is the net disappointed 9 for print
TRANSCRIPT
Is the Internet Disappointed in us?
D a v i d W e i n b e r g e r P h . D . d a v i d @ w e i n b e r g e r . o r g
w w w . J o h o T h e B l o g . c o m d w e i n b e r g e r @ t w i t t e r
H a r v a r d B e r k m a n C e n t e r f o r I n t e r n e t & S o c i e t y
S e n i o r R e s e a r c h e r
H a r v a r d S h o r e n s t e i n C e n t e r o n M e d i a , P o l i t i c s & P u b l i c P o l i c y
F e l l o w
S x S W M a r c h 1 4 , 2 0 1 5
One way to address this question would be to go through the list of horrible things about the Net. But I’m going to do something different. I’ve been so in love with the Web for the past twenty years because of what I thought would be its effect on how we think about ourselves and our world. So I want to use those changes in our ideas to provide a context for the list of horribles. Instead of going for completeness, I’m going to pick just a handful of them to see if we can learn something more general from them.
Note for SlideShare
The original slides were animated, so I’ve done a rough job of altering them for static presentation.
- DW
TIME Dec. 6, 1993
“The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
John Gilmore
In 1993, we thought the Internet was an unstoppable force for freedom. john Gilmore 1993
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
“On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
John Perry Barlow
In 1996 we thought the Internet was a new world we could make into something better.
“7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchies.”
In 1999, some of us thought that the Net would change every institution.
In fact, institutions did quake and fall. Businesses, the music industry, newspapers, education, libraries, government … all have been deeply changed by the Net.
But it’s not all unicorns and rainbows
“Native Ads”
The Net is not the same as it was. There’s been a re-concentration of power. Marketers have successfully camouflaged themselves. Conversation too often has all the patience of a pitchfork. And the spies of many governments are everywhere.
Is the Internet Disappointed in us?
So now seems like a fitting time to ask how it’s going. Note that I intend this question as a provocation. I absolutely do not believe that the Net is or could become sentient. That’s a different question.
Is the Internet Disappointed in us?
How are things going? It’s our
responsibility.
With great
responsibility comes
great hope.
Instead, asking “Is the Net disappointed in us?” is a way of asking how things are going while, acknowledging that we have something to live up to. That is, we have responsibility for how things are going. On the positive side with great responsibility comes great hope.
A hope that comes from
architecture
We cyberutopians thought early on that that hope was well-grounded because it sprang from the Internet’s very architecture.
Exceptionalism
Because that architecture is unprecedented, we thought the Net was just as exceptional. In terms of importance, it was less like the invention of telephone or TVs, and more like the invention of the printing press, language, or fire. Or so we thought. And so I still think.
(cc) Wikipedia.org
So what is that architecture? It’s not the architecture of the prior dominant network, the phone system. That network consisted of physical wires that for each call were physically connected…
… to let someone in LA ring a phone in Boston.
To: From:100101001010
data(content)
header
packet
The Internet is not a physical set of wires. It is a specification, an agreement, or as the creators of it say, a protocol. It specifies that if you want to send information from A to B, your computer will chop it into packets, each with a header that says where it’s from, where it’s going, what number it is in the series, and the rest of the minimum it needs for the receiving computer to put the packets back together.
Each packet is thrown to a router that makes the best choice it can about the next router to throw it to, to get the packet closer to its destination, based on the traffic in the connecting pathways. That next router will do the same, until the packet arrives. The packets may not take the same route or arrive in the proper order. So the destination has to assemble them, and message received!
This makes the Net exceptionally different from normal networks. There’s no central dispatcher with a big map figuring out which route the packets should take. Instead each router makes the best decision it can for each packet, based on very incomplete information about the current state of the network pathways.
connects everything
Not for anything
Permission-free
Equal to Equal
Open to all
Represents our interests
That’s as technical as this talk is going to get. But I needed to say it, even though most of you already know it, because the consequence of this architecture is a network that connects everything to everything, is not for any one use in particular, and is permission-free to use. This gives rise to values we thought would rule so long as the Internet architecture persevered. It’d be a place for equals, equally open to all, and more perfectly representing our interests than the old media did. But were we wrong? There are at least three problems.
