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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.
What did I miss back in the mid-90's? I always thought Wired was more like Vogue for the technology set -- candy-coated fluff without much substance.
Anyone have an issue of the magazine this guy's talking about? :)
Method of processing duck feet
Google works on the idea that information that is the most useful will be linked to more, essentially, it identifies clusters of information dense websites and ranks them. There was some other research, involving graph theory (actually, Google tech does too... Google really is a feat of theoretical and practical value), that talk about power law relationships. Here's an article (1 in a series of 2) in American Scientist. The bibliography has some references that might be useful to anyone truly interested in the topological nature of the internet.
Humorless sig goes here.
Whether you love him or hate him, Jon really brings out a few salient talking points in this article. I might even venture out and say that I agree with him on most of his points. However, "me too" does not a good Slashdot comment make, so let me expound a little on why the gloom and doom of the corporatization of the Internet isn't all that bad.
First of all, the corporatization of the Internet has helped to push higher speeds and ubiquity. These two factors alone, while meant to benefit the middle class users, have only helped to lower the cost of entry to future nerds, geeks, hackers and coders.
I'm 25 now, but as a kid growing up in the late 80s, getting any kind of net access was a struggle and a hopeless quest. Enter BBSes and the like. Most of us probably cut our teeth on the BBS. Then enter Freenets (like Cleveland Freenet) and the like. Back then the network was considered blazingly fast at 14.4K. However, my view of what the Internet was and could be was completely blown away upon my visit to the campus of Case Western Reserve in Late 1993. What I saw there was a completely fiber network and the web.
Wow. *that* was cool.
Fast forward to now. Most of the kids coming into college have already experienced the Internet much as I was only able to do once reaching the university. The young hackers in their larval stage come in with a store of knowledge that I could only dream about. I am convinced that we now have more hackers and more technological enthusiasts than we ever have had before. While this may seem like an obvious and trite observation, we need to consider this when also taking into account the fact that the "commodity" usage of the Internet has gone up as well.
In other words, sure, the vast majority of Internet users use it in a utilitarian way. However, now, more than ever, there are users who are using it as a tool to expand their own knowledge and to explore new frontiers of technology. I almost look upon this as romantic, in a weird sort of way, in the way that New York is romantic. I draw the analogy by thinking of both the city and the Internet as being unimaginably dense with people, ideas, culture and thought. However, just underneath the surface, if you look close enough, you'll find your niche, you'll find the "underground".
Granted, most people don't give a shit about the underground. But who cares? It's still there and we can still use. We can still build and we can still expand it. The Internet doesn't exist to fill one purpose or to have one center. The Internet exists to be whatever we want it to be. Again, at the risk of sounding trite, we are slowly and quietly moving towards the concept of cyberspace discussed in early and seminal cyberpunk literature. Think back to the writings of Gibson and Sterling.
So, in closing, in response to the questioned lack of center and the concept that most Internet users are simply Internet consumers, I simply respond, "So what". All we can hope is that right minded individuals will find their calling and explore what makes this whole thing tick. We can hope that they will find out about Open Source software and becoming contributing members to the global computing community. It's not a utopian goal by far, but it is the way things have been and continue to be moving. In every group of people who are content with the status quo and accepting the medium for what it is, there are those individuals like ourselves who are willing to take the next step to make the medium do what we want. There's nothing wrong with that. Let the Internet continue to grow!