Slashdot Mirror
Heart of the Net
The Net has evolved, and radically. It's much too big and diverse for a single locus. It's also much too corporatized, and its new kinds of messaging systems increasingly too personalized and subterranean. Unless you're selling things via AOL or MSN, there's no longer any way even to reach a significant chunk of the Net universe, including the tech elites who still wield so much influence in cyberspace. The new media sites are all struggling; Wired has become a homogenized bulletin board for computer execs; and the most successful and heavily trafficked sites are about products, games or entertainment.
Since the Net has always been an almost organic, free-form entity -- nobody's in charge of it, or really decides how it will evolve and grow -- its epicenter floats all over. For a while, the heartbeat resided in the dream of new kinds of virtual and media communities -- the WELL, ECHO, Salon, Slate -- that popped up to connect people of common cultural or political interests. They were supposed to herald the movement of traditional media online. They were top-down, agenda-setting and, almost without exception, marginal or unsuccessful.
Enter AOL, then and now a Main Street for middle-class access. Its labyrinthine commercial sites, shameless peddling of goods, vast network of messaging boards and sex sites a form perfect metaphor for the evolution of the modern Internet -- people selling things like mad, and forming ever smaller, more specialized groups to talk to people much like themselves, with the same interests and ideals.
Of these developments, probably the early design era -- the Net's actual construction -- was its most idealistic. The early BBS's felt -- and were -- revolutionary, and few of the people first going online could help but feel they were participating in and witnessing the birth of a new kind of culture. Engineers and defense researchers like Postel, Licklider set out to build a free and open information network that would theoretically be open to and benefit everyone. Net architecture was certainly designed that way, and government, media and business paid little attention to the network, dismissing it as the handiwork of tech-heads and kids, irrelevant once the Cold War had passed.
The hacker period was the most revolutionary, and the open source phase one of the most political, especially when that movement rose to challenge the Microsofting of the desktop. The rise of the dot.coms might have been the most purely American era, in its speedy rise, greed and eventual collapse. Open source didn't stop the Microsofting of the Net, but it might have forced programmers to write better code, and greatly influenced the culture in other ways, creating a community of programmers committed to the idea of open access to information. And panicking corporate lobbyists into co-opting intellectual property legislation.
In between, enterprises like Amazon.com, which teased and tantalized investors and analysts with the retailing promise of networked computing, served as the heart of the Net, at least for a time, because they were so closely studied and monitored, and in some ways, highly innovative. For better or worse, Amazon has changed marketing in America for good.
Napster, which freed millions of music lovers from the hoary grip of the recording industry, symbolized the Net's challenge to hierarchical business and institutional structures -- until it showed the true power of corporatists. For years, the hackers believed nobody could stop them. After the Napster battles, it was clear that lobbyists and lawmakers, especially conjunction with wealthy corporatists, could. Briefly, Napster was the heart of the Net, and the Napster era -- now over -- one of it's most pivotal periods. Perhaps inevitably, this wasn't a fight the good guys ever really had a shot at winning, although they were slow to see it. While free music is still widely available online - free software types and music and movie traders are all over the place - the Net, it's now clear, will not remain a free frontier except in certain isolated and idiosyncratic corners.
The free software movement, in fact, was the apogee of the Net's most recent political period, the legacy to the hacker idea of liberating information, especially its sudden radical promise and challenge to proprietary institutions and information. For the hackers, the idea of an Open Net was their shining hour. Then the software turned communications inward, mostly permitting shoppers, chatters and people of like mind to talk to one another and shut out the clutter and the spam, including different points of view. At first, it was just religious fanatics and pious Boomers who embraced the idea of blocking and filtering. Then even hackers adopted it as a means of filtering out all that noise and an enormous volume of unwanted messiahs. The Net, designed to be the most open medium ever, became an increasingly closed nation of blockades, guardhouses and moderation and ratings systems. What the corporatists didn't sanitize, the hackers themselves chopped up.
An idea very close to the heart of the Net -- an open medium -- died, probably for good.
Where's the heart of the Net now?
The odd truth is that there probably isn't one.
The Net has become an economic and utilitarian rather than social, political or idealistic network. It has grown beyond almost anybody's earliest imaginings to become a thoroughly mainstream and very American communications medium., thoroughly corporatized and Disnified. Its grown too diffuse to have a center. Half of the nation is now online, says the U.S. Department of Commerce, nearly 90 percent of all kids.
