Copyright Matt Salacuse for the Industry Standard

By J.D. Lasica

John Perry Barlow is a retired cattle rancher, a lyricist for The Grateful Dead — and the theoretical architect for the cyberspace community. He spoke by phone on May 24, 1996, from a New York hotel room after a speaking tour of Dusseldorf and Paris.

Do you think people are generally tired of the top-down model of journalism, where professional journalists decide what’s important for the public, where it’s all push and no pull?

They’re absolutely sick of it. Most people have become profoundly skeptical of what they read through mass media. For all intents and purposes, the mass media have become a collective hallucination. People want to bypass those channels to increase the level of direct experience, to have a much more direct contact with reality and with the subjects they feel closely about. And so, to the extent that people can disintermediate, that’s what they do.

If there’s something in the world that I’m interested in, I try to go there directly, and I don’t need a professional communicator to help me do it. I’m not likely to anyway — what I experience directly and what I read about in the papers are so extremely different that it makes me skeptical of everything else I read. Given the corporate business pressures imposed upon the media, it becomes impossible to report anything except what the masses already believe. A mass medium exists to confirm the illusions of the crowd, and to sell the attention of that audience. If what you’re about is selling attention, then you’re also about getting it by whatever means are required.

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The noted media critic and former editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report discusses the future of online journalism

By J.D. Lasica

Harvard-educated, a Rhodes Scholar, a former chief White House speech writer (for Jimmy Carter), former Washington editor of The Atlantic Monthly and former editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report, James Fallows is one of the nation’s foremost press critics, on the strength of his 1996 book, “Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy.” He responded to questions on the state of the online media in an e-mail interview on May 7, 1996.

In an “On the Line” online interview earlier this year you said one advantage of the Internet is that it gives people “the ability to find ways around the bottlenecks and strangeholds of the mainstream media.” Can you expand on that? What are some of the ways in which it allows ordinary citizens and amateur journalists to get around those bottlenecks?

The great shortcoming of the broadcast media is the terrible pressure for time and space. Network TV has 22-or-so minutes each evening to touch on world and national events, and viewers don’t know ahead of time which subjects will be covered, or in what order. Newspapers and magazines offer greater space and improved “random access” — you can flip through the things you don’t care about about to find the stories that interest you. But even the best newspapers suffer the inevitable constraints of the material world. They have only so much space each day.

The Internet, by contrast, allows each user a (theoretically) limitless amount of coverage and discussion on whatever obscure subject the user may care about most. In the real world there are some barriers to achieving this theoretical potential. Phone connections are slow; searching tools are primitive; an alarming amount of on-line discussion is conducted by rankers and cranks. Still the Internet allows the determined info-seeker a way to find things that the mainstream press leaves out.

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