Wrongheadedness

Listening to interviews with people whose views I consider to be wrongheaded - such as Andrew Keen (he who thinks the Internet is wrecking our culture) and Nicholson Baker - (he who thinks Churchill was nearly as bad as Hitler and that the Allies should never have gone to war with Nazi Germany) it has struck me that there may even be something in the very timbre of their voices that should alert us to the presence of a tosh-merchant. For a start, both these men speak too slowly - at least when they are discoursing on their core contrarian ideas.

Still, wrongheadedness is never an an absolute quality. Baker's assertion that the way Churchill pursued a low-level bombing war may have accelerated the logic of the Holocaust - at least by bringing Germany and its bureaucratic institutions fully behind the more dangerous Nazi notions -  is one that may be difficult to entirely dismiss. Yet I's still have to content that if you imagine that history is a collection of well signposted forks in the road ur not doing it right. 

Still, WWII was always the big BUT... that my developing, essentially pacifistic intellect had to deal with and, without having had a chance yet to read Human Smoke, I sense that this is one fly in the ointment whose presence I'd at least like to acknowledge.

Andrew Keen meanwhile insists that the purpose of the media is to give experts a platform. He revels in his status as the 'Antichrist of Silicon Valley' ....and boy do some of those narcissistic digital libertarians out there need a fly in their ointment. 

For me the technological culture (especially as it relates to the media) is something I have been able to put on and take off rather like a costume; I'm not one to go around all the time dolled up like a complete homo digitalis, and one of the pleasures of moving out here has been the ability to leave this particular outfit back home in the cupboard for more extended periods. 

Keen is also wrong in a way that Baker isn't - factually wrong as opposed to just emotionally wrong. I often wonder whether thinkers who so consciously go against the grain are in some way aware of the intellectual integrity they have surely had to sacrifice in order to eschew the norms of balance. Perhaps their slow, deliberate diction is a clue to this.

I was recently listening to a radio piece about a new Brazilian venture called Movie Mobs, where people use a social network to gather groups to view films of their own choice. Andrew Keen should pay a visit to Brazil, for here is a nation that has immersed itself almost completely in social media. It strikes me that the 'expert' losing control in this instance, is the phoney expert we tend to call a marketer.