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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.
I don't think that there's a real center of the net, but there are "groupings" around the net where the servers/sites/computers/people/whateveryouwant are more concentrated!
Life sucks.
So what you're saying is that the heart of the net is whatever part of it the media decides to glom onto that week?
I hate to tell you this Jon, but "hackers in suburban bedrooms" are still just as prevalent as the Wired CEO of the Week, as are many, many dotcom companies that are actually making money.
The heart of the net is pure ones and zeroes. It has nothing to do with what aspects of it the Washington Post and Wired decide to pay attention to.
It seems to me that now days the Net is so big and there is so many persons hanging around that now is more like a country, for some people the Net Heart is the multimedia sharing community, for others the porn post sites, for others the chatrooms, others Quake or Counter Strike, AI, development, Open Source, jokes and many other topics... i know persons who spend 90% of their online time playing Quake, more or like 4-5 hours a day, same goes for mp3 downloaders and developers.
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
errr .. last i checked .. Microsoft was the heart of .NET(tm)
.. if so .. then [being an American myself] I suggest you try looking outside the borders of our country .. 90% of the web's BullShit not only concerns only the U.S. .. but it happens in our borders.
.. this could be because you still pay per min when using a phone over there.
unless your talking about the World Wide Web
Both the U.K. and Europe in general have a great deal more of an 'information' presence.
of course
Kats, Kats, Who Let the Katz out ?
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
Why is it so odd that, as the Net becomes increasingly ubiquitous, it ceases to have a well-defined "heart".
The premise of this article is like asking where the heart of the library is - the periodicals? the dictionary? The Grapes of Wrath? Or how about the heart of the phone book? The yellow pages? The residential listings? 867-5309?
The not-so-odd truth is that the internet is a medium, not a message, and therefore its heart depends on the perspective of the user.
Oh yeah, and all that stuff about AOL - just because there are more of "them" doesn't make them more (or less) relevant. Remember, for every human being on earth there are thousands of pounds of insects!
The 'net has always been about information transfer. The question underneath all the expressed angst seems to be the "value" of the information.
It seems reasonable to assume that the cost and speed of data transfer in the early days of the internet served as a filter for determining how "valuable" the information was considered. As the price decreased, the holes in the sieve grew larger and the amount of less valuable information increased. Where we stand in that trend today I will leave to your judgement, but it is arguably a collapse toward a mean where the information typically has little value at all.
In the middle of all this is the 'net's equivalent of samazdat - the underground literature of the former Soviet Union - where somehow information that's valued is being transferred. Where the traditional media is increasingly concentrated in the editorial hands of a few, the internet remains one of the few ways for either rapid broadcast to many or discreet transmission to few.
Both corporate and government policies seem bent on increasing control over this information. The heart of the net will increasingly deal with the ability to freely disseminate information of value without prior official oversight.
We have met the enemy and he is us - Pogo (Walt Kelly)
The "Net" wasn't designed to be a "medium" of any sort, individualistic or not. It was simply a way for users of computer systems to access resources on other systems - a throwback to the days when most serious computers were military and/or academic and resources were scarce and widely scattered. It was also designed to be more reliable than traditional communications methods.
That's pretty much the original design goal, Jon. Everything else, even e-mail (even TCP/IP itself), is just a function that was grafted on to the original design. The Web? An accident, really. Tim Berners-Lee was looking for an easy navigation system for researchers and created the Web. The uses we've come up with for it are something else entirely.
There's also a lot more to the Internet than the Web though, Jon. And things like the specialized communities of Usenet, the P2P file sharing systems like Gnutella, and such add to the experiences you speak of. The Internet has become an entertainment medium, but it's not just about that, even though you write about it as if all Web content is now provided by Disney.
It's not the case at all. All the quirky individual sites still exist, though some have gone and others appeared. There's still communities out there - hell, Slashdot is really one of them. They're more lost in the noise than they were in the days when there were a few hundred websites and they were all listed on Netscape's "What's Cool" page, but you can still find what you want without too much trouble.
