The Failure of Filters — Why We're Getting Dumber by the Hour

My mother was a live book reviewer in Cleve­land, an activ­ity that seems to have gone the way of the trav­el­ing magic lantern lec­ture tent show. For­tu­nately for Mom, the traf­fic lights in our com­mu­nity were exceed­ingly slow, and she always had a book by her side. We joked that she had com­pleted War and Peace just by judi­cious use of her time at red lights.

Book review­ers were prime enter­tain­ment at women’s orga­ni­za­tions until some­where around the late 1960s, pos­si­bly replaced by book clubs where every­one was sup­posed to actu­ally read the book for them­selves. Until then, the job of the book reviewer was to bring the ideas in impor­tant books to life for a whole com­mu­nity, to put it into con­text, to enrich the lis­tener. The expec­ta­tion that most of the audi­ence would rush out and pur­chase the book, as Oprah’s audi­ence does today, was not there. With a good book reviewer, you didn’t need to do any stink­ing page turn­ing yourself.

Oprah was broad­cast­ing from Cleve­land in those days. I won­der if she and my mom crossed paths.

Live book review­ers like my mom addressed one of the great chal­lenges to liv­ing well — hav­ing that feel­ing that you’re liv­ing authen­ti­cally and thor­oughly in your times. To me, it would have been a ter­ri­ble thing to have been liv­ing down the street from the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris in May, 1913 when Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Print­emps had its pre­miere, and not been part of the com­mo­tion. Or to have been on earth in the early 1960s and not heard I Want to Hold Your Hand on the radio. Or lived in Eliz­a­bethan Eng­land and never been to the Globe and seen a play by that Shake­speare fellow.

Know­ing what’s going on, what new ideas are shap­ing the cul­ture, in the arts, in tech­nol­ogy, in ideas in gen­eral seems to me to be an essen­tial part of really being alive, of get­ting all that life has to offer. The great chal­lenge for me is in find­ing out how to fer­ret out what’s new and valuable.

In the early days of the Web, the rage was all about fil­ters. The idea of fil­ters dan­gled in front of us the promise that we would be able to cus­tomize our news sources, so we could “get the news we wanted.” And we could even join groups where every­one in the world inter­ested in a topic could be a mem­ber. I, for one, joined a harp­si­chord builders list­serv, and wore out my life-long pas­sion for the harp­si­chord in a lit­tle under two months. Those were dark times. I even began to agree with George Bernard Shaw’s remark that a harp­si­chord sounded like two skele­tons cop­u­lat­ing on a tin roof. But I digress.

Still look­ing for fil­ters, I joined a Linkedin inno­va­tion com­mu­nity. Turns out it’s just a bunch of inno­va­tion con­sul­tants try­ing to sell their ser­vices to each other. Good luck. New con­tent: 4%. Recy­cled ideas: 96%.

It turns out that I don’t want fil­ters. I want scouts. I want to know who those peo­ple are, with taste and smarts and rea­son­able crit­i­cal fac­ul­ties, who can find the sur­prises. Books I never would have found on my own. New genius com­posers liv­ing in Ser­bia. An avant-garde film­maker in Finland.

In 1951 Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and W.H. Auden decided to become scouts for impor­tant new books. They felt the exist­ing book clubs, namely The Book-of-the-Month Club and the Lit­er­ary Guild had low­ered their orig­i­nal goals and now were pur­su­ing the “safely pop­u­lar.” Their new club, the Read­ers’ Sub­scrip­tion, had the goal of sup­ply­ing read­ers with books of solid intel­lec­tual merit. Every four weeks their lit­tle flyer, The Grif­fin, offered their choices for main book and alter­nates, and before long they had some forty-thousand sub­scribers. The Club went through many changes, and I was a mem­ber until The Grif­fin sud­denly started shrink­ing some five years ago. The Club was now a Dou­ble­day Club, some­where in the bow­els of Ran­dom House, now a mere divi­sion of Ber­tels­mann Aktienge­sellschaft, which had, iron­i­cally, grown from being pri­mar­ily a printer of cal­en­dars to a book giant through the cre­ation of their own book clubs in post war Germany.

The Read­ers’ Sub­scrip­tion was my favorite scout for impor­tant new books, and when it was put down, I thought I would be able to find a replace­ment for it on the Web, or some­where. But that hasn’t hap­pened. A group of really smart peo­ple need to do the work, and find a way to get paid for scout­ing, with­out cre­at­ing a con­flict of interest.

I’ll be scout­ing for bet­ter scouts, now that I know that’s what we need. Maybe it just comes down to more moms grab­bing a para­graph of Tol­stoy while wait­ing for that slow, slow, slow red light to turn green.