The New Yorker: The Internet Makes Us Stupid And Love Glenn Beck

Before the White House vs. Fox News entirely took over the media it looked like Cass Sunstein, head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, was set to be Glenn Beck’s next ‘czar’ target post-Van Jones. The question remains why? (Beck initially focused on Sunstein’s overzealous animal rights beliefs, but that was likely just a warm-up to the main event, which may still be ahead of us).

In the interim the New Yorker has taken a stab at Sunstein, and it turns out a great deal of what Sunstein preaches may explain why Glenn Beck is so popular. Short version: The overwhelming amount of information on the Internet may actually be making us dumber, and more racist.

“The most striking power provided by emerging technologies,” [Sunstein] has written, is the “growing power of consumers to ‘filter’ what they see.”…In 2006, Sunstein performed his own study of fifty political sites. He found that more than four-fifths linked to like-minded sites but only a third linked to sites with an opposing viewpoint. Moreover, many of the links to the opposing side’s sites were offered only to illustrate how “dangerous, dumb, or contemptible the views of the adversary really are.”

Sound familiar? How about this:

“Views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, can be found in large numbers on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible, or bizarre in most communities,” Sunstein observes. Racists used to have to leave home to meet up with other racists (or Democrats with other Democrats, or Republicans with Republicans); now they need not even get dressed in order to “chat” with their ideological soul mates.

Basically Sunstein believes that while the Internet may be making it easier to find movie times, and not get lost on road trips, it’s also enabling us to indulge in the angels of our worser nature. Interestingly, unlike Beck, the New Yorker thinks Sunstein’s conclusions are not partisan enough: “Several decades ago, a detachment of the American right cut itself loose from reason, and it has been drifting along happily ever since.” A conclusion, which may in itself prove Sunstein’s overall argument since New Yorker readers are not known to be comprised of, you know, right leaning types who might argue with this analysis!

Moreover, none of Sunstein’s conclusions on the subject sound terribly radical (in print! on TV is another ballgame), beyond being somewhat insulting to people who spend a great deal of time on Webs, as it were. How to fix the problem is an entirely separate matter, and not one there appears to be an answer for…though one might conclude the White House’s current ‘war’ on Fox is one, not terribly well though out, solution to the dilemma.

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