NancyBaym
Eszter Hargittai
TECHNODETERMINISM1
[4:30] First, it sounds like technodeterminism, the idea that technology affects us all the same way, the way a falling safe does. Researchers like Eszter Hargittai have shown differences based on gender and socio-economic factors influence our online skills and behavior. And obviously the Internet to a member of the Taliban is a very different thing than it is to us. I’d also strongly recommend Nancy Baym on this topic
ChristianSandvig
2
Second, suppose Christian Sandvig is right? Christian says that while the underlying architecture of the Net still is as I’ve described it, we’ve added layers and layers of technology to that architecture to make the Net usable for the equivalent of broadcast TV. So, the Net now is designed for one particular application, and it’s one that makes it harder and harder for a little gal or guy to make a difference. It’s like me saying the architecture of democracy gives everyone an equal vote, and Christian saying, yeah, but big money has totally corrupted the system. And I’m afraid Christian is right.
HatREDHatRED TrollsTrolls
IsolationIsolation
PrivacyPrivacy
3
Third, there's a series of damning facts that say that the Net is not what the cyberutopians thought it inevitably would be. Conversations are now hateful. We are more isolated in our social lives and in our thinking than ever before. We have way less privacy than before. And so on. It’s hard to argue with all that. But I'm going to try.
frame love of the Net
escape from old ideas
we knew they were wrong
live their correction
belief hope
This afternoon I want to try to assess and understand these facts in a frame that’s larger than they are. From the beginning my love of the Net has been driven by a sense that the Net's greatest significance is that it’s enabling us to escape from some very old and very wrong ideas about ourselves and our world. We’ve always known there’s something wrong with those ideas, and the Net is letting us live their correction. That’s been my belief, which is now perhaps being shown to be really just a hope.
Things
Order Preparing
Self-interest
I want today to talk about four very broad sets of these old beliefs the Net may be setting straight, and then look at the damning facts that suggest we're still getting it wrong.
Here goes.
Things come first(cc) Eduardo Mueses @ flickr.com
Old Id
ea #1
The first of these ideas has to do with what’s most real.
Eduardo Mueses https://www.flickr.com/photos/emueses/8650127689/
(cc) MattysFlicks @ flickr.com(cc) Matt McGee @ flickr.com
If I ask you to think of something real, you're likely to rap your knuckles on the chair you're sitting on, or …
seats: (cc) Matt McGee @ flickr.com
(cc) MattysFlicks @ flickr.com
think of, say, a rock. We’ve assumed that real things are material objects that exist as they are and come first and then enter into relationships.boulder: (cc) MattysFlicks @ flickr.com
Many of us believe that's true of human beings also: we really are who we are when we're alone.(cc) mediotanque @ flickr.com
1911
Oliver Goldsmith
6,000If you want to see how the Net is changing that, look at how this idea shows up in our traditional paper-based media. Our media have to a large extent consisted of a set of self-contained rectangles. So, if you're an encyclopedia, you have a rectangular container this big into which you can put everything the reader needs to know about, say, the Anglo-Irish poet, Oliver Goldsmith.
Oliver Goldsmith
3,0001961
Connect it all
Over time you have less room in your encyclopedia, so with each edition, you have reduce the size of the Goldsmith rectangle
1994
Oliver Goldsmith
1,500
Connect it all
....The editors of the Britannica routinely threw out knowledge with each edition. And we were fine with that arrangement because it's all we had. By the last edition of Britannica, the Goldsmith article was only 1,500 words long.
