[/caption]by Michael Cosgrove - What do a 24-hour detox diet, soldiers whooping with delight when they kill the enemy in battle, and Internet news sites have in common? Answer – they all teach us a lot about human behavior and self-preservation.
Many people who decide not to eat for 24 hours in order to ‘purge the system’ will tell you that they do so because their bodies ‘know’ when they contain too many impurities for their own good, impurities which slowly accumulate over time as a result of what they eat. They say that they periodically feel a visceral need to eliminate the various chemicals and other artificial elements that are used in a lot of mass-produced food. It is an instinctive human reaction which kicks in when people realize that their bodies need to be looked after.
The same kind of instinctive reaction can be observed in soldiers. They are acutely aware that they may lose their lives from one instant to the next when they come under fire and suddenly find themselves in an extremely stressful kill-or-be-killed situation. When they manage to kill the enemy and the firing stops they often let out shouts of delight. This may sound like a cruel thing to do, but they are not celebrating like happy kids who won the relay race. They are eliminating the extraordinarily high levels of tension and adrenaline they were pumped up with when they were under mortal threat. This too is a reflexive, natural and necessary human phenomenon.
There is an element of automatic self-preservation to be observed in both of these situations. All living beings have a strong and innate sense of survival and humans are no exception.
Which leads us to the Internet. A new development – it’s a one-second old newborn baby with an as-yet uncut umbilical cord if you compare its relative age to the length of time humans have existed on Earth – the Internet is at the equivalent of a Paleolithic stage of development. Yet it has already become such a crucially interwoven part of our existence and social fabric that the consequences of having to do without it starting tomorrow morning would be incalculable.
The things that happen on the Internet and the uses it is put to vary from uplifting, to harmlessly innocuous, and to downright bad. That isn’t surprising because when all’s said and done it is only a mirror held up to the behavior of those who use it.
Internet sites can be uplifting (arts and culture sites for example), harmless and banal (your local transport authority’s site), and downright bad (neo-fascist sites), but news sites contain the whole gamut of human reaction and intentions, from the best to the worst.
This is because news stories and events can be extremely polarizing. Before the Internet came along papers would just print the news as they saw it and people would buy and read their preferred version of the news and get mad at it or be pleased at it. But rare were those who would walk into a bar to pick a violent argument with someone they’d never met who didn’t share the same opinions on, say, the Mideast or the financial crisis. Those hotheads would either get their noses put out of joint by someone bigger than them or get arrested for threatening behavior or a breach of the peace or something.
But now that we have the Internet along with its increasing numbers of comment threads and forums, some rabid Bin Laden apologist in New Jersey or somewhere can easily, by using a series of digital zeros and ones to turn his thoughts into ‘speech’, tell some gentle young female student in Manila who believes Bin Laden was a terrorist killer that she is “a fascist western boot-licker who deserves to die!” Better still, and even more angrily, he can PUT IT ALL IN CAPS!!! In the same way, a pro-Obama or Palin comment may attract a scathing “Are you for real? I mean, are you?!” And on it goes, these exchanges being conducted from from behind computer screens and avatars such as ‘FreedomCome’ or ‘World’sEndUnite.’ All of this and worse can be read every day on major mainstream press sites.
Unfortunately, the mainstream press has recognized the money-making potential of this phenomena and the fact that more hits, readers and comments translate directly into advertising revenue. That’s why more and more of them offer comment threads on more and more articles, not only articles on art and, say, gardening, but particularly on articles concerning sensitive subjects such as politics, conflict and religion. Reader interaction on this kind of article can become very nasty and attract large amounts of traffic. This is why there are more and more opinion, comment, and op-ed articles on their sites – because that kind of article automatically results in a for-or-against reader reaction.
The mainstream press encourages this reality via the use of a falsely democratic rationale based on ‘reader participation’ and ‘giving the public their say.’ This sounds wonderful in theory, but it has resulted in more and more deleterious debate and provocative article writing, because they can’t resist the temptation to make money.
So much for the mainstream, but what about the alternatives? The blogs and the citizen journalism sites? After all, they proclaim themselves to be at the vanguard of a press revolution which aims to give news back to people without thinking about corporate profit. But they resort even more to shock tactics and doubtful practices than the mainstream, and the result, far from giving lessons to the mainstream on how a news outlet should be run, takes the worst examples of mainstream practices and exploits them to hitherto unseen levels of unscrupulous conduct.
Citizen journalism and news blogs are to be found in a murky and dangerous sector of the Internet news spectrum, the sector where trolls, flamers, shills and conspiracy theorists congregate, like shoals of piranha fish. These sites mimic the mainstream in appearance, but the content can be much more toxic. Comment threads full of spite, vituperation, recrimination and revenge pullulate like bacteria on so-called ‘opinion’ or ‘op-ed’ articles which are no more than a platform for blatant propaganda. Not only that, even the ‘news’ articles are too often heavily laced with bias using subterfuges such as numerous links to one-sided interpretations of events. All this demonstrates lax editing of articles, their intention, and their factual content too. And it is done this way to attract hits, subscribers and advertising.
One particularly worrying tendency of citizen journalism from the beginning has been its tendency to publish work which announces or supports conspiracy theories or which uses them as part of what purports to be reasoned analysis based on the facts. That it is being accepted is just another part of the shock-horror effort to attract readers. Citizen journalism is becoming cynical before its time, and this phenomenon is, in turn, attracting cynics.
So what does all this have to do with diets, soldiers, self-preservation and human behavior?
I contribute articles to the mainstream press and, until recently, I contributed news and opinion/op-ed to some of the larger citizen journalist sites. And I, as a human being just like anyone else, have been exposed to all I have described above for a long while. I have thus on occasion fallen prey to the temptation to respond in aggressive terms to provocation, I too have harangued certain agenda merchants who pose as analysis writers, and far too many a time have I switched off my computer at the end of an evening feeling angry and wired.
But I've had enough of the violent sentiments and dishonest writing.
This means that although I still write for the mainstream press, I have abandoned its opinion articles and comment threads. It’s all too vexing. I have also stopped contributing to major citizen journalism sites. My mind is telling me that those things are not good for me. My intellect is telling me that the fundamental principles of good journalism are being neglected in the headlong rush to make a profit. My heart tells me I should be somewhere where people who have never met can exchange points of view in a civilized manner, somewhere where writers have a sense of what ethical writing is, somewhere I am glad to log on to, somewhere I can try to forge potentially long-lasting intellectual dialogue with people.
There are many kinds of human behavior, and self-preservation is an instinct. And it is precisely because the nastier of the former have polluted the press that - as is the case of people who want to feel better or soldiers who want to stay alive - the latter has kicked in. Viscerally, and instinctively.