AOL, a peculiar notion of the Net, is dominant -- with more than 25 million subscribers, it's probably the biggest single entity on the Net, at least in the U.S., and the largest host of utilitarian virtual communities. MSN is fast closing the gap. Who imagined just how prescient Steve Case really was, or how determined Bill Gates was? The middle-class wants to use the Net for pragmatic purposes -- shopping, entertainment, personal communications, and yes, sex. And they don't mind giving up privacy and freedom from corporate and government monitoring to do it.
This isn't meant to be a lament, not entirely. The Net was intended as an individualistic medium; it was inevitable that it would grow beyond a single focal point. Individualists still use it to chatter around the clock via mailing lists, blogs, vanity sites and IRC. But mostly, they appear to be speaking to ever smaller increments, like one another, rather to the larger world. The notion of the Net as a new kind of common ground is nearly over.
It isn't yet possible to know if this is a good or bad thing. The flowering of individual ideas is astounding; it's also a cacophony and something of a trap. Few of them escape their immediate surroundings. The fragmentation, hostility and narcissism are equally jarring. The Net may never recover from the waves of hostile adolescents and intellectual programming crackers, like the DoS vandals -- often bitter enemies of free speech -- who thundered online in the 90s, nor from the corporatists who shaped and co-opted telecommunications policy, copyright and intellectual property law. The Net is perennially interesting, and in many ways its story is just beginning to unfold, but in a far subtler way. This culture is being transformed by its own success.
didn't Katz write a column or two in Wired? of course he thinks he and the magazine he wrote for is visionary or guru-esque or something. Goes along with the tremendous ego on that guy.
Read the article, his assumption is that the entire internet is focused on whatever he's into or knows about at the moment. Completely and utterly self-centric.
*shrug* I just find no big suprise there.
JonKatz, you are an idiot. Please stop posting your endless drivel about your opinion of the day. This "heart of the net" crap is as pointless as any of your ramblings. The internet was designed from day one to have NO HEART, only endless interconnections, yet you bring up such a childish topic as this. Please come up with something insightful to write, or just let the users post more articles.
~ now you know
There are lots of different people on the Internet. Those people use it for the things they are interested in.
Some people use it for sex.
I wish I could mod down JonKatz: Offtopic, Redundant and Stupid.
The Anti-Blog
Because they are filled with emotions!
/. readers are male, and technically
The majority of
adept at that.
It takes effort to sit down and see the world from
someone else's point of view, specially when that
PoV is not an argubale fact, but an emotion.
mark me down to -1 for being off topic, and next
time you see a Katz article, pass it to a female
friend, a non technical (immaginative male.)
or anyone with human blood running through their
veins, as opposed to a lethal mixture of caffeine
and testestrone, and you will see them enjoy it.
.va ? As in the Vatican City State? ;)
Carbon based humanoid in training.
- Select your handle link at the top of the main page. The one that talks about the page being generated by flocks of monkeys, gaggles of toasters, etc.
- Then select the "homepage" link in your preferences area.
- Scroll down a little ways, and you'll see an "Exclude Stories from the Homepage" section.
- Click on the check box labeled "JonKatz".
Click the "save" button at the bottom of the page.
Yay, you'll enjoy a Katz-free life.Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
from the can-you-find-the-pulse? dept.
I'm afraid I can't. Then again, Katz probably couldn't find his ass with both hands, a flashlight, a Garmin GPS, a paper map, a host of dental mirrors, and a three hour remedial ass finding course on tape. So I guess that makes us even.
Jon, there's no singular "heart of the net." There's not a single culture out here. And we're not all greasy high school kids with black nail polish. Thanks for oversimplifying, though.
--saint
MHV, that's sheer elitist babbling on your part. Actually worse because it's obvious you're not elite in the least; you've just discovered a few things about words and are showing-off. The holier-than-thouness of the newbie.
But hang on, all is not lost: get a life and pretty soon you'll realize that the world is not the straight-laced, tight-assed prison you wish it to be. That there's give and take. And that understanding is at least as important as form. A form you're wrong about anyway.
Quite the bumpkin, our MHV. Nex