The Wikipedia article on Goldsmith is only 1,400 words, but that's because many of those words are links. So, if you want to do a apple to apples comparison of Wikipedia and Britannica to see which has more information about Goldsmith, you’ll have to figure out which linked articles count toward Wikipedia’s total on this topic, and no two people will agree about that. At Wikipedia, Goldsmith is not a self-contained rectangle. Goldsmith is a web , and this I think is a more accurate representation of the real shape of knowledge.
And what Wikipedia does to Goldsmith, the Web does over and over to every topic and idea. It turns them into -- it lets them be -- webs. We always knew life wasn't so neatly rectangular.
The same is true with these familiar rectangles (books). We jammed things into them even when we knew they didn't really fit, and we attached covers as if the world divided up into book sized chunks.
But the new object of knowledge isn't the book or the article. When physicists have important results, they now try to get them onto the Web as quickly as possible, often by posting at arxiv.org, a site where any scientist can post anything at all, without peer review or any editors — even when they could have published in the most prestigious of paper journals. They do this to get the information out quickly so that...
…a web of discussion can gather. With important results, the knowledge ecosystem fills completely, so that people at every level of skill and interest can learn, follow links, and even contribute. The result is that knowledge now lives in this web, but this web only has value insofar as the nodes are expressing differences. Knowledge now contains difference, rather than being only that from which all doubt, difference and disagreement has been driven. Knowledge is a network.
And that's true for our selves as well. We are all now Oliver Goldsmith. If you were a stranger encountering our species for the first time and wanted to understand our sense of self
…you’d quickly end up at Facebook and would assume that a self is a node defined by its network. And you wouldn’t be wrong.
We are social
connected creatures
living in a
connected world.
We've long suspected that we’re social, networked creatures, and that everything we see we understand in terms of its place in a world of rich relationships. Now we cannot escape that truth because it’s in front of us every day.
Connection
precedes
individuality
We are nodes that gain their meaning from our connections to others.
Single Order(cc) wikimedia
Old Id
ea #2
Next, the notion that there’s a single proper order. In the real world, everything has to be some place, and no two things can be in the same place at the same time …
…no matter how hard you try.
(cc) Steve Huang @ flickr.com
That's why if you and your partner are deciding how to organize your physical CDs, you can organize them alphabetically by author or by title, or by date or genre or mood … but you can pick one and only one way of organizing.
(cc) Steve Huang @ Flickr.comhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/stevehuang7/2392957019
But if you and your partner were organizing your *digital* music library, you could make as many simultaneous orders as you'd like. We call them playlists and they're as easy to create as rearranging a house full of books is hard. That’s because playlists organize not the music itself but the metadata about the music.
HomePhone
Number
WorkPhone
Number
EmployeeID
In the Age of Computers, before the Internet, we knew what metadata was. If you had an employee database, one particular column of numbers would have a metadata label like "ID" while another might say “Phone Number”. Metadata are labels that enable us to locate data.
herman melville
Search
Metadata Data
Now think about the simplest search you did today. Let's say you were trying to remember the name of the book that Herman Melville wrote. You typed "Herman Melville" into Google and you got back your answer. And a network of related information, including a link to the book itself. Now let's say this time you remember a bit of the content of a book -- "Call me ishmael" -- and you put that into Google.
herman melville
Search
Metadata Data
Now you got back the book's title, author, and his bibliography, and a map to his house, and his social network, and the biology and ecology of the whale, and Al Gore. You’d get everything.
Herman Melville
Moby-Dick
“Call me Ishmael”
It turns out the only difference between data and metadata is that metadata is what you know and data is what you're looking fo. In a connected world, everything is metadata for everything else. This is fantastic because we use metadata to pry up knowledge, so if everything can be metadata, we just got much smarter.
