Slashdot Mirror
The Web We Have To Save
An anonymous reader writes: Hossein Derakhshan endured a six-year prison term in Iran for doing something most of us would take for granted: running a blog. He has a unique perspective — he was heavily involved in internet culture, becoming known as Iran's "blogfather," before suddenly being completely shut off from the online world in 2008. Seven months ago, he was released. When he got settled, he took up his old work of blogging, but was surprised by how much the web has changed in just a few years. Now he decries our reliance on monolithic social streams that prioritize image and meme sharing over the thing that makes the web the web: links.
"The hyperlink represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web—a vision that started with its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralization—all the links, lines and hierarchies—and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks. Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you'd rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. ... Since I got out of jail, though, I've realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete."
"The hyperlink represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web—a vision that started with its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralization—all the links, lines and hierarchies—and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks. Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you'd rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. ... Since I got out of jail, though, I've realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete."
I've been using DARPANET/Internet/WWW in one way or another since the mid-80s. The signal to noise ratio is, indeed, appalling. I miss the WWW when it was far and away less commercial, when everything didn't need to be "monetized'. I miss reading Websites with links to other Websites with content that all one page. These days, a simple article is broken down to be spread across multiple pages, and for why? Ads. So people see more ads. Knowing this, and seeing this occur before it became the norm, I started blocking ads in the late 90s using a hosts file. Now, it's simpler with browser-based tools.
The WWW is not what it was. It's been hijacked by the corporatists.
I particularly like those tweets when I'm not even doing laundry that day!
Real estate is a fantastically particular business. I would like to meet the person that wants to drown in every tweet from just one realtor or one agency.
When I've looked for a home, the realtor and I were busy defining exactly what we were looking for. In short order we had a short list. We checked out that list. If that didn't work out, we re-defined and repeated.
The process had absolutely nothing to do with breathlessly tweeting out every gasp in the real estate market and everything to do with being specific.
FWIW, this sounds like it might be a job for RSS or email...but the notion of having to sort through tweets is ridiculous. Another problem with tweets is you would have to follow the link to learn anything at all -- there would be no room to describe the listing (unlike in RSS or email).
I come here for the love
"The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking." https://medium.com/matter/the-...
Sad but true.
Immediately following the end of the article, I found this:
[infinite facepalm]
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Eventually, the amoeba divides. Until then, it stretches itself thin.
There once was a single internet culture. Then it began to stretch away from what it was, while still containing what it was. It continues to stretch. Eventually, a break will form and there will be two internet cultures. One for the "joe sixpack and slurpee crowd", as you put it, and one for the Eternal August (pre-Eternal September) crowd.
Both will be fully functional and isolated from the other. They won't touch each other, because, cooties. Nerds don't want "dumb-jock" cooties, and non-nerds (jock or not) don't want nerd cooties. There's a reason people laugh at The Big Bang Theory, and this is it.
And the world will be poorer for it. Only in the crucible, where heat and proximity force things to form unlikely bonds, can you make stronger alloys. Perhaps the "stupid" you should "fix" is your own.
The internet has become all of the things that the old AOL represented.
He is bitching because the medium he used to become popular is now obsolete for the masses. It is no different than newspapers complaining about the internet or "journalists" complaining about bloggers. Now its bloggers complaining about average Joe's. Unfortunately as the ability to publish moved down the food chain anyone with a computer is "publishing". Now we get a huge volume of useless content drowning out anything of value.
The fact is the same people publishing cat pictures and dumbed down quotes would never read a meaningful article anyway. They have just joined the internet and now outnumber the people who actually want to generate and consume meaningful content. Welcome to real life.
Corporate content aggregation, and new flocks of sheep to drink from those content streams are one phenomenon.
"Entrepreneurs" re-inventing IRC every two weeks with more emoticons is another. Can we simplify every "internet innovation" into three bullets?
1) threaded forums -> TCP -> Usenet -> every news service ever (time-buffered data delivery)
2) "get hails" -> UDP -> IRC -> every chat service ever (real-time data delivery)
3) hypertext -> HyperCard -> WWW -> links (glue that connects everything)
And I'll argue "content aggregation" is just a fancy .* glob, so pre-net.
Ironically, the problem the author is attempting to address is not about the Hyperlink but the failure of people to process anything beyond a meme.
You refuse to read, then make up your own summary. Proving once again that the mentally handicapped can use a computer and write sentences.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Wow we're the two guys in the world who feel this way,. I knew there was someone else out there somewhere.
Most of javascript and the massive javascript libraries out there are trash which have the net effect of\ making the ability to write and maintain web pages less democratic. The whole idea that the web has to be some form of advanced TV, with infotainment graphics and video in little squares all over your page is completley mistaken.
You acquire knowledge through reading; through either written words or equations on the page. Knowledge acquistion for humans is inherently and forever a process of abstract symbol processing- we process speech and scratches on a page and transform it into understanding. That's as natural as breathing. Plain text is the once and a future king of the internet.
Sure, interactive infographics is a real step forward in faciliating the comprehension of complex data sets and interrelationships but those are few and far inbetween and most of the web is a designed for something else.
Suer somethings are better demonstrated than explained verbally. No one is arguing with that.
But the vision of the web as a general purpose computing platform hosted in the cloud which distributes it's "resuts" to limited capacity machines (that would be yours) which more or less passively consume the output is the TVization of the web.
It's what the media companies crave because it puts them back into the seat of power they've always held- power to decide what you see, what you're told, what you know; the power to turn you on and and turn you off using draconic and insane theories of "intellectual property" like software patents and copyright-forever and take-down notices - the whole SOPA and PIPA machinery of innovation control and democracy annihilation which is being about to be passed into law through the TPP passage.
Pages like Huffpo and Facebook it's ilk are unendurable, with video splattered everywhere, their incessant loading , reloading, sputtering and changing. But worse, on a deeper level, they're deliberately designed not to inform readers but to *develop detailed profiles of reader's specific interests which are then sold to marketers and employers*.
They do this by making the headline, the actual content and the link-paths to their stories micro-interest sieves. With each follow-me link, with each carefully worded headline, every news story is broken out along predefined personality/interest micro topics. By the time you've clicked down to the actual story you wanted to read, you've told huffpo and their "partners" an enormous amount yourself personally, your personal circumstances, your private interests, private concerns and life circumstances.
When read Huffpo you repeatedly engage in the above cycle and they in turn tweak and retweak their sieves to be finer and finer over time - this is an iterative game for them- so it reads you back, like a book.
It knows you're a 23 y/o white woman living in THAT house with 3 roomates who's had an abortion, makes 23k a year working as a temp and is currently looking for a partner with which she can surprise one day by intimating she's willing to explore 50 Shades of Gray type S&M and that you have 34k in student loan debt you worry a lot about.
It knows that and it shares that information to "its partners" which is to say anyone with enough money who wants it, who in turn sell that to your potential employers, that grant issuing institution you applied to, that political organization you're thining about joining, perhaps to see how far you can go.
It sells it to the gatekeepers of your life so that when you show up in your new business causual outift to interview, you might as well be butt fucking naked with what you thought was your most private and personal information neatly typed out in Courier 12 on bond paper instead of you education and qualifications.
And that's if your just Joesephine Average. If you're Josephine Someone, then you've effectively given your