Raging against the internet machine

Lee Siegel is a cultural critic who has written for The New York Times, Slate and The Nation. However, he is perhaps best known for what happened in 2006 when writing for The New Republic.

Exasperated by anonymous attacks made against him through the site's talkback facility, he created a pseudonym to exact revenge on his critics via the message board. Quickly exposed, Siegel was suspended from the publication but eventually reinstated in early 2007.

Following his experiences at the sharp end of Web 2.0, Siegel wrote a book, Against The Machine, which criticises what he sees as the web's mob mentality and antipathy towards those who dare to be different.

Suggesting that commerce's intrusion into the internet goes hand in hand with people's packaging of themselves through phenomena like social networking, Siegel argues that a war for culture is currently underway. ZDNet.co.uk interviewed Siegel in London, to see whether we are really all doomed.

Q: You're upfront in the book about your experience on The New Republic's message boards. How much did that influence the tone of this book?
A: The book does not come out of that; I've been criticising the internet for some years, most intensively in my blog. I'd tried to get a book contract [on the subject], but I guess that doesn't matter for those who think this is an act of revenge. I have been thinking for a long time about the tension between culture and democracy, and that tension is crystallised on the internet, supposedly the most democratic medium.

Is the internet not inherently democratic?
Some would argue that we live in somewhat limited democracies, and the pathologies of democracy are amplified on the web. You have an egalitarian anti-democracy, with the illusion that everyone can have a voice; if everyone sits around the table and shouts at the same time, the loudest voices drown out the more softly spoken voices. It's a popularity contest; people will do almost anything to get noticed. A lot of the stuff that happens on the web that passes for social interaction would never happen in real life.

But social interaction has changed with many communications media, even with the telephone.
The changes wrought by the internet are more radical even than the telephone. On the phone you have the fluctuating intricacies of presence.

The book focuses very much on the negative aspects of the internet age, but surely the internet is a boon for some.
Ideally that's what it should be but, with kids on social-networking sites, there is a type of personality being developed. Web boosters talk about breaking down hierarchy, but there's always a hierarchy in human engagements. Some people are sneaky and so on, and those who are there to share things are vulnerable to the more cunning animals.

Should the children of today not be more adapted to the new medium?
Ideally, yes. There's this rift in the discourse about the internet — there is the 'ought' and the 'is'. A lot of people present the 'ought' as the 'is', but it could also be that the type of personality being developed is very conscious of numbers of friends and developing a sense of false intimacy. [The web] magnifies the high-school nightmare. There are good things being done [on the web]. Modern life is more atomised and isolating, and these sites should bring people in touch with others and allow them to find like-minded spirits. But it quantifies friendship.

Your book talks about people packaging themselves like products and links this to a growing commercialisation of the web. Is that not quite a logical leap?
I probably pushed it a bit too far to make my point. Maybe I'm guilty of quantifying what I think is a social trend. People are more complicated than that, after all. But, where you have everyone seeming to...