(cc) Steve Huang @ flickr.com
This undoes the ancient assumption that if you want to get information out of a system, you have to structure it going in. If you want to find your Bruno Mars CD, you better have figured out your shelving system beforehand
Now we can get far more information out of a system by shoving everything we can into it without any agreed upon principles of organization. Let everyone post whatever they want. No cataloging system. No required keywords. Just post! Afterwards we'll have plenty of time to find the links and connections in every word and every comma. And if you should want to add some metadata, say using the Semantic Web, even better, that’s just additive.
Order
doesn‘t
scale.
It turns out that order doesn’t scale. But that’s ok…
Messiness
scales
meaning.
…because messiness scales like a boss. And messiness scales meaning — connections, relationships. That makes available to us more of the richness we always knew was in the world even though our old media couldn't set it free. We are living in an age of super saturation of meaning, of connection.
Anticipat & Prepare
Old Id
ea #3
The next idea the Internet is undoing:
Anticipate
Literally since the dawn of history, we've assumed that the right way to manage the future is to anticipate it
Anticipate Prepare
…and then prepare for it. The more reliable your anticipation, the narrower your preparation can be. And that's important because if you prepare for an anticipated future, and that anticipation doesn’t come to pass, you wasted your time and resources.
That's why we're not all carrying around this Swiss Army knife, which is real, by the way. The costs of over-preparing are severe. This thing costs $1,200 and weighs over 7 pounds.
Appssites
sitesApps
That's why the movement toward open platforms is so important. An open platform makes some set of data openly available to developers anywhere in the world who want to create an application that uses them, or want to integrate them into their site.
This is something Facebook is doing, making much of its data and many of its services available to external developers
or the World Bank, with lots of economic data about the developing world, and more
, the federal govt at data.gov
, or the NYTimes
or Marvel…
…open platforms break out of the anticipate and prepare pattern. They don't provide the narrow data they anticipate will be useful for some particular purpose. Instead they make as much data available as they can precisely so developers around the world can think of uses that the data provider would never have anticipated.
Platforms
leverage
unpredictability
Preparations depend on predictability. Platforms enable unpredictability. That's their virtue. And the entire Internet is a platform.
Was Twitter Predictable?
In fact, we can ask: Was Twitter predictable? If someone had predicted it to you, you probably would have laughed. 140 characters? Are you kidding me?
And once Twitter became important, would you have predicted the hashtag? Without hashtags, Twitter you'd have no good way to follow, say, #Ferguson, and Twitter couldn’t have become an important new news medium
But the invention of the hashtag was even less predictable than Twitter. In fact, it was invented by a user, Chris Messina. BTW, that's not the actor Chris Messina...although Chris does bear an eerie and unpredictable resemblance to Ryan Gosling.
What's true of Twitter is true of the Net: It's a platform that enables unpredictable ideas to be formed and to be realized at a pace unparalleled in human history. The Internet’s fluidity and the fact that an entire world’s imagination can be brought to bear is now letting us see the limitations of anticipating and preparing.
Self-interest(cc) kevin Dooley @ flickr.com
Old Id
ea #3
We have been told over and over that we are fundamentally interested in ourselves. Self-preservation, self-interest, first look out for #1. That sort of thing.
(cc) kevin Dooley @ flickr.com
Sure, but remember the Web? It’s that place where you used to post pages with links? Imagine that. You put in a link to someone else's page and tell your readers why they ought to click on it and leave yours. That's the opposite of how commercial sites understood the Web.
Commercial sites still talk about sticky eyeballs, the most demeaning and disgusting way ever of talking about your customers.
Diana Kimball’s booklists are always worth reading:blog.dianakimball.comblog.dianakimball.com
I always find something great to read.
For the rest of us, a link is a little act of selflessness, of generosity. "Go away," we say. "Something interesting is going on over there." The smallest conceivable human action, the click of a finger, and you've left our site.
(cc) Linh Nguyen @flickr.com
It feels natural because it *is* natural to want see how the world looks through someone else's eyes. The most basic fact, the fact before all other facts, is that we share a world that matters to us, and that matters to each of us differently.
