By DOUG SHAVER
August 6, 2020
I no longer remember the exact date, but I know the year. In early August of 1987, while I was living in St. Augustine, Fla., my social life moved from my favorite bar to the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. I had practically no friends left outside the bar crowd, and I assumed at the time that my drinking was the reason I had become so alone. Few people care to hang around with someone who's always drunk unless they're always drunk, too. I could understand that. So, OK. I was in a new playground with new playmates. I would make new friends.
And, I did make a few. But like all humans, I most easily make friends with people who are like me, people who share my interests and tend to think the way I think. In every place I have ever lived or worked, such people have been rare. In St. Augustine's AA groups, they were nonexistent.
I've heard the admonition, "If you have to drink to be sociable, that's not social drinking." So be it. Even when I was drinking, I never claimed that I was just a social drinker. But it did happen that when I was drunk, I was able to socialize with people with whom I could not otherwise have casual conversations. Alcohol was something like a social prosthetic for me. A crutch, you might say. But using a crutch is nothing to be ashamed of if you really can't walk without it. The problem with the alcohol crutch is the side effects, the way it cripples you in so many other ways.
In AA, my crutch was gone. And without it, I really was crippled, socially speaking. For a time, I thought to 12-Step program itself might replace it. I tried to become a true believer in it, to "carry the message," as they say. And for a time, I did feel like a true believer. Mostly. Just one little problem. All the suffering I'd endured because of my drinking had done nothing to weaken my commitment to scientific rationalism, and I could not assimilate the religious elements of the 12-Step worldview. I tried to, with every intellectual trick I could think of. It was hypocrisy, pure and simple. I denied this for as long as I could, but eventually denial was no longer an option. I quit going to the meetings, and I had nowhere else to go.
Except online. It was now 1999, and the World Wide Web was a thing, a very new thing. I found a forum, one of many populating the Web in those days, with many members whom I had much in common with. The website was operated by a company called About.com. The forum was called Agnosticism/Atheism—usually referred to by its members, of course, as AA. (Unavoidably, this caused occasional confusion, since Alcoholics Anonymous was a topic of discussion every now and again.)
Internet forums were the dominant social media around the turn of the millennium, but others were in the works, and various market forces were apparently against the forum format. Facebook came along in 2004 and managed to outcompete just about all its competitors. Within a few years, About.com withdrew its support from the AA forum, and in 2010 several of its members formed their own Facebook group. I got my own Facebook account just so I could join them, and it remains almost the only thing I use Facebook for. But I don't use it often. The Facebook format is just too different to facilitate the kinds of discussions we had in the forum.
And there went my social life, such as it was. I have never had a Twitter account or used anything else like it. I do watch a lot of YouTube, but rarely read the comments and even more rarely post any. Not that I'm whining. I yam what I yam, and one thing I yam not is good at socializing, even among my own kind of people. Since I can't change that, I'd better accept it, and I have accepted it. I get it that the world is under no obligation to accommodate itself to me. I'm the one who has to do the accommodating. Not About.com. Not Facebook. Not Twitter.
Such has been my own lived experience, and it was in light of that experience that I read "Journalism’s Death by a Thousand Tweets" in the online magazine Quillette. It was a paradigmatic case of blaming technology while denying agency to its users. Its author, Thomas Moller-Nielson, had some comments on an earlier essay on Medium.com by Jeff Jarvis, which in turn was commenting on a New York Times column by Farhad Manjoo.
Moller-Nielson was scolding Jarvis for suggesting that Twitter has has been good for journalism because it has enabled victim classes to make themselves heard. While making his case, Jarvis remarked on Manjoo's observation that "Twitter is ruining American journalism." Among Jarvis's responses: "I do not subscribe to the technological determinism and moral panic that blames the tool" and "When I’m a jerk on Twitter it’s because I’m being a jerk, not because Twitter made me one."
According to Moller-Nielson, "This is, of course, a variation on the 'guns don’t kill people, people kill people' argument, and it is as intellectually and morally craven." Perhaps my ability to detect moral cravenness is not as finely tuned as Moller-Nielson's, but I think I would see its quintessence in a murderer who argued in his defense, "I didn't kill anyone. My gun killed them." I would not accept that argument.
I feel very sure that Moller-Nielson would not accept it, either, so I'm not straw-manning anyone here. My adversaries are not, in so many words, denying that people should accept responsibility for their own behavior. If a misbehaving journalist were to say, "Twitter made me do it," I'd be very surprised if Moller-Nielson were to say, "Of course it did, so don't blame yourself. It wasn't your fault."
But in that case, just what is his point? Perhaps he makes it here: "that journalism as a profession now largely takes place by virtue of—and is, in fact, almost entirely mediated and governed by—a largely unaccountable corporate advertising and surveillance behemoth, the goals and values of which are antithetical to journalism, traditionally understood." And sure, that is a problem. But that "corporate advertising and surveillance behemoth" is still a bunch of people, not a technology. They did create the technology, and they made it available to the world, including the world of journalism, but then it was up to the journalists to decide how they would use it.
Many of them obviously are misusing it, and Moller-Nielson touches on some possible reasons why this might be the case. Most have something to do with some economic facts of the modern information age. There surely are problems with our current economic system, and they do need fixing, right away. But those problems are caused by people behaving badly. They are not caused by the tools those people are using to effect their bad behavior.
Next: Blaming the Enlightenment
(This page last updated on August 6, 2020.)