Iran's Blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter Are Killing the Web (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Iranian writer Hossein Derakhshan has a unique perspective on the internet. He got into blogging early on, and sparked the spread of blogs across the Iranian internet. In 2008, this earned him a 20-year jail sentence. Late in 2014, he was released early. Derakhshan was a major participant in the early-2000s web, but missed the social media revolution. Here are his thoughts on the change: "The hyperlink was my currency six years ago. It 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. Since I got out of jail, though, I've realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.

But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: it is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations. Surveillance is increasingly imposed on civilized lives, and it gets worse as time goes by. ... I miss when people took time to be exposed to opinions other than their own, and bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters."

Comments

Right. More than right.

[vikingpower]

Nearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object – the same as a photo, or a piece of text. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting. But links are not objects, they are relations between objects. This objectivisation has stripped hyperlinks of their immense powers.

Apps like Instagram are blind, or almost blind. Their gaze goes inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying.

These are very thoughtful observations, and the regard the man has, what with coming freshly out of jail, is acute and accurate. I have been thinking along similar lines, more and more, these last years. And here is definitely one of the main reasons, for me, not to be on Facebook, Twitter et al.

Re: Right. More than right.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say "amen to that", having myself kept clear of "social media", but realistically this won't be an option any longer soon. When everybody thought it would be a fad and people would flock back to the real internet after the umpteenth MySpace clone had bitten the dust, it was easy. But now? Facebook et al are supplanting the old web. Apps are killing websites. The free information concept of the old internet is dying, walled garden rising everywhere. Already not having a Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account means social isolation, marginalization and getting a job impossible. In the end I know I'll cave in. I can't fight the whole world. The internet I knew and loved is dead. Heil Zuckerberg.

Re: Right. More than right.

[TheRaven64]

Getting a job is hard without social networking, the mistake is to confuse data-mining platforms for social networks. A social network is the graph of people that you interact with. A data-mining platform such as LinkedIn or Facebook may be a mechanism for supporting a social network, but it isn't a social network. There are a great many ways to communicate with people.

Re:Right. More than right.

[Incadenza]

Iran is a very interesting country. Contrary to popular belief the inhabitants are not anti-Western at all.

Make sure you watch Our Man in Tehran, a series of documentaries by Dutch journalist Thomas Erdbrink, who married an Iranian photographer and has lived in Iran ever since.

Nope

[penguinoid]

but missed the social media revolution

I thought the implication was that he founded the social media revolution and avoided the social media devolution.

If social media didn't limit shares to a bubble ef

[Anonymous Coward]

If content sharing wasn't crippled in an attempt to make UX an echo chamber of user views to more effectively monetise the web, then social media as an aggregator wouldn't be the worst thing. Users could still get an echo chamber by choosing who to follow, same as they chose what blogs to read, but the sharing mechanism would still work.

Re:Hyperlinks are hardly dead...

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

Writing on the internet had not changed, but reading – or, at least, getting things read – had altered dramatically.

I had the same initial reaction as you did, but before posting, I decided to take a look at the article, and his point is about how we obtain our information and how it's spoon fed to us now. The summary could be written better, imo...

No...

[Anonymous Coward]

Excessive greed is killing the web. (just like it does everything else in the world)

Everyone has their hand out for your data and your money now.
And all content is getting sliced up into smaller and smaller bits for larger and larger fees.

Things were pretty good there for awhile before the marketing assholes moved in.
And now. Not.

Bout time for 'something new'. And complex enough to keep the marketing assholes out for a few years.

Re:Hyperlinks are hardly dead...

[drinkypoo]

I had the same initial reaction as you did, but before posting, I decided to take a look at the article, and his point is about how we obtain our information and how it's spoon fed to us now.

Before the internets: people got their information from news and TV. After the internets: most people choose to follow mainstream news outlets, and ignore the alternative press. The only differences are the medium used for spoon-feeding, and the fact that people are now making a conscious decision to continue getting spoon-fed, even when given alternatives. The problem isn't social networking sites. The problem is willful ignorance, caused by cognitive dissonance. That predates the internet. Why would you imagine that it's caused by it?