(cc) Linh Nguyen @flickr.com https://www.flickr.com/photos/lng0004/7654298310
(cc) Jorge Fusaro @ Flickr.com
And it's not just seeing that world. Letting what matters to someone else matter to you is the most basic act of morality. Without it, there is no morality. The Net's linked architecture instantiates this most basic movement of morality.
You can't get more cyberutopian than that.
(cc) Jorge Fusaro @ flickr.com
So, let me step back from the precipice. Language is premised on this same fact: it lets us see how the world matters to others. Language is the instrument of that shared mattering. But we use language to lie, to hurt people, and to turn people against each other. Just as we use the Net.
So we could ask: Is language disappointed in us? I hope so. But we'd be fools to give up trying to live up to its possibilities.
How are we doing?(cc) World Bank Photo Collection @ flickr.com
Ok, so that's the framework I want to use for examining how we’re doing with the Net. I've tried to argue that we've carried around some old ideas that were appropriate given the limitations of our physical world and physical media. Our new networked medium is showing us those old concepts' limitations, and letting us get used to some new ideas -- new ideas that we always in our hearts knew were true.
Then the question is, how are we doing living up to these new ideas? As I said at the beginning, I'm not going to go through the laundry list of issues. Instead let's spend more time on a few them to see if there are some general conclusions we can draw.
(cc) World Bank Photo Collection @ flickr.com
Connection
Messiness
Non-anticipation
Common interests
Let's start with "connection comes first." How are we doing with that? How well are we connecting?
Connection
1. Echo chambers
2. Conversations
The answer is long and complicated. I want to look at two different issues.
Connection
1. Echo chambers2. Conversations1. Echo chambers
1. Echo chambers
Compared with where we were twenty years, we've connected more pages, people, places, things than we could ever have imagined. This took a mobilization of effort that in its scale can only be compared to what it took to mount two world wars.
Great. But although the Net looks like this in terms of its diversity,
when it comes to who we hang out with, it looks like this. Ethan Zuckerman in *Re-Wire* has convincing evidence that we're not taking advantage of our new ability to connect with people around the world. If you disagree, read his book and get back to me.
duesentrieb@flickr
More certain
More extreme
Cass Sunstein's 2001 book *Republic.com* warns about a truly worrisome consequence of hanging out with people who are like us in what he calls echo chambers. Doing so reconfirms our existing beliefs, closing our minds to others, and even tends to make us more extreme in our beliefs. If that's what happens, then the Internet isn't the great hope of democracy, as Al Gore says, but is its greatest threat.
Condition for being human?
Moral failing?
Or
This sticking with people like us is often presented not only as a lost opportunity but as a moral failing. We're not open-minded enough, so we stick with what's familiar.
On the one hand, absolutely, it's always good to expand your horizons. It's an opportunity not only to understand other cultures but simply to find more beauty in the world. On the other hand, we stick with the familiar not just because we're weak humans, but because that's a condition for being human. .
99% agreement
Conversation requires
Take conversation. We've been led to believe that in a real conversation, two people who deeply disagree sit down, work their way down to first principles, and resolve their differences, both equally open to changing their minds. But that basically never happens because it misunderstands how conversation works. In order for two people to have a successful conversation, they have to speak a common language, agree about norms such as how long you get to speak uninterrupted and how off topic you're allowed to go, they have to agree about what are appropriate topics, and have to find some shared interest about which they can differ safely, which among strangers is usually movies, sports, or weather. Conversation requires 99% agreement, in order to enable us to iterate usefully on our 1% of difference. That's not a failing of conversation. It's what enables conversation.
99% agreement
Understanding requires
Understanding works the same way. We understand something new by assimilating it to what we already understand. That's why if there's a new discovery about vaccines, I'm not going to go to an anti-vaccination site for an explanation. I’m going to go first to people who share my basic premises. Seeking out people with whom I basically agree isn't a bug in understanding , it's a feature. Understanding appropriates the new into the context of the old. Which is not to say that we should only ever talk with people who are like us and with whom we already agree. Not at all. We need to always push our boundaries. But I do think it’s important to get our expectations right.
