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December 10, 2006

THE WEB IS "PANDORA-EXPULSIVE"

Today's New York Times Magazine presents its annual "Issue of Ideas": concepts and trends, inventions and advances that blipped across the cultural radar in 2006--from the notion of "Digital Maoism" (computer luminary Jaron Lanier's thesis about the oppressiveness of online collectivism that can foster errors, suppress individual creation, and trigger electronic witch-hunts) to the folly of "Tushology" (an effort to "scientifically calculate...the perfect behind").

From the pages of Watching the World Change, I'd like to nominate a worthy Emergent Concept:

The Internet as "Pandora-expulsive" (page 292):

"Visually, then, the Internet is Pandora-expulsive. All photographed actions--deeds and misdeed alike--are potentially consigned to permanent public memory. Once an image or videoclip barnstorms across the Net, there's no way to return old Flicker to the paddock and shut the door: Web pages persist. Even if they are deactivated, they can be retrieved if someone has retained a link or has electronically bookmarked that page. This propulsion into the public domain, irrevocable ad universal and unfungible, is one of the positive and negative features of the medium.

"The positives have much to do with the truths that come from transparency. In 2004, for example, Internet editor Russ Kick (of TheMemoryHole.org) was able to publish an online archive of long-suppressed images of the coffins of deceased U.S. soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, when he persisted in acquiring the pictures through a Freedom of Information Act request. 'The Pentagon,' according to the industry publication Photo District News, 'quickly said the granting of Kick's FOIA request was a mistake, but the images were out there and there was no taking them back.'

"The downside of Pandora expulsivity is sheer and steep. With a leer and a shrug, pirated pictures are often thrown up on a Web site--ownership, libel, and privacy considerations be damned. Pictures appear, quite frequently, without credits or accurate captions. They appear, as the culture critic George W. S. Trow coined the phrase, 'within the context of no context'--free-floating story fragments that lack rational connections with a bigger picture."

. . . .

Alas, George Trow's obituary appeared in the Times last week. (He died in Italy, of natural causes, at age 63.) And there is no taking back that fact, that life, that page.

As Margalit Fox would write so engagingly:

"Associated with The New Yorker for nearly 30 years, Mr. Trow...was best known for his provocative [1980] essay 'Within the Context of No Context,' [which later became a book]. As a result of Mr. Trow's work, ''the context of no context'' -- his pithy indictment of the emptiness of modern discourse -- became an enduring catchphrase in intellectual circles.

"....In mourning the passing of American discourse, Mr. Trow was not so much a conservative as a wistful curmudgeon. As he passionately believed, the shimmering Manhattan of Champagne, dinner jackets and meaningful conversation had been devoured, in the decades after World War II, by a culture of celebrity-driven bombast. 'A landscape rather like history with the tide out,' he once called it.

"To Mr. Trow, the culprit could be named in one word: television.

"'The work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and to chronicle it,' he wrote....

"He left [The New Yorker], incensed, in 1994. For Mr. Trow, the provocation must have seemed like his most dire cultural prophecy come true: Tina Brown, then the editor, had invited the comedian Roseanne Barr to edit a special issue about women. In his note of resignation, Mr. Trow likened Ms. Brown to someone selling her soul 'to get close to the Hapsburgs -- 1913.'

"Ms. Brown shot back, in a note of her own: 'I am distraught at your defection, but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught.'

"...[Said Rory Nugent, a writer and longtime friend,] 'George was tireless at the oars in pulling toward what he thought was valuable.... His world was that of Mr. Shawn and The New Yorker; of Diana Vreeland, who could be his companion at dinner. And the rest of the world was onto something new.''

Like Trow's life and death and even his obituary, this Web entry, as all Web entries, all energy and matter, for that matter, all actions good or ill, all lives and deaths, is, itself, Pandora-Expulsive.

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