What is most telling about the mainstream media’s early response to the Internet is not its failure to predict where it would be in 2011, but its failure — as in so many other areas — to ask significant questions. That so much attention was given over to asking about the meaning of “@,” instead of making inquiries into the possible social and political implications of this new system, is instructive of the point made by Thomas Pynchon: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” This was not unlike the kind of questioning Gutenberg might have faced (“But what will the letters look like?”)
These 1990s media people — whose employers faced the biggest threat from the Internet — might have invoked L. Frank Baum’s directive: “Pay no attention to those men behind their screens.”
