Your radical ideas about religion as a means of social control have already occured to others

SomethingAwful had an amusing front page story the other day about the media's current obsession with blogging. The point (it's not news when someone uses the internet to spread information) is well taken, but there's a more interesting side to it as well. One of the regularly referenced philosophies in high school debate (at least when I was in high school) was the marketplace of ideas. The idea, which was always blamed on J.S. Mill although the phrasing is not his, was that ideas could only be truly judged when in a neutral environment in competition with other ideas. Thus, the marketplace could be used as a response to almost any kind of censorship or limitation of free speech. The truly free marketplace, however, remained an idealized concept. Even if the government does not censor what is printed in newspapers, newspaper editors do. Publishing house employees decide what is published. No matter how true my ideas might be and how false the ideas of, say, Clarence Page might be, there is no chance that my ideas will have as much impact as Page's because he is published in the pages of the Chicago Tribune (at least) and I'm just ranting on a webpage.

The internet has a certain ability to level the playing field, though. Were I standing on a street corner in Chicago with pamphlets, it's unlikely that anyone would take me even slightly seriously. On the other hand, my rantings here could, theoretically, be read by anyone on the 'net, and while Blogspot doesn't quite have the caché of the Chicago Tribune, there's certainly nothing to distinguish me from any other Blogspot user. Especially since the blogging sites have removed most (or all) of the technological barriers to anyone having a soapbox, the internet has turned into the largest experiment in a completely free marketplace of ideas yet.

So, how're things going? I suppose it depends on where you look. It's certainly true that neither Slashdot nor SomethingAwful would be possible without the internet. Similarly, while print gaming journalism has gone steadily downhill, sites like Evil Avatar pick up the slack. One trek through LiveJournal, though, and you get a completely different impression. It seems like the reaction of the average net user to being given an opportunity to express themselves completely freely is to tell us about what they had for dinner last night. No, actually, I'm not joking. This fellow started a company, Fotolog, to enable him to post a picture of each meal that he eats.



The truth is, between LiveJournal, Xanga and Geocities alone, there's enough meaningless, empty-headed dreck on the internet to drown all the meaningful content four or five times over.

In response, the internet has grown gatekeepers. The news sites, like Slashdot, try to filter the meaningful from the surrounding swampwater. Ultimately, though, the search sites serve as the internet's biggest gatekeepers. Google's doing a great job, I think. Between their various searching gizmos, of which I think maps.google.com is currently the most impressive simply because of what they've accomplished to do with HTML and little JavaScript, and the way their other services, including Gmail and Blogger, are run, they're carving out a nice niche as the people who make sense of the web. I'm personally particularly impressed by their attempts to convince users of Blogger that punctuation and spelling are actually GOOD things.

In the end, though, no matter how much PageRank approximates market forces, and how well it finds the best sites on the web, Google's search results are not the result of a free marketplace, they're the results of Google's standards for what makes a good webpage, and we're still a couple of steps away from Mill's idealized marketplace. Part of me thinks that's a bad thing, but after my last journey through thirty or so LiveJournals, I'm not so sure.

Big, Wide World

I'll be honest: there's a certain amount I won't miss about New England.

The other day, a couple of friends and I were driving through West Lebanon, New Hampshire. It's not a bad town, on the whole, although it's certainly not wealthy or a center of culture. The road into town from Hanover is forested, running between a river and a decently steep slope. As you approach the town, the road moves away from the river and the forests give way to classic white frame buildings, first houses, then a number of small, probably family run businesses. It's not a bad image, and one of my friends commented, "You know, I think most of America probably looks like this."

Of course, it doesn't. Having grown up in the Midwest and taken occasional trips to the South, I can say with confidence that there are large portions of the country that look nothing like that. At the time, I had to chuckle a little, and suggested that really, no place outside of New England looked quite like that. My protagonist was a little taken aback; well, yes, he supposed he might allow that, but with the strong suggestion that we weren't really ever talking about those places, were we?

I don't mean to vilify him, because he's a nice guy and a very good friend of mine. I doubt he's even a very good example. That incident, though, brought into stark relief something that's been bothering me for some time. One of my professors is another prime example. As she talks about the various places she's been, the time she's spent overseas, I really get the impression that she's never found any place she liked besides her slightly idealized version of New York City. No matter where she is, she's fond of the things that mesh with idealized New York and dismissive of everything else.

It's a strange kind of parochialism, and I've never found it outside of New England and New York City. I suppose I'm not that unfamiliar with parochialism; after all, I grew up among a certain number of people who thought that a long trip was from the north suburbs to the south suburbs. However, I've found it slightly less bothersome to have never left Chicago than to have traveled the world and still have never managed to leave the place you were born.