Leave it to the inimitable Edward Champion to not only get Alain de Botton’s response to the brouhaha over the Caleb Crain review of “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work,” but to get an insightful essay from Alain de Botton on the blurry “boundaries between public and private” in the Internet age, and on the rules of reviewing as laid down by John Updike.
De Botton begs naïvité in his comments on Caleb Crain’s website:
I used to believe that posting a message on a writer’s website counted as part of this kind of semi-private communication. I have learnt it doesn’t, it is akin to starting your own television station in terms of the numbers who might end up attending.
This is a little hard to believe–he sought out Crain’s site, which shows some web savvy; and Crain’s site publishes an e-mail address, which would have provided a more private means of contact (not 100% private, but more so than a blog comment). But we can give de Botton the benefit of the doubt here, particularly since there was not a little passion clouding his judgment. One might be tempted to see something performative in the way de Botton responded to Crain, using the public and unfiltered nature of the Internet to undermine the effect of the review, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
De Botton’s essay makes two interesting, and compelling, points: that there are (or should be) standards for book reviewers, and that the line between private and public communication has greatly eroded in the Internet age. On the first, I agree wholeheartedly; and his suggestion (in response to Champion’s questions, though the essay reflects the spirit of the suggestion) that reviewers comply with Updike’s rules is a good one:
In the wake of Updike’s death, partly as a tribute to him, my recommendation is that newspapers all sign up to a voluntary code for the reviewing of books. This will help authors certainty, but most importantly it will help readers to find their way more accurately towards the sort of literature they’ll really enjoy.
His observations about the Internet and privacy are trickier:
The problem with overhearing people in private moments is that they don’t follow the rules of civilised society and hence offend our sense of propriety (that’s why the rules are in place). All of us, if cameras were turned on during our moments of rage, disappointment, fear and vengeance, would wince if the footage were then played back to us or – even worse – were played back to an audience of strangers. We value privacy for precisely this reason: it protects us our immaturities from wider display.
The Internet, at its technological core, is built on anonymity, immediacy, and mass distribution. This is a combination that is ill-suited for externally applied civility and propriety; without fundamentally changing the architecture of the Web, it’s unlikely that brakes on our private fulmination could be built into the system. The benefits of the loose, replicable, and immediate architecture of the Internet are many, but they come at a significant price: the private sphere is greatly eroded by the ubiquity of the blog, and the editorial gatekeeping that print publishing demands is cut out in favor of the Internet’s raw and immediate distribution.
The quandary is in trying to apply rules of propriety in a lawless cyberspace. New rules of propriety are developing, but not nearly as well-codified as the etiquette developed over thousands of years of written and spoken communication. Without rules of some sort, though, communication quickly collapses into shouting.
For now, at least, we’re stuck relying on our own internal code of conduct, and on the fear of shame when others see our outbursts. We’re not yet mature enough as a society to handle the loaded gun that the Internet gives us, and I expect that there will be many more instances of people shooting their own feet before we’ve figured out how to put the safety on.






