The Net. Use of English B1+

Postman passed away in 2003, but if he … alive today he would likely express amazement about how quickly his fears from the 1990s came to fruition—a slide driven by the unforeseen and sudden rise of the Internet.

Fortunately, Postman has an intellectual heir to continue this argument in the Internet Age: the hypercitational social critic Evgeny Morozov. In his 2013 book, To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov attempts to pull back the curtains on our technopolic obsession with "the Internet" (a term he purposefully places in scare quotes to emphasize its role as an ideology), saying:

"It’s this propensity to view 'the Internet' as a source of wisdom and policy advice that … it from a fairly uninteresting set of cables and network routers into a seductive and exciting ideology—perhaps today's uber-ideology."

In Morozov's critique, we've made "the Internet" synonymous with the revolutionary future of business and government. To make your company more like "the Internet" is to be with the times, and to ignore these trends is to be the proverbial buggy-whip maker in an automotive age. We no longer see Internet tools as products released by for-profit companies, funded by investors … to make a return, and run by twentysomethings who are often making things up as they go along. We're instead quick to idolize these digital doodads as a signifier of progress and a harbinger of a (dare I say, brave) new world.

This Internet-centrism (to steal another Morozov term) is what technopoly looks like today. It's important that we recognize this reality because it … the question that opened this section. The New York Times maintains a social media desk and pressures its writers, like Alissa Rubin, toward distracting behavior, because in an Internet-centric technopoly such behavior is not up for discussion. The alternative, to not embrace all things Internet, is, as Postman would say, "invisible and therefore irrelevant.”

This invisibility explains the uproar, mentioned earlier, that arose when Jonathan Franzen dared suggest that novelists shouldn't tweet. It riled people not because they're well versed in book marketing and disagreed with Franzen's conclusion, but because it surprised them that anyone serious … the irrelevance of social media. In an Internet-centric technopoly such a statement is the equivalent of a flag burning-desecration, not debate.

Perhaps the near universal reach of this mind-set is best captured in an experience I had recently on my commute to the Georgetown campus where I work. … for the light to change so I could cross Connecticut Avenue, I idled behind a truck from a refrigerated supply chain logistics company.

Refrigerated shipping is a complex, competitive business that requires equal skill … trade unions and route scheduling.

It's the ultimate old-school industry and in many ways is the opposite of the lean consumer-facing tech start-ups that currently receive so much attention. What struck me as I waited in traffic behind this truck, however, was not the complexity or scale of this company, but instead a graphic that had been commissioned and then affixed, probably at significant expense, on the back of this entire fleet of trucks— a graphic that read: "like us … Facebook."