When I’m sizing up an operation I only know through the internet, I always keep this New Yorker cartoon in mind. In it, a dog who is sitting at a computer tells the dog next to him, “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.” On the internet, you don’t need to be a reputable retailer or a working journalist or a knowledgable pundit or a careful scholar in order to present yourself as one.
Our kids love to watch the “Our Gang/Little Rascals” short films from the 1930s. They’re especially tickled by the episodes where the kids run their own mocked-up version of some adult activity—a courtroom, a newspaper, a taxi service, a golf course. The devices they conjure up from available resources are ingenious, and they sort of work, but eventually there’s a confrontation with reality, and you become painfully aware that the taxicab is still just a hodge-podge of apple crates sitting on some old bicycle wheels, with tin cans for headlights, a donkey for a motor, a duck you squeeze when you want to honk the horn—and no brakes.
Many operations on the internet are just such contraptions. A polished-looking retail website is often backed by a one person who comes home from his regular job to pack and ship orders, return phone messages, and answer emails. An online journalist or pundit is often a hobbyist who spends all his spare time scouring the internet for material to recycle in the form of a link and a clever comment. An online scholar is often a gadfly who comes home from his unrelated job and produces or cites a massive amount of verbiage to promote his particular unusual point of view.
There’s nothing wrong with any of those things. Someone can provide a useful service by running a store in their spare time, or by tracking down and relaying interesting information that others have produced, or by being a gadfly who provokes people to rethink their assumptions. But if you take on the appearance of something more, you run the risk of believing your own publicity. You start to think you’re playing in the same league as Amazon, and you expand your inventory and services far beyond what one person can handle in their spare time. You start to think that you’re playing in the same league as a New York Times columnist or a Sixty Minutes journalist, and you start holding forth on topics where you have nothing useful to contribute. You start to think that you’re playing in the same league as historians and cultural commentators and other public intellectuals, and you expect to be welcomed to hobnob with them just because you admire them and have quoted them approvingly on your website.
Unfortunately, you can’t avoid the risk by refusing to play the game at all. The professionalism that is brought to the game by the big leagues has created expectations that must be met to some degree by anyone who wants to be taken seriously in any league. We have put a fair amount of effort into the look and usability of the Draught Horse Press website, not in order to fool potential cusotmers into thinking we are a big operation, but to convey to them that they can expect their transaction to be handled professionally. We run the risk of leading people to think that we are bigger than we are, but we do our best to counter any mistaken impressions in other ways, e.g. the informal tone of our book descriptions, this unadorned weblog.