Weare
local.
We are local creatures. We are each of us firmly situated in the language, culture and understandings that formed us. We may live in a global world, but we do so as local creatures. So, while the echo chamber effect is real and dangerous, and we need to do what we can to avoid it, we should also recognize that it’s a pernicious exaggeration of what enables conversation and understanding in the first place. We are local creatures
And now we’re local creatures with access to a world of ideas and knowledge. That makes this the greatest time in human history to be a smart curious person, but also the greatest time to be a total idiot. It's easier than ever to go wrong with perfect confidence. We can’t get rid of all the wrongness, because we’re humans, but we can’t even get started without first fixing the over-confidence.
(cc) wikimedia commons
We have to get far better at understanding knowledge as being as error prone as baking a soufle: no matter how well you know the process, it's still sometimes going to go wrong. How do you put that confidence into perspective? How do we make the walls of echo chambers at least semi-permeable? We know how to do this.
(cc) wikimedia commons
It’s called education. It's education that teaches us how knowledge works: the role of evidence, how to weigh probabilities, how the rules for discourse and belief are different in physics, biology, history, and poetry. How to appreciate larger and larger differences. This is why we have teachers, and librarians, and parents. No cyberutopian I know ever thought that sending a bunch of uneducated yahoos out onto the Net was going to end well.
(cc) Ross Pollack @ flickr.com
2. Conversations
If we're asking how well we're taking advantage of the Internet as connective, we have to look at the quality of the connections. So, how well is the global conversation going?
(cc) Ross Pollack @ flickr.com https://www.flickr.com/photos/rossap/14629421091/
(cc) Andrew Senay @flickr.com
If it's not going so well for you then maybe you should have considered being a middle-class white man. That's where you made your mistake. We know that women with any Web presence are routinely subjected to abuse, if not outright threats. Likewise for members of all the groups subject to real-world abuse who find themselves in the crosshairs of haters, trolls, and sociopaths.
This is so depressing. I wish I knew what to do about it, beyond the obvious of taking it seriously, being supportive, and demanding that law enforcement do its job. But I know that’s not enough. I just don’t know what else to do.(cc) Andrew Senay @flickr.com
And even where anonymous violent assholes are not trying to scare people into silence, many conversations on the Net are broken. And in this we see one of the important corrections for early cyberutopians who thought the world was just waiting for the chance to sing together. It turns out that peace is much harder than we thought because our differences are not only deeper, but they're encoded in norms that as norms are implicit, hidden.
House Rules of Conversation 1. Everyone gets to finish their sentences 2. Looking directly in eyes for more than 10
seconds is creepy. 3. Bad language allowed, but not name calling 4. We don’t “get” sarcasm
Norms work by being implicit. That's their power. On the Net we need to do the thing that norms don't want done: make them explicit. And then enforce them. Post the rules of the pool for the conversations you host. That’s easy to say, but norms are so hidden that we’ll inevitably miss some. Conversations on the Net are always going to go wrong because we’re local people talking globally, but maybe we can make them a little less toxic.
In fact, call me a dreamer, but the real world has a way of handling the problem of encountering people from different localities. It's called hospitality. You welcome travelers into your tent for refreshment and conversation, for, as Abraham and Sarah learned, they might be angels in disguise -- or, as the hippie in me wants to believe, we are all angels in disguise. The great religions and cultures instruct us in the virtue of hospitality precisely because it doesn’t come naturally. But it enables connection across difference, and it's a lesson the Net could learn from the real world.
Connection
Messiness
Non-anticipation
Common interests
So how are we doing with messiness — and these will all be much shorter.
