The Brooklyn Standard

You probably know more about physics than you think.

See, right there, when your brain registered the p-word, a black hole of anxiety opened up in the pit of your stomach from which nothing can escape. Your underarms began to radiate heat as your mind conjured memories of stuffy high school laboratories. And as your eyes scanned ahead for those dreaded half-English, half-Greek words followed by an equal sign, the probability of you reading on fast approached zero.

But there’s hope! Whether you realize it or not, you just visualized some of the more important natural phenomena that govern the world around us. The stomachache was space-time curvature at a point of infinite density. The sweating was a crass simulation of something known as black body radiation. And your waning interest was a metaphor for quantum non-locality. What do these words mean? It doesn’t really matter. Even complicated physical processes were surmountable — even understandable — when they were put into the context of something familiar, say, traumatic experiences of young adulthood.

Without analogy and metaphor, a reader can quickly suffocate in the rarified air of the hard sciences. The task then for any science writer is to couch these concepts in colloquial terms and familiar experiences, and no one does it better than Brian Greene.

His second of two books, The Fabric of the Cosmos, is a potent distillation of 200 years of discovery and an invaluable roadmap of reality that is almost impossible to get lost with, regardless of your level of scientific knowledge. It is a compelling narrative of the search for understanding that probes the boundaries of human experience.

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I think the operative word here is “opportunity” when we discuss the Internet’s role and the blogger’s place in a new media landscape.

If a thousand people were standing in an open field, noses to the sky, as an airplane suddenly exploded overhead, most would have something to say about it. They would turn to their left or right and blurt out the first thing that came into their head, probably an “Oh damn!” or a “Merciful creator!” or something of that sort. I would wager that very few would calmly take out their notebooks, collect data, ask to make sure everyone saw the same thing, draft just the right expletive¹, edit the copy, and then read the result, especially if surrounded by a thousand spectators.

The access of an audience prompts the delivery. At the risk of stating the obvious, the Internet is tantamount to proximity. Though podcasting, vodcasting, RSS feeds, etc. make the delivery more diverse and entertaining, it’s utility lies mostly within it’s connectivity, which, don’t get me wrong, is invaluable.

On no other medium would I have the opportunity to read in succession and then juxtapose the gravamen of two dissimilar viewpoints. The volley between Lemann and Jarvis is a great example of the medium’s accessibility and thought provoking potential.

I think Jarvis’ thorough indictment accuses Lemann of slightly more than he is guilty of, but he makes several important observations, one of which is that Lemann is careful not to use the word “reporting” – a point that should not be dismissed as semantics but understood as a refusal to recognize Bloggers who do the job well as any reporter’s equal. Thankfully, everyone with an Internet connection now has the opportunity but ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. There’s just way more pudding to eat now. You tell me how in any situation, be it physical or metaphorical, more pudding could possibly be a bad thing.

Just as a kid who only eats McDonalds will surely be obese, so too will citizens with a poor media diet swell with misinformation. The Internet is a double edged sword in the sense that it provides equal opportunity to those who want to learn and better themselves as it does to those who want intellectual stagnancy and soundbite superficiality. In this sense, it is not so different from cable news channels. Not to completely spotlight my personal biases, but people who get their information solely from Fox News do so for one of two reasons; they either don’t want to hear the complexities of current events or they’re too lazy to look for alternatives.

I agree that the internet – in terms of speed, accessibility, conflation of resources, and sheer power – is a great evolutionary step in media delivery, but I think it falls just short of revolutionary. Some will use a new ladder to climb to the roof and unclog the gutters, and others will have a shiny, metal shelf on which to place some pretty flowerpots.

¹”Huzzah!”