecedented global interconnectedness — the internet is “the great masterpiece of civilization,” right up there with the pyramids, the Magna Carta, the novel, cars, telephones, airplanes and television, and cooked meat, among other achievements.
Them are fighting words, and Heffernan, who grew up in Hanover as the daughter of Dartmouth English professor James Heffernan and Nancy Coffey Heffernan, co-author of a popular history of New Hampshire, backs them up with her own counter-arguments to the doom-and-gloomers and hand-wringers.
When humankind turned to science as a way both to explain the universe and to develop technologies for manufacturing, it produced the Industrial Revolution. This led to analog technology and culture, and in turn to digital technology, which has, with amazing speed, superceded analog, Heffernan writes in Magic and Loss.
And from this much more good than bad has emerged, she said in a phone interview from her home in Brooklyn.
She has a point. Where else but on the internet can you delve into many of the world’s great libraries and archives, at no charge? Where else can you track, with a few clicks of a mouse, the journeys of your ancestors to the U.S.?
Where else can you see videos of veterans returning home to ecstatic reception from their dogs, the proceedings of the British Parliament, clips from this week’s Tony Awards, arguments for and against Black Lives Matter, a guide to the spiciest chicken joint in Nashville, and Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble on the road?
Heffernan, who has also written for the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and Mother Jones, took up the torch for the internet because, she said, she was “frustrated by what wasn’t being covered.”
There is a canon of thought that the “internet is ruining our bodies, minds and souls,” she said. Writers who take that view tend to come to the table with an existing bias against the internet, or elements of it, and then cherry-pick studies to back up their arguments, Heffernan said.
“I thought it was an elitist distaste for a new technology,” she said, pointing out that many artistic and literary forms and scientific advancements were met initially with incomprehension, resistance and disdain.
What the internet has accomplished that face-to-face encounters aren’t able to do on such a vast scale is to bring together people, some of whom are and have been disenfranchised, Heffernan said.
While it’s true that there’s plenty online that’s offensive, belligerent and even dangerous, “offensive speech has always been protected speech,” Heffernan said.
The difference now, she said, is that if you’re misogynistic or bigoted you will hear about it from writers who “now feel empowered to tell you this is brutal, or not funny. … (The internet) has given a voice to millions of people who didn’t have a voice before.”
She also acknowledged that she tends to “default to thinking (the internet is) interesting and I don’t feel the proportion of aggressive language is any different from any venues in the past.”
Heffernan, who is 46, has been drawn to technology since she was at Hanover High School. As a precocious pre-teen and then adolescent who liked television, as well as reading and writing, she became fascinated by the mainframe computers to which she had access at Dartmouth.
Former Dartmouth president John Kemeny invented the computer language BASIC, and the campus had a computer center where youthful explorers like Heffernan could test their technological mettle, feed their intellectual curiosity and, through a live chat room, engage with other people also noodling away on computers, as if they were ham radio operators plucking distinctive voices from the ether.
“I offset my restlessness about being in a small town with connecting with people up and down the East Coast,” she said.
She sees her own two children using the same process of self-education, whether for school or for their own edification — but on the internet and on social media.
“You can ask yourself, who were the Romanovs? And two hours later you can come up with an amazing portrait, beginning with Wikipedia,” she said.
She concedes that seeing one’s children staring rapt at a telephone or computer screen for hours can push against our ideas of what is virtuous, and best for them.
“It’s hard to look at your kid looking at a screen. They don’t look the way parents want their kids to look,” she said.
Parents sometimes reason that if their children’s habits and interests don’t conform to their images of their own childhoods, then something must be wrong, Heffernan said.
On the other hand, when she was younger, her parents said the same thing to her about watching too much television, and the generations before that probably admonished their children about being glued to the radio, the funny papers or the two-reelers at the local movie palace. What goes around comes around.
After graduating from the University of Virginia, Heffernan went on to earn a PhD in English from Harvard. But academia, it turned out, didn’t satisfy her in quite the same way that writing for a popular audience did.
So she turned to journalism, working as a fact checker at The New Yorker and then as a fact checker and editor at Tina Brown’s now-defunct Talk magazine before moving to the online magazine Slate, where she edited and then wrote a column about television. This led to a four-year stint writing about TV for the Times, and then to immersion in the universe of digital media.
What’s so interesting about the internet and its creations (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, Snapchat), and what Heffernan has tried to get at in Magic and Loss, is, she said, the “idea that the medium is the message. What did (Marshall) McLuhan mean by that? The content of what we do and say is heavily determined by the medium in which it’s said.”
Take Twitter and its 140 character paradigm. Although some writers argue that Twitter debases both language and reasoned argument, Heffernan maintains that tossing off a 140-character quip or retort isn’t much different from writing an epigram or a haiku.
“A lot of writers have written 140 characters,” she said. The structure of a tweet “rewards epigrams. It has staccato language, you get followers, you get retweeted and starred and hearted.”
The current reigning emperor of the tweet is Donald Trump, who has an ability to spit them out as if he were spitting bullets. Heffernan noted that Trump has said he considers himself the “best 140 character writer in the world,” and she sees truth in that, despite his penchant for self-aggrandizement.
“He’s gifted at it, there’s a punch in the way he talks. It’s not freighted with excessive deference or politeness. Something about it seems very raw, immediate, and unchained. There’s no lacquered PR effect,” Heffernan said.
She likens the tweet model of 140 characters to “what you can shout in a crowd without losing your voice.”
Facebook, by contrast, usually offers more reasoned debate. “You use your own name, you have certain responsibilities, and you’re not likely to go off the rails,” Heffernan said.
New internet applications seem to mushroom weekly, and they compete noisily for attention. At the moment, Heffernan is intrigued by Muse, a meditation app you download to a smartphone and which comes with a headband. (For those of us who remember actually using the Sony Walkman tape player, the band looks a little like the small headphones that went into your ears.)
The promotional material claims that the headband detects and measures brain activity in the same way that a heart monitor measures heartbeats, and that the app can help users ameliorate stress through meditation.
“It’s sort of a beautiful notion,” Heffernan said. And despite her robust defense of the millions of clamoring voices on the internet, she observed that, at the moment at least, “I’m into technologies of quiet.”
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.