Connection
1. Echo chambers2. Conversations1. Echo chambers
The good news is that the Internet remains a huge mess. But we are in danger of losing one particularly important characteristic of the mess: that it's our mess. Take a look at what's happening to hyperlinks. Positively, there are more than ever. And we're aware that those links form a never-ending Web. This is a huge change in how we think things go together, and there's no going back from it. Good.
(cc) ericww623 @ flickr.com
But the Web is losing its centrality to the Internet. Much of our experience is now with apps that try to keep us within their borders, and that are shiny things provided by others, rather than rough-edged things we've made ourselves. I'm afraid we're losing this sense of ownership of the Web, the sense that we’re building our culture together.
(cc) ericww623 @ flickr.com https://www.flickr.com/photos/ericww623/6081035358/
Connection
Messiness
Non-anticipation
Common interests
How about moving away from strict and narrow preparations?
Platforms
Interoperability
Semantic Web
That’s actually also going really well I think. There are more and more platforms, more and more interoperability, and the SemanticWeb is chugging along, and making the future even more interoperable.
Connection
Messiness
Non-anticipation
Common interests
Finally, I've maintained that by giving us an infrastructure that tempts us to see how the world matters to others, the Net refutes our notion that we are primarily self-interested individuals.
There’s been a realignment of our interests so thorough that we take it for granted. For example, if you want to know how a mini cooper is going to do in the winter in Boston, you’re better off asking this guy than this guy. The owner will tell you the truth. Businesses are no longer the best source of information about their products and services. We are. Because our interests are aligned.
Here's a simple example of the mismatch of interests. If you've read *Gone Girl*, Amazon will recommend next books to read that very likely will satisfy you.
If you tell a librarian at your public library that you just read *Gone Girl*, the librarian is likely to make some of the same recommendations, but also may say something like, "You know, you might like *The Price of Salt*, by Patricia Highsmith. She wrote in the 1950s, but it's got a lot of the same sort of elements." The librarian is suggesting a book that's just different enough that you'll like it, but expands your point of view just a bit. Amazon is all about recommendations of the least resistance because it just wants to sell you something and it doesn’t care what. But your local librarian wants you to be challenged just enough. Your librarian is doing real personalization: her or his interests are perfectly aligned with yours. That’s true of the Web at its best, when people are connecting with people. It becomes less true as those connections are mediated by commercial operations.
If personalization isn’t on our side,
we’re targets, not persons
PrivacyPrivacy
This is the problem with personalization. It isn’t that non-people are pretending to know us. It’s that it’s not being done in our interest. There’s also that little issue of privacy.
The only thing worse within this domain is when the advertiser tries to hide the fact that what we’re reading is an advertisement. It makes the whole place worse.
For example, a few weeks ago, this was the cover of Time Magazine. Time announced a few months ago that it was no longer going to respect the division between its editorial and advertising operations. The result is that I immediately suspected that this cover was bought and paid for. So, so long Time magazine.
(c) labnol.org
This misalignment of interests is even more important now that our daily experience of the Net is dominated by corporate giants whose interests are not fully aligned with ours. Some are more worrisome than others, but even the best of them look out at the Net and wonder how they can monetize it. Monetize us. And they have tremendous power. (c) labnol.org
Big
Head
Looooooooooooong Tail
This recentralization was, unfortunately, inevitable. The idea that the Net could be kept flat -- a level playing field -- was exposed as naive in the early 2000s in the book *Linked* by Albert-László Barabasi, which shows that even in networks in nature, large hubs grow with lots of links that dominate the many more tiny nodes. An then Clay Shirky in 2003 pointed to the inevitability of a power law developing in the blogosphere: It’s natural for a network to have a few major sites and then a very long tail. That's just the way it is.
(cc) josephb @ flickr.com
Nevertheless, we can still see the hubbub in the cracks between the hubs -- the happy ferment of people building works of wonder that don't require a Facebook or LinkedIn login. But you have to look for it. These days you can spend your life on the Net in services provided by giant corporations, happy as a clam and just as closed. The open architecture of the Net is still there, ready for you. But you have to know that. Otherwise, we entrust our online lives to corporations that ultimately don't care about us except as data streams they can sell and wallets they can lighten. (cc) josephb @ flickr.com
Conclusion
Conclusion time.