So I don't buy this one, Jon. Just because AOL has a lot of users who type with one hand doesn't mean the Net has become a different medium. It's just that not everyone has the same high-minded hopes and lofty goals you do. Most people probably are just looking to read (or watch) news, buy stuff, get some amusement, find people like them to talk to, and (sorry) get their rocks off once in a while. The Net isn't just a place for the elite anymore, and that's fine, because the "elite" can still do what they want to do.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
In the early days (or is it daze) of Usenet, I remember seeing stats that estimated 40% of Usernet sites/traffic was porn-related. It's probably not a whole lot different on today's Web (maybe a lower percentage). Point is, porn sites are typically on the vanguard of implementing 'richer' Web experiences (streaming video, interactive video/chat, etc.) and developing self-serve economic models (i.e. credit-card processing). This would not exist if a significant portion of the Web community did not want it. Right?
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
Centralized Intelligence->
Descentralized Intelligence->
Centralized Media->
Descentralized Media->
Centralized Business->
...
Se where do I want to go? I believe net's future is on the services part of the economy, but descentralized. You will have individuals offering their work without much interference from large companies. Like a peer to peer trade system.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
super-8 film succeeded because now you could watch porn at home.
VHS won, because Sony wouldn't let porn on Betamax.
The first "multi-angle" DVD's were porn
as the poster above states porn dominates the internet.
porn dominates spam. and drives spamming technology (well, porn and credit card offers)
jpeg? send porn pictures to your friends faster
mpeg? send porn movies to your friends faster
porn drives all media
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
For better or worse, Amazon has changed marketing in America for good.
A niche question here, but I would be interested to hear from John (or anyone) on why you think this is or is not so. I have spent a lot of money there and have seen it absorb the online entities of Toys 'R Us, IMDb and others. In what ways has this affected all marketing across America?
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
I've been on the net as a hobbyist and wannabe-geek for over a decade now, which to many people on Slashdot might not seem all that impressive. And in a technical scheme of mind, it isn't. But when I was 16 years old and hiding in my own apartment from the morons inhabiting the real world in my area, the Internet became my primary conduit to any sort of community.
First it was MUDs, then MUSH. As technology advanced, the only things I really valued were managing to have a computer that would let me play some of the latest games and let me run a terminal window to one of the communities I practically grew up on. For years, despite the balkanization of the net brought about by deregulation and the emergence of the national ISPs, I found community in those textual realms. Unfortunately, as time has gone on and the quality of people online has degraded further away from those of us with an innate interest in the concept and technology toward today's "All Aboard" culture. For me, the heart of the net was something I felt innately, but always had a hard time placing when the time came. Was it in the exposure I had to people of other cultures and locations? Was it the close friends I made and maintained to this day? Both. But furthermore, it was a place where I felt like I had something in common with -everyone- else there. We were all on the Internet instead of doing "normal" things.
Now, the "normal" thing to do is AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, email... My mother has an Internet account. I can no longer say that I have something in common with everyone, and in that way the heart of the net has just seemed to slow it's beat. The balkanization has come around to completion, and it just doesn't feel quite right anymore. I seek out other communities, but the spirit just isn't there. I can't tell if it's because I've aged, the Internet has grown, or a combination of both.
I feel like there's a need to create a new community on top of the Internet, some massive VPN of exclusive, open sourced applications and services meant to bring people together without fear of corporate takeover. A sort of Open Internet. Maybe this way we can reclaim something like what existed before the rise of commercialism.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Okay, someone has to say it: the Internet is packed solid with degenerate demihumans who use the vast powers of a global network to find recipes for cheese toast and pictures of Jennifer Lopez. It is CB radio, crackling with posers with idiot callsigns trying to feel cool and find anyone to listen. We all know that, and there may or may not be anything wrong with that, per se.
It just annoys me that all of this intelligence (of various degrees) has been put into a system for idiots. Yeah, yeah: that's the way it goes. Whatever. I'm still waiting for the Internet's John Galt moment when the technically inclined abandon their monkey users.
The heart of the Internet probably is AOL, and that is a harbinger of the inexorable slide of the human intellect into entropy if there ever was one.
Sigh. I guess I just miss the days when I signed at the university computer lab and could find meaningful content on the larval Internet.