1994. Although we didn’t know it at the time, 1994 was probably the last entire year in history to enjoy a global internet penetration small enough to be called non-consequential. I remember it fondly: when I bought my tickets for that year’s Lollapalooza, Nirvana were the announced headliners. By show-time, however, everything had changed: Instead of Kurt, we’d be getting Billy. With news of Cobain's suicide, The Smashing Pumpkins - already slated to co-headline - had ascended to the top spot. Corrigan and his people seemed game enough come show day, but not as good as the coulda-been Nirvana shows burning though the minds of ticketed fans. Promised something sublime and unique, it was frustrating to accept what they were offering up in its place. Fortunately, I had a list of people to blame. I never attended another Lollapalooza, and I never voluntarily listened to the Smashing Pumpkins again.
Musical happenstance aside, the culture had a more pressing matter to attend in 1994. So complex and enthralling was this idea, even the people selling it had trouble understanding exactly what it might do. It’s roll out to the general public was through a series of commercials carrying the MCI brand, but shilling for something called, “The Information Superhighway.” The spots featured a young actress named Anna Paquin. Dressed smartly in a fancy dress, cute hat and speaking with an equally cute English accent. The tiny pitchwoman didn’t seem to be advertising anything. Instead, she looked cute and precocious, and spouted cute, precocious, positive affirmations interspersed with hopeful-sounding koanic riddles. (“There is no more “There!”). Apparently there was a highway being built. A highway that would bring the world together in ways that previous highways could not. A highway that could save us. By 1999, still years before You Tube, Facebook and Amazon, it seemed readily apparent to anyone paying attention that all the marketing promises could be kept. Everyone agreed: An age of miracles was upon us.
The MCI spots were ubiquitous for a while, but they were part of a much larger global awareness. The elephant had clearly been lured into the room, and now the blind would gather, touch, feel, and speculate.
Now, almost twenty years later, we’re beginning to see the potential end-products of those early years. After all those promises at the beginning, it’s hard not to be at least a little disappointed. If the internet was ever truly envisioned and conceived as a uniting force, it’s existence as such proved gallingly short. By 1998 Napster launched the first sorties of a music / info / file sharing battle between copywriters, artists and the public.
And it’s been sort of downhill from there. The upside potential of what was so obviously a world-changing device began to leaven itself with shitty by-products of it’s rise. Newsgroups evolved into forums and forums began to espouse exclusionary tactics, with the most knowledgeable active users policing the less knowledgeable (and/or those who couldn’t write as well) through castigation, bullying, and threats of expulsion. It’s that ethos that’s crystallized and perpetuated itself, to the point where most opt-in forums on the internet today seem to be run by a fandom of bullies, dead set on belittling the knowledge, opinions, and criticisms of their fellows in the group.
The codifying of the social media phenomenon didn’t help matters. The internet using public wasted no time in diving head first into a complete lifestyle re-jigger on behalf of Facebook. Suddenly we all found ourselves back in touch with - in many cases - a significant representative array of all the people we’d ever met. Now the uniting theme was stoked up again, this time, there’d be no weird forum hierarchy to navigate, and no banner ads distracting us from wasting time talking to people we never liked enough to actually stay in touch with in the first place. Again, the miraculous in electronic form. I think the goodwill lasted all of six months.
The “Like” button, a good idea in theory but beneficial ONLY in theory, and never in practice. The problem is in the weird duality of the feature. In many cases, internet users will share things that they want other people to enjoy. The “Like” button is a good way of closing the loop: Here check this out…this? Love it so much I’m gonna “Like” it. The problem is that “Likes” are used to determine page value in most internet monetization models. As that relationship became more and more prevalent and more and more obvious, the use of the damn “Like” button get’s more and more useless.
Hey look at this.
Awesome. I like it!
And so on. There are also many cases in which people who sell things might price those things according to their “Like” button value. By now most internet users understand this, and this understanding has created a weird new paradox. Now when somebody sends something they want us to like, we automatically assume that we’re being grifted into helping somebody else get paid. That effect alone is enough to negate the perceived benefits of a “Like” button, because the motivations of the “Likers” are seldom stated, and oftentimes not readily apparent. So too for the content provider’s, who maybe simply be sharing things for the sake of sharing, or earning advertising dollars based on “Likes.” Without that key piece of info in the bag, keeping track of “Likes” is completely useless, and that info is NEVER in the bag.
That’s shitty because this evolution was no accident. In my memory, the internet of the nascent, Netscape / AOL / dial-up years was a positive place. The people at work on internet properties were positive people. Conversations at parties, front page articles in the NYTimes. Feature stories in publications major or minor: All of them touted the new, amazing, light speed communication device that would link us all, no more “there!!!.” Every part of every country in the world sitting at one magical table. We would approach problems as one people now, and progress as we knew it would get botox. Then, after the thing was well on it’s way toward making at least some of the hype into reality, we, the young and tech-savvy, the users and builders who’d seen the upside potential and been astounded, we went and implemented every conceivable measure to reverse the effects.
So here we sit. The promises of the internet, save for the ones about how much easier it would be to buy things with it, have - largely - not materialzed. As a race, humans seem to be addicted - more than anything else - to our differences. We teach our children about familial pride and patriotism, but some how it transmutes into the belief in only us. OUR ideas...OUR country...OUR resources...We promise ourselves enlightenment and evolution, and build this awesome engine of attainment, then - just as all the pieces fall into place, we consciously engineer the results to be something other than that. Promised something sublime and unique, it's frustrating, sometimes fatally so, to accept something different offered in it's place. Unfortunately, in 2012, we've got nobody left to blame but ourselves.
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