Ours is certainly not the first generation to value knowingness. Those supposedly "in the know" have always been a kind of information elite, and more democratically speaking, gossip, in large measure, is predicated on the notion that a good many people want to know what's going to happen before it is publicly announced or just want to know what others hope to hide. But in a society like ours where there is a glut of information -- so much to know and so many venues from which to know it -- knowingness has become one of the newest and most powerful forms of status. Talk to any teenager and you are likely to be staggered by how much he or she knows -- the music of the most obscure rock stars, the dating habits of the most obscure television performers, the names of the most obscure clothing designers -- virtually all of it, by the teen's own admission, useless in any intrinsic sense but useful in the sense that it is empowering among other teenagers. Knowing all this cultural effluvia is like being captain of the football team or head cheerleader. Not to know is to be condemned to eternal geekdom.

But knowingness is not just a status; it is a force that is increasingly driving the culture. If Marshall McLuhan was wrong, as I believe he was, and technology does not determine culture so much as culture determines technology, then the Internet might be regarded as a knowing machine designed expressly to satisfy the ever-growing community of individuals who need to know in order to empower themselves. One can find anything on the Internet, from the Paris Hilton tape to the Taguba report to the Nick Berg decapitation, and those who watch these tapes or read these documents have the satisfaction of knowing that they have joined a new band of cognoscenti. Indeed, the images on the Internet seemed to advance the Abu Ghraib and Nick Berg stories not because seeing is believing or because everyone wants visuals but because mainstream print outlets don't have the same cachet of knowingness as the Internet, where you have to navigate your way to the plum -- itself a form of knowingness. So the Internet not only provides the opportunity to see what one could not see elsewhere; it plays to an emerging sensibility that regards finding and then watching these images not as horrors to be shunned or terrible realities to be viewed but as pieces of information one must see because not to see them is to be left out, which is why the hand may not linger long over the mouse before double-clicking. It is less voyeurism than a kind of validation. Man, have you seen the Nick Berg tape?

All of this wrests Nick Berg and Abu Ghraib from the old moral context and categories. There may have been a time when knowing led to knowledge, which made considerations about the cultural and psychological impact of what one saw or read seem appropriate. But now knowing is an end in itself, and a debate over the effects of watching abominations may be irrelevant in a society where information no longer exists to be assessed but only to be accessed.

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