Some folks have responded to the rise of the virtual with irresponsible paranoia. That is to say, they fail to deal with contemporary indeterminacies and instead repetitively, compulsively, reassert their particular “truth.” Thus, some — not all of whom are neo-Luddites or technophobes — think that they can solve the “problem” of virtuality with a strong appeal to a strong reality. Mark Slouka locates this reality in the physical world and in face-to-face interactions. I wonder if he mistrusts books. Kurt Andersen thinks that the traditional press and their fact-checking rules can protect reality from cyberian incursions. I guess he is reassured by the vagueness of categories such as “facts” and “reality” and the nostalgia they invoke. Others reassert the authority of experts, education, and evidence. And I think about Leah Haley, Budd Hopkins, and John Mack.
Appraisals of the Internet that fixate on the truth of the content of Web sites, discussion groups, bulletin boards, or chat rooms resemble UFO and abduction “debunkers.” For all their appeals to facts and credibility, debunkers are less skeptical than many believers, less skeptical than those in the UFO community who are willing to question consensus reality. Similarly, some Net critics attempt to install in cyberia notions of accuracy and the commonality of truth that have deep connections to the liberal ideal of a rational public sphere. This resembles alien debunking because it doesn’t allow for other ways of thinking about what happens on the Net. They assume cyberia is a public sphere. Or attempt to make it one.
The idea of the public sphere brings with it presumptions about truth, discussion, and consensus. Debate in such a sphere, for example, requires that everyone accept the same conception of reality. Everyone has to agree about what facts look like. Not only would most liberal political theorists discount the claims of abductees, if they ever considered them, but they would argue that religious beliefs don’t “count” as compelling reasons in public discussion. For them, to say that a view is religious, traditional, particular, magical, paranoid, or irrational is to provide acceptable grounds for not taking such a view, or those who may hold it, seriously in political debate. Matters like these are considered too divisively private to matter in public. Similarly, to say that a position is violent is sufficient to exclude from the realm of the public those who take such a position. Millennial America has witnessed the effects of such exclusionary conceptions of what is claimed to be public in Waco and Ruby Ridge. It seems more accurate to say that the exclusion is prior to the violence. Thus, the liberal public is preserved and protected by the bracketing of certain ways of thinking or points of view. This bracketing, in fact, creates the public.
pp. 136-7Slouka worries: “By flooding the culture with digitally manipulated images, I’m saying, we risk devaluing all visual representations and, by extension, the reality they pretend to depict. Which is no small thing. Allowed to run unchecked, the crisis I am describing could come to have a profound effect on Western democratic culture. How? By knocking out one of the supporting girders of the liberal democratic state: the belief in universal access to reliable information and therefore, by implication, to truth” (War of the Worlds, p. 124).
p. 223
– Aliens in America (1998)