Connections first
Messy, rich with meaning
Unpredictable
What matters to us
I've pointed to some core ideas that our -- Western and typical -- experience of the Net subverts. These are old ideas that we always suspected were bogus, being replaced by new ideas that we always knew were true: Connections come first. Those connections are messy and rich. They make a world so unpredictable that the best way to prepare for the future is to give up on anticipating it. And these connections show themselves in terms of what matters to us, but not just in terms of narrow self-interest.
Connections first
Messy, rich with meaning
Unpredictable
What matters to us
Fear of Difference
Wrong and convinced
Hateful conversations
Sold souls to commerce
Against these highfalutin ideas and values there are the grim facts of life on the Net: the failure to appreciate difference, the ease with which we're convinced we're right even when we're dead wrong, the conversations that turn to hatred and threats, the commercial interests that have buried the creative, connective Web under personalized ads that depersonalize our world. And those are just examples. So grand ideas versus grim facts.
Three moves of
understanding
But we can undo each those facts, or at least lessen the harm they do, by understanding them. There are three moves of understanding that we’ve seen and that I think will help.
1. We are local
First, we need to always keep in mind that we are local creatures. We are products of our language, culture, history, family. That has not changed as the Net has obliterated distance. It's just made it more important than ever that we be explicit about the fact that we are local creatures now thrown together into a global world.
2. Go metaYear:1967
Town:Stock-Bridge
Artist: Norman Rockwell
Second, we need to go meta. We're getting knowledge wrong on the Net? Then we need to teach and to learn how knowledge works. The way its rules are local to its own domains: the rules of evidence in a court of law are different than in evolutionary biology are different than in Big Data. Likewise, as locals in a global world, we need to go meta — be explicit about the rules and norms of every conversation we have. Corporate sites and services are obscuring the Net as a place we build for ourselves? Go meta. Connect outside of the shiny walls of the corporate Net, at least sometimes.
3. Remember
(cc) Ken Douglas @ Flickr.com
Third, most of all, remember the glory of the Internet's initial revelation, a shining so bright that reasonable people became utopians, because they and we all glimpsed something so powerful and true.
(cc) Ken Douglas @ flickr.com
we share a world
Matters to each
Matters equally
Matters differently
That truth was a new revelation of the oldest fact, and the fact that is so easily forgotten that in our history it has been what we have most re-taught ourselves: that we share a world that matters to each of us, that matters equally to each of us, but that matters differently to each of us. By letting us actually see how the world matters to others, the Net is the most direct revelation of that most fundamental fact, the fact that grounds all else that we know.
(cc) PhotoGramma1 @ flickr.com
And because for the first time the Net connects us directly, we now can see that mattering. And we can see how much more we can do together than we'd ever dreamed. These are facts we need to remember as the litany of grim complaints is recited as if it constitutes the Internet's full accounting.
(cc) PhotoGramma1 @ flickr.com https://www.flickr.com/photos/photogramma1/3608162170
Architecture isn’t enough.
Our best nature isn’t natural.
Remembering the revelation of the Internet is hard even for us who were there for it. Now as we enter the second full generation after the event, that revelation has to be re-won. For, while the Net remains an opportunity for a new start, we cyberutopians have to learn a hard lesson: Architecture isn't enough. We are local creatures in our understanding, and caring globally has to be constantly retaught and relearned. For it turns out that our best nature is unnatural. It needs our care and work to unfold, even now that the tools of human caring have been handed to us all.
Is the Internet disappointed in us?
Is the Internet disappointed in us? Yes. And we need to acknowledge that and feel it, for that disappointment is really nothing but our awareness of the opportunity to at last live up to our best nature.
