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Links, Context and Little Green Footballs
The New York Times Sunday Magazine this weekend features a long article about the fallout between Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs fame and the rest of the anti-jihadist rightosphere. If nothing else it provides a solid overview for anyone who has noticed LGF’s change in focus over the past year, or read his November post “Why I Parted Ways With the Right” but didn’t remember too much about the controversy surrounding the presence of a representative from fringe Finnish political party Vlaams Belang at a 2007 Brussels conference that presaged it. You can get a good sense of the dispute by reading posts by Johnson and his enemies at Memeorandum; for context, I especially recommend Patterico and R.S. McCain.
But what interests me even more is the intellectual framework writer Jonathan Dee imposes on the proceedings. While there certainly appears to be a personal element involved for Johnson — one Dee apparently wasn’t quite able to crack — there is also the possibility that events occurred as they did because the Internet elevates the importance of links and the act of linking, opening the possibility for the forging of novel (and possibly false) relationships. On the Internet, the possibility of creating new contexts is limited only by any one person’s imagination. It’s impossible for me to say whether this is true in Johnson’s case, but Dee at least presents a persuasive case.
Key excerpts:
Fans of Don DeLillo may recall the final pages of his 1997 novel “Underworld” (no relation to the graphic novels, film series nor English techno artists) where the characters Sister Edgar and J. Edgar Hoover are joined for eternity in cyberspace, “a single fluctuating impulse now, a piece of coded information. Everything is connected in the end.” Well, I did, anyway.
Meanwhile, Dee makes a secondary point that this blurring of context may contribute to a conflation of conflicting perceptions which one may find too often in online discourse:
I cannot say that is what is happening here — I’m certainly not about to be pulled into a discussion of Vlaams Belang. And while misreadings of intentions are not new to online discourse, I think there is a “flattening effect” or, to borrow a metaphor from television, “time-shifting” of opinion which can sometimes confuse more than enlighten. Such confusion may be innocent, but it is also open to exploitation. With no information online separated by more than a few clicks, anyone can choose their own context. And in the blogosphere, some choose contexts incompatible with others’ — even if only for the sake of argument.