I want the The New Yorker to get the Net. So far, they don't. Actually it's worse than that. Two of their best writers, Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik seem to be taking turns at slamming the Net and writers who have made it their job to understand it.

The latest is Gopnik's Adam Gopnik that The New Yorker"How the Internet gets inside us", which comes on the heels of Gladwell's Does Egypt need Twitter?, a follow-up to "Why the revolution will not be tweeted", published a few monts earlier. Beth Kanter, Anil Dash and other Net-side writers had sharp responses to Gladwell's latest, while Zeynep Tufekci had a good response own blog and in TechPresident. to the earlier one. But my favorite take on Gladwell is the Onion's latest on the dude. (Stop, go there, enjoy, come back. Good.)

Gopnik is another matter. I've read his latest book, Angels and Ages (about Lincoln and Darwin, both born the very same day) cover-to-cover, at least twice. (Here's the first chapter.) Best line: "Law is the practice of rules in a context of deals, and Lincoln believed in both." While we'll need a century or two before the Lincols and Darwins of our time earn full respect, I'd like to see Gladwell and Gopnik give the thinkers and do-ers we've got a little more respect. Gopnik is no less negative toward what academic types call Internet exceptionalism Clay Shirky for example. Writes Gopnik, "Shirky’s ... version of Never-Betterism has its excitements, but the history it uses seems to have been taken from the back of a cereal box. The idea, for instance, that the printing press rapidly gave birth to a new order of information, democratic and bottom-up, is a cruel cartoon of the truth." I read that and thought, "Hmm... is this a cereal box? Here's an excerpt:

Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press. She was able to find many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg’s invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther’s use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability.

What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?” Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify. And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

I'm defending Clay here not because I agree with him (which mostly I do), but because I know Clay has thought a great deal more about the topics at hand than Gladwell (who also slammed Clay) and Gopnik give him credit for — and, I'll bet, a lot more than they have.

For example, among the many polarized disputes about the Internet is one between what some of us call Bell-heads and Net-heads. Your basic Bell-heads are tech and policy veterans of phone and cable companies who believe the Internet is, literally, a "network of networks," and therefore exists at the grace of the entities that own those networks. Net-heads' alpha members are bald and bearded engineering and computer science guys, including authors of the Internet's founding protocol suite. In their corner too are developers hoping to make the most of whatever Internet capacities the Bell-heads and governments of the world make available. On both sides are academics trying to make sense of it all. To Bell-heads, the Internet is subject to the property rights of companies (or governments) that go to the trouble of building out the physical infrastructure the rest of us depend on to access the Net's many benefits. To Net-heads, the Internet is defined by its protocols, which transcend the parochial business interests of the Bell-heads. And, of course, both are right, within the frames they employ.

Doing their best to bridge both are policy and law folks — in government, the academy and the business world.

And then there are the business folk, trying to make a

I'm a Net-head. I have sympathy and (I hope) understanding of the Bell-head side; but I think the Internet is an exceptional thing, and needs to be understood on its own terms, whatever those are (and I believe we don't yet fully know). I also believe we have an insufficient understanding of what infrastructure is, why it matters, and how the Internet challenges that understanding. I've written a lot about all this stuff over the years, and I think I'm right, but I've also changed my mind, especially when better minds than mine make a good case about some topic that I know needs to be understood more deeply. (For example, Stephen Lewis, whose latest is here.) Gladwell's and Gopnik's minds are among the best I know, but neither has yet changed mine about the Internet. And I would very much like them to at least try. (For more about what I mean here, see this old Pressthink post by Jay Rosen.)

What bothers me is that they haven't gone deep enough. I want the full Gladwell here. I want the full Gopnik.

In other words, I think the stack of potential topics of discourse here is very high, and that none of us has the whole picture, or anything close to it. That includes Gladwell, Gopnik and everybody they critique, plus the many other thinkers, writers and do-ers who have thus far escaped their attention on the Internet matter. Among folks I know, these include Lewis Hyde, Lawrence Lessig, David Weinberger, David Isenberg, Harry Lewis, Yochai Benkler, John Perry Barlow and many other colleagues past and present at the Berkman Center, where it has been my privilege to hang out for the last few years. Among folks I'm getting to know, I suggest Phil Weiser, Dale Hatfield, Paul Ohm and Brad Bernthal at Silicon Flatirons, which had a great event I wish I'd attended on Sunday and Monday of this last week.

In his essay, Adam concludes,

...perhaps the instrument of the new connected age was already in place in fantasy. For the Internet screen has always been like the palantír in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”—the “seeing stone” that lets the wizards see the entire world. Its gift is great; the wizard can see it all. Its risk is real: evil things will register more vividly than the great mass of dull good. The peril isn’t that users lose their knowledge of the world. It’s that they can lose all sense of proportion. You can come to think that the armies of Mordor are not just vast and scary, which they are, but limitless and undefeatable, which they aren’t.

Thoughts are bigger than the things that deliver them. Our contraptions may shape our consciousness, but it is our consciousness that makes our credos, and we mostly live by those. Toast, as every breakfaster knows, isn’t really about the quality of the bread or how it’s sliced or even the toaster. For man cannot live by toast alone. It’s all about the butter.