Mediawatching

Who's most narcissistic of all?

Be gentle with us this month, dear Reader, for we have been satirised, savaged by one of the bigger fish in the media sea.

Admittedly Michael Bywater of the Independent on Sunday is not the most sharp-toothed of columnists. Nevertheless this august journal was subjected to a severe gumming in his contribution of 11 January.

Obviously rather stuck for subject matter, Mr Bywater was reduced to entering his own name in an Internet search engine, to see whether anything came up. Hey, Michael, we've all been there, but best not to discuss it in public, unless your audience has consented - a meeting of narcissists anonymous perhaps.

Imagine the hilarity when he discovers that someone with the temerity to share his name was featured in the Obituaries column of the April issue of this very magazine.

'I pictured to myself a committee of solemn, horn-rimmed Librarians,' he tells us, 'dressed with elegant negligence, smelling of Russia-leather bindings and Acqua di Parma, seated around a vast oak table in the panelled elegance of the Association Record Room.'

So loud were the sounds of barrels being scraped in Canary Wharf that weekend that nervous inhabitants suspected an influx of giant rodents.

Intrigued as to how the venerable Bywater had been led to us, I followed his footsteps and searched under the name myself. This brought me to a listing for Michael Bywater's Home page.

'Nothing particular to say at the moment. So why waste bandwidth? Join the Campaign for Responsible Usage of the Net,' read the taster in the Yahoo index.

Now putting something on a Web page does not in itself take up bandwidth. It only does so if people want to read it, and even then text takes up minimal space in comparison with graphics and multimedia, so the campaign doesn't really stand up. Anyway I was unable to find out any more, because this particular Bywater seems to have heeded his own advice and removed the page in question.

Had the paper-bound Bywater found this reference, instead of the entirely tenuous one in the Record, he might have taken a link from his cyber-namesake's hypertext and decided to save one small branch of the rainforest and not write his column at all.

Cyberjunkers

A couple of years ago it seemed that you couldn't open a newspaper without encountering some form of cyber-babble about the death of the book, the redundancy of libraries, etc, etc.

Mercifully this particular 'meme' (in the current parlance the media's equivalent of the gene) seems to have died out (cause of death - inveterate stupidity). Unfortunately the cyberjunkies have been replaced by the cyberjunkers.

Where the former envisioned the digital age as some sort of cultural blitzkrieg which would carry all before it, the latter insist on portraying it as a glorified CB-radio-style fad.

Perhaps the most extreme of this latter breed is Ziauddin Sardar, author of the rather less than promising sounding Postmodernism and the Other: the new imperialism of western culture. Writing in the New Statesman (2 January) Mr Sardar postulates that 'the crap that saturates the Net makes the book more, not less, important. The Net encourages vanity publishing on a colossal scale. It's the domain of the unread semi-literate, clutching web-pages, screaming about his undiscovered genius, stalking cyberspace for victims.'

Or perhaps he's just been looking in the wrong places. This suspicion is confirmed when he takes issue with the aphorism 'information wants to be free' on the grounds that 'nothing of value on the web is free. What appears to be free is only an invitation to entrapment, like the drug peddler's initial fixes.'

No one would deny that there is a huge amount of rubbish on the Web, but if you can't find something to interest you without having to pay for it, then baby you're just not trying. Which is fine, no problem. But hardly the stuff that a Weltanschauung is made of.

It is true that the economics of the Web - which means that to date creators are providing material for nothing (unless where subsidised by bodies like the Arts Council) while telecommunications companies are making people pay to look at it - will need to be redressed if the medium is to grow. But the statement 'information wants to be free' does not preclude the economic reality that there will always be someone who will try to make you pay for it if they think they can.

It is a more sophisticated argument than Sardar takes it for, about the manner in which information circulates regardless of media. There is more to the Internet than the Web. Also, ever heard of gossip?

The problem with both the cyberjunkies and the cyberjunkers, is that they both fetishise the medium. To turn Sardar on his head, you could argue equally well that, in an age where multi-national publishing companies are more concerned with finding the new Bridget Jones than the new James Joyce, the conformity of the book makes the anarchic possibilities of the Web more, not less, important.

After all, we have vanity publishing to thank for Ulysses.

'Hell,' snaps Sardar, 'why don't the netheads just disappear in electronic blips and leave the world for people with real imagination?' Like himself, no doubt.

The truth is, rubbish is rubbish, whether it's a narcissistic and contentless Web page... or a book with two 'isms' in the title.

Dancing to the music of money

The issues of creativity, how it is best nurtured and rewarded, and how it reaches its audience, are revisited in the month's debates over the issue of music piracy.

The government, keen to party with the likes of of Richard Branson and Oasis supremo Alan McGee, is pledged to crack down on copyright abuses. This takes two forms: firstly there is the corporate piracy of illegal CD sales, which the Guardian's Simon Beavis informs us is 'linked with organised crime, including the Chinese Triads, the Mafia and the Russian crime gangs' (10 January). Then there's the digital juke boxes (people exchanging sound files of Oasis tracks in the bits of the Internet which Ziauddin Sardar doesn't know about) and other acts of individual piracy (such as home taping).

As the Daily Telegraph's Norman Lebrecht points out (7 January), wiping out the minor theft of the individual enthusiast could be counter-productive. Without individual piracy, there are numerous important sound documents which would never have been preserved for posterity.

The beneficiaries of such a crackdown are also likely to be multi-millionaires such as Oasis and Mick Hucknall. If the government is interested in helping struggling musicians at the beginning of the careers, suggests Imogen O'Rorke in the Guardian (6 January), it would be better to maintain the welfare system which maintains so many nascent superstars.

Don Watson

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Last updated: 23 January 98