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GOOD: Thanks the week 10th April 2005
GOOD: Thanks the week 10th April 2005Last Word
Jon Stock
The Internet is a wonderfully anarchic place, giving voice to those who might otherwise have been silenced and offering unprecedented opportunity to others. One only has to think back to Baghdad in 2003, when a brave blogger was able to upload his uncensored dispatch every day, even as American tanks rolled into town. But the Internet is not, I recently discovered, as free from worldly shackles as it likes to think and, without wishing to be a killjoy, I’m rather glad. Let me explain.
Personal blogs are great. Most of them might be about as exciting to look at as your neighbour’s holiday snaps, but that’s not the point. They encourage people to write, often from the heart, and for every 100 dreary blogs, there will always be one which stands out, whether for its honesty, insight or sheer quality of writing.
But with the freedom of the Internet comes a worrying sense of unaccountability, and many bloggers, ironically, write assuming that their musings have no consequence or effect in the real world (even if they desperately wish they did). In reality, of course, their influence is usually non-existent: a blogger in Britain who posts a dispatch about his favourite brands of teabag (I kid you not) is unlikely to alter world opinion, let alone the nation’s tea-buying habits. Although he has visions of literary greatness, his blog is linked to no more than a dozen others, and might just show up in a Google search of teabags—hardly a massive audience.
But bloggers are deceiving themselves if they conclude that they are writing in some sort of critical vacuum. No matter how pitiful their readership, they are penning more than a personal diary the moment they choose to upload it to the Internet. And with publication, however modest, comes responsibility.
Take the blog of one Vivek Kumar, a lively writer based in New Delhi. Now, I would never have come across this particular blog (vivekspace.blogspot.com) if I hadn’t been the sort of sad author who runs his book titles through Google once in a while (okay, once a day). Late last month he announced that he had borrowed my latest novel, The Cardamom Club, from a library and would be reviewing it shortly. Then, a few days later, he wrote the following: "I finished reading The Cardamom Club. The book is not even worth commenting on. Don’t bother buying/borrowing it. I’ll return it to the library tomorrow and hunt for something with some substance."
Apart from the fact that he had borrowed rather than bought it, I was mightily miffed by this. Not that he didn’t like it (I’ve got the skin of a rhino—you should have read what The Hindustan Times said), but that he couldn’t even be bothered to share his comments. In short, he had assumed that he was unaccountable, but he was—to me.
So what did I do? I tried to contact him by posting various messages on his blog. And that’s when I realised quite what a surreal place the Internet can be. Try as I might, it was very hard to persuade Vivek that it was actually me, as other ‘Jon Stocks’ had duly posted messages. In the end, we made contact in the real world and Vivek, to give him his due, has now honoured his responsibilities to a fellow scribe and posted a detailed review of the book, complete with suggestions for the Bollywood version (Hrithik Roshan to play the lead).
He still doesn’t like it, which is fine (I don’t care much for his own attempts at science fiction), but we’re getting on like a house on fire these days and I have become quite a fan of his blog, particularly a recent, utterly gripping account of a UPSC interview he once survived. The transcript of his encounter with the formidable Arundhati Ghose—she of the "not now, not never" address to the United Nations conference on disarmament in 1996—should be compulsory reading for any aspiring diplomat (Vivek now works for the Indian Foreign Service).
My point, I suppose, is a simple one: the Internet might seem a thoroughly vast and unanonymous place, but as search engines trawl ever more deeply through the sea of Web pages out there, it’s becoming smaller, more intimate and, ultimately, more accountable. On the whole, I think that’s a good thing. Freedom and responsibility are not such unpleasant bedfellows, are they?
Personal blogs are great. Most of them might be about as exciting to look at as your neighbour’s holiday snaps, but that’s not the point. They encourage people to write, often from the heart, and for every 100 dreary blogs, there will always be one which stands out, whether for its honesty, insight or sheer quality of writing.
But with the freedom of the Internet comes a worrying sense of unaccountability, and many bloggers, ironically, write assuming that their musings have no consequence or effect in the real world (even if they desperately wish they did). In reality, of course, their influence is usually non-existent: a blogger in Britain who posts a dispatch about his favourite brands of teabag (I kid you not) is unlikely to alter world opinion, let alone the nation’s tea-buying habits. Although he has visions of literary greatness, his blog is linked to no more than a dozen others, and might just show up in a Google search of teabags—hardly a massive audience.
But bloggers are deceiving themselves if they conclude that they are writing in some sort of critical vacuum. No matter how pitiful their readership, they are penning more than a personal diary the moment they choose to upload it to the Internet. And with publication, however modest, comes responsibility.
Take the blog of one Vivek Kumar, a lively writer based in New Delhi. Now, I would never have come across this particular blog (vivekspace.blogspot.com) if I hadn’t been the sort of sad author who runs his book titles through Google once in a while (okay, once a day). Late last month he announced that he had borrowed my latest novel, The Cardamom Club, from a library and would be reviewing it shortly. Then, a few days later, he wrote the following: "I finished reading The Cardamom Club. The book is not even worth commenting on. Don’t bother buying/borrowing it. I’ll return it to the library tomorrow and hunt for something with some substance."
Apart from the fact that he had borrowed rather than bought it, I was mightily miffed by this. Not that he didn’t like it (I’ve got the skin of a rhino—you should have read what The Hindustan Times said), but that he couldn’t even be bothered to share his comments. In short, he had assumed that he was unaccountable, but he was—to me.
So what did I do? I tried to contact him by posting various messages on his blog. And that’s when I realised quite what a surreal place the Internet can be. Try as I might, it was very hard to persuade Vivek that it was actually me, as other ‘Jon Stocks’ had duly posted messages. In the end, we made contact in the real world and Vivek, to give him his due, has now honoured his responsibilities to a fellow scribe and posted a detailed review of the book, complete with suggestions for the Bollywood version (Hrithik Roshan to play the lead).
He still doesn’t like it, which is fine (I don’t care much for his own attempts at science fiction), but we’re getting on like a house on fire these days and I have become quite a fan of his blog, particularly a recent, utterly gripping account of a UPSC interview he once survived. The transcript of his encounter with the formidable Arundhati Ghose—she of the "not now, not never" address to the United Nations conference on disarmament in 1996—should be compulsory reading for any aspiring diplomat (Vivek now works for the Indian Foreign Service).
My point, I suppose, is a simple one: the Internet might seem a thoroughly vast and unanonymous place, but as search engines trawl ever more deeply through the sea of Web pages out there, it’s becoming smaller, more intimate and, ultimately, more accountable. On the whole, I think that’s a good thing. Freedom and responsibility are not such unpleasant bedfellows, are they?
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Say something about good bad and search. I shall write taking an idea from there.