Life After Typesetting

We would never climb on stage at an opera - or very few of us would. We know not to scrawl in library books, and although a few religious groups and schizophrenics harangue pedestrians about their salvation, most of the world recognizes this as crackpot behavior.

Online, we are at a disadvantage we rarely take into account. The problem is this: we grew up before the Internet boom, in a time when you could presume printed text had been vetted. Sure, there were bulletins run off on mimeograph machines and the occasional self-published Fantasy novel, but usually, if you read an essay or article, it was by someone credentialed to write on the subject, and had passed through the scrutiny of a number of similarly credentialled editors.

As a result, we are impressed by published text. We take it more seriously than speech. Even if we know that the thing we are reading is a blog entry we ourselves wrote at two in the morning, sent to a readership of four, and know how easily we could have published a similar entry made exclusively of the word "bloopie" repeated five thousand times, we give what we have written more weight than we would a telephone conversation.

We look at our published words, which may even be in Times New Roman, and we think they have the same importance as the printed things we read as children. We don't mean to; our brains have been short circuited. When we are blocked from a message board, we scream about freedom of speech and no prior restraint, although it is closer to a radio station choosing not to broadcast our calls, or a friend seeing our name on their phone and deciding not to pick up. If we were asked to leave a party where we had gotten too drunk and felt up another guest, we wouldn't sob about our Constitutional right to free assembly. Print, however, is holy - or was holy - and we extend this holiness to ourselves when we write. We defend our Twitters about the ownage of Face/Off with a righteous fury, asserting parliamentary procedure we half remember from high school debate club.

I think this trend - this disability - is passing, although it will take a long time. The 16-year-olds I talk to see social networking texts as informal conversation, not print, and routinely make the same source judgments we would about a bum on the street versus a librarian. You can see the tide turning on Facebook, where no one will talk to you unless they know who you are. This isn't new; this is old. That 20-year period of the anonymous Internet was a blip, and only held for so long because, at first, if you were online at all it meant you were at a college or you worked for the government. You were, in effect, vetted.

Those days are over, and the ability to publish no longer makes you special. If you write well, and if your authority is based on something real, I will read what you wrote. Otherwise, I will give you the same attention I would to a lay preacher bloviating at the bus station, which is to say none at all.

Vocabulary

Just read an entry by economics nobellist Paul Krugman in which he defines chutzpah as "that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan." Apparently, that definition comes from Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish, and in the word's Hebrew root there is no admiration expressed, in contrast to the American connotations. It describes someone who has significantly overstepped what is appropriate, and who now should feel shame but is instead arrogant.

While tracking that down, I discovered that in Athens, hubris was not merely the character trait ("excessive pride") that we all had to memorize, but instead an actual crime for which you could be prosecuted. It was pride that put one outside of an accurate view of reality, a pride that let one do things like rape, mutilate corpses, defile sacred spaces, and assault someone in the street without noticing that everyone around you was appalled. When Greek writers describe it as a terrible crime - or the worst crime - they are not speaking metaphorically. It's analogous to our concept of the psychopath - someone who grossly overestimates his own importance and cannot pick up on social cues to the contrary.

I think shame has been misused in the past - used to enforce who is allowed to have sex with whom. (Inappropriate shaming of another person also falls under the heading of hubris.) However, I don't think the solution was to enter a shameless society, or to reject all shame as useless. I don't think I trust people who don't feel shame when they act shamefully, and although I hate it when I myself feel ashamed, I hate it because I know then that I've done something awful.

(Postscript: Aid groups in Britain and in India have found that social shame does more than education in convincing people to follow proper sanitation practices. Shame, in these cases, literally saves lives.)