Internet

Unless you were unconscious last week – or perhaps a Yankees, Phillies or Red Sox fan in October isolation – you’ve likely seen the extraordinary online video of a horned beast attacking a mountain biker in South Africa. It’s captivating because of the random violence and the fact that the biker only suffered a concussion.

One of the features of a life in journalism is the casual assumption, expressed by nonjournalists at cocktail parties, that journalists “know” things: have the inside dope, heard the real version, predict the future. I have always defended myself by saying that, apart from being acquainted with public officials and the occasional celebrity, journalists know little more than the average reader. And as for predictions, your guess is as good as mine.

If you are growing tired of hearing all the gruesome details of politicians’ personal lives, you are not alone. But you may also find yourself troubled about what these stories say about the state of our culture. 

Jerry Brito, director of the technology policy program at the Mercatus Center, notes that the unrest in Libya could have an effect on the rest of the world, too -- at least that part of it that participates in social networking. Writing at time.com, Brito notes that Twitter's default URL shortening service -- often necessary to remain within the site's 140-character limit -- is bit.ly.

This week the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on COICA (the Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeit Act). It sounds like harmless enough legislation, or at least it did to members of the committee who voted for it unanimously, 19-0, during the lame duck session last year. But it's worse than it sounds.

In the Washington Post yesterday, Jackson Diehl had a column on the failure of the State Department to provide funding to something called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, a collection of providers of gizmos that can circumvent firewalls constructed on the Internet by repressive regimes.

“Nuclear deterrence during the Cold War contemplated an automated response to attack by the Soviet Union, and similar automated responses to cyber attack are now being debated. Computer network attacks happen at the speed of light, so future threats require an equally rapid and perhaps automatic response,” writes Mark D. Young in the Journal of National Security Law and Policy.

Last week, the Chinese government issued a new propaganda piece in the form of a policy paper on its Internet control policies. It serves as a typical example of Beijing's Orwellian use of language and formalism to dress up its authoritarianism as legal and rational.

ClickZ reports today that the GOP is quantifiably outperforming Democrats in online buying for House races in 2010:

Howard Dean has resurrected his "Hit the Bat" gimmick in an effort to raise money to "fight for a public option" in the healthcare bill.

Don't miss contributing editor David Gelernter's thoughts on the future of the Internet. A lot is going on in his 35-paragraph essay, but I was struck by this observation in particular:

Nowness is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern age: the western world's attention shifted gradually from the deep but narrow domain of one family or village and its history to the (broader but shallower) domains of the larger community, the nation, the world. The cult of celebrity, the importance of opinion polls, the decline in the teaching and learning of history, the uniformity of opinions and attitudes in academia and other educated elites — they are all part of one phenomenon. Nowness ignores all other moments but this. In the ultimate Internet culture, flooded in nowness like a piazza flooded in sea water, drenched in a tropical downpour of nowness, everyone talks alike, dresses alike, thinks alike.

This is exactly how I felt during the hour or so I spent watching the Oscars on Sunday. Hollywood seemed so small. Not geographically or financially. But in terms of cultural hegemony. The only real "star" on the scene -- in the sense that Cary Grant or Bette Davis were "stars" -- was Meryl Streep. And she lost. Of the nominees for Best Picture, Avatar was the only cultural experience in which the entire world participated. It lost, too.