Howard Jacobson: Whoever said we are all entitled to express our opinions didn't reckon on the internet

Funny, but the idea of being watched over by Big Brother, or whatever we have to call the agencies of state intrusion now that Big Brother has been trivialised, has never caused me concern. An electronic chip in my passport? Fine by me. I tell everyone where I'm going anyway. CCTV cameras? The same. There is nothing I am ashamed of anyone seeing me doing. I'm not a terrorist. I'm not mugging old people. I am old people. As for teams of spies and hackers getting hold of my personal details, they are welcome to them. I don't have any personal details.

So no, being looked at isn't what bothers me. What bothers me is being talked about. And by being talked about I don't just mean being subjected to gossip, I mean being misquoted or quoted out of context. I mean suffering description by people who lack the power to describe. I mean being at the mercy of whoever thinks he (or she) is entitled to an opinion. A risk you run, of course, by virtue simply of being alive. You cannot hide or win exemption from the judgements of your fellow men. But the judgements of your fellow men are everywhere suddenly, inscribed for all to see, and in some cases maybe for eternity, on the internet.

A great force for democratisation - that was how the internet was sold to us. And it's true. Every man is now a commentator, with his own blog, or his own link to a blog, or his responses to someone else's blog, or whatever it is he fancies confiding to the electronic media, out there and given equal space with the wisdom of Socrates and Sankara. And if that wisdom - or, as is more likely, folly - happens to turn its gaze on you and your endeavours, it will follow you around like a tin can tied to an old dog's tail. Men have always been prepared to die to protect their reputations. But never has reputation been subject to so much faceless and indiscriminate assault. Thanks to the net, we now are what people choose to say about us.

Kicking about on the net, even if you have to log on to this paper's online edition and then click "comment" and then click "letters" to find it, is a description of my attitude to Israel's bombardment of Lebanon in 2006. "Sir: Howard Jacobson confesses to not being ashamed of Israel during the carnage in Lebanon last summer (Comment, 10 February). At least he's honest."

Rest assured I do not mean to rehash all I said in the column to which this letter refers. But I did not "confess" to anything. What I actually wrote, in response to someone else's confession of shame, was "Myself, I don't recall being proud or ashamed last summer." That there is a significant difference between confessing one is not ashamed (with its implication that perhaps one should be) and distancing oneself from the emotionalism of both shame and pride, readers of this column don't need me to tell them.

For us, a sentence is not a hiding place for an opinion. How one puts a thing is how the thing becomes. To say one feels neither pride nor shame is to position oneself between extremes, refusing the allure of choosing from a pair of polar opposites. Which is very different from the bald defiant assertion that one is unashamed.

I do not say the letter writer means to misrepresent me. But in the heat of his fervour he hears only what is oppositional to himself. And in the process has me "confessing" what I didn't. Thus do I exist in cyberspace as something other than I am. And that's what gives the letter writer a new influence over history. Once upon a time a person deaf to nuance and blind to context would dash off a few intemperate lines to a newspaper, or failing that, to you, care of the newspaper, and that, once you'd called the police, would be the end of it. Now their words are banked where they can be retrieved as unassailable fact by anyone who types your name into their computer.

Myself, I confess to having little patience with letter writers. At least, as the man says, I'm honest. Though I understand well the frustrations of voicelessness that drive a man with uninformed opinions to his desk, I am not sure that society is obliged to humour him. There are reasons, in most instances, why some people achieve distinction as commentators and others don't. Reasons not unconnected with clarity of mind, soundness of judgement, patience, reason, acuity and the wherewithal to express thought.

Every man has a novel in him, the saying goes. No, he doesn't. Very few men have novels in them. What they have in them is idle inclination. And so it is with articles, reviews, blogs, and even letters. Very few people have one in them. Democracies insist that every dog must have his say, but our society is dying not of suppressed opinion but an overproduction of it.

We professionals are partly to blame for conniving in the fallacy that everyone's views are worth listening to. Some of us append our email addresses to the bottoms of our columns as though we cannot wait to be engaged in corrective conversation with those of our readers we would least like to run into in the park. Others agree to blog for their online newspapers though they know their blog will only initiate streams of bile. Indeed, you wonder whether the bile isn't what the newspaper are really after, and the occasioning essay merely bait.

And then, following you to your grave, the internet book groups and Amazon reviews - where the person with the book "in him" exacts his revenge on the person who got the book out. Here, I accept, is the fault-line of my argument. For yes, it is an article of faith with writers to "rejoice to concur" with Dr Johnson's "common reader"; yet we also believe that reading is a highly expert activity, too precious to be entrusted to people of common sensibility and imagination. But you can't very well ban unsuitable people from reading you and speaking of their reading, can you? Or can you?

Our mistake is to conceive the common reader, like the common man, materially instead of philosophically. There never really was such a thing. Just an illusion of an illusion. But now he's out there snarling, his teeth sharp, every bite his God-given right to an opinion. And short of turning off the power or blowing up the system, there's nothing you can do to silence him.

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