If you didn’t catch the Tribune’s “Perspectives” section on Sunday. There was a great article on Reason and our emotions by Jack Fuller. Fuller takes on Al Gore’s hope that the internet will usher in a new age of reasoned discourse. Along the way, he makes note of the tension between Gore’s argument against fear as a political motivator in his new book and his expert use of fear in An Inconvenient Truth. Fuller writes:

“Fear is the most powerful enemy of reason,” Al Gore declares in his new book, “The Assault on Reason,” an examination of neuroscience, the new information environment, and the depredations of the Bush administration.

But in deriding fear as a tool, the book neglects to mention that Gore himself has harnessed its power. The promotional trailer for “An Inconvenient Truth” calls Gore’s Academy Award-winning film “by far the most terrifying movie you will ever see.”

Indeed.

Fuller’s argument is that emotion and reason are inextricably linked and the notion that the internet is more partial to reason than any other mass media is just wishful thinking.

However, I wonder if Fuller would admit that words are a fundamentally more rational way to deliberate than are TV images and radio talk. If so, he would have to admit that the Internet to date has been a medium dominated by the printed word and therefore considerably more rational than say television or radio. (I’m equating reasoned and rational here for the sake of convenience)

Fuller would still rightly point out that the Internet isn’t likely to remain text-based for long and so Gore’s Utopian media is likely to resemble television more and more as we progress. So even if there were some basis for a media renaissance initially, it would quickly be eclipsed by the emotional aspects of the medium.

Fuller is correct. But (and not to defend Al Gore) the economics of the Internet are completely different. The power of TV as emotional communication, because of the cost of entry, has weeded out most of the more reasoned programming. But on the internet, the cost of entry is low, and so there for it remains possible for reasoned dialogue to survive along side a more emotional dialogue.

The Internet is not revolutionary in the sense that it is going to change how we, as human beings, communicate. But rather the Internet will change the economics of mass communication such that modes that were previously unavailable now have a chance to thrive. Right?

I apologize for going wonky on you with this post.