In our business, it's easy to get overly sentimental about the Internet. I'm not checking my email with this new multiplatform app on my iPhone... I'm now going through an experience! I'm not sending tedious updates about my day to a vacuous pool of navel gazer...
I'm social engaged! So on and so forth.
In life, I tend to be more romantic about the chores of daily life - so I fit right into an industry hopelessly in love with itself, the possibilities of the future and the search for human meaning in the modern technology era.
But there's a crumb of discomfort with the praise for Web, in my mind. Perhaps it's academic, but I believe it is fundamental and important. It crystallized while watching a PBS documentary about Martin Luther's writings changing the world via the printing press. Before the printing press, Luther could never have gained the political support he needed to challenge the Roman church. He would have been put to death or silenced as dozens of others had been. His cultural impact on society could not have happened without that invention.
It hit me: we have yet to experience something as fundamentally unique with our current use of the Internet. It is less like the astrolabe making global navigation possible and more like enjoying the benefits of a movie on DVD as opposed to VHS.
It sounds strange to say, given the way the Internet's impact on every person I know. But on some flow chart somewhere in my head, this thing is still just replicating other forms of media in a shinier package. Movies, TV, letters, journalism, music, common chit chat - all things we did before. With the Internet, these things are now consumed or achieved more efficiently, but perhaps not quite as differently as it gets credit for.
An example: In banking, I'd argue that the ATM fundamentally changed the way the economy works by affecting consumption patterns. Not just a matter of convenience, the ATM became the new front line of Western consumer capitalism. Academic understanding of this led to important actions around ATM banking at historic moments that came to pass. Post Sept. 11, 2001, the Fed took emergency measures to shore up the money supply as Americans "hoarded" cash during a time of instability. During the financial sector meltdown of 2008, economists theorized that the modern bank collapse would "hit Main Street" when ATMs ran out of cash an event that would cause something in the realm of riots and mayhem.
If your banking Web site went down, would society come unraveled? Would anyone argue that?
On and on my mind goes an artist displaying photos, a musician distributing songs. These things are now handled differently, but the art itself is unchanged. The Internet has only served to make these things more readily available and (ahem) disposable.
Little email forwards were the ditto'd cartoons posted in break rooms of years gone by. The 15 second video of the guy getting hit in the crotch with a flying cat is the discount bloopers VHS tape of 1985. I watch baseball anywhere, anytime but is the game now different? Even fantasy sports were played years before Web-based applications by nerds via the postal system.
Unlike the cinema, the television, the telegraph, the radio wave, the printing press, the camera, the University, the democracy the Internet still has yet to achieve anything truly new, despite making things faster and more widespread. Sure, it's a bit precious of a point to make, but for all the credit the Internet gets in changing the world, so far it has not pushed itself beyond the humble postage stamp in terms of creating a new way of life for society. Are we smarter? More happy? Did this thing change who we truly are? Or are we just doing the same things in a different way?
Is the world more different pre/post Internet than it was pre/post internal combustion engine? I have no doubt someday it will be, but for now , the answer is no. Maybe it will be around social media as we gather our minds and consciousness in new and different ways. But not until we're at least 10 steps beyond our current understanding of it. Maybe it will be around mobile technology, keeping us linked to the cultural mainframe without borders. But not until hardware becomes more fundamental and seamless.
I guess that means we have some work to do. But hey, that's what keeps me coming back for more.
Mike Hudson
Strategists & Planners
Comments (4)
As a very young man in 1975 I had the same question as Mike poses ...other than making everything more accessible, what does the internet really do for us? Is it not, essentially, a communications medium, transparent?
1975? Yes, my uncle, George Smith, was working at Lawrence Livermore Labs and Los Alamos; he was describing to me what was then called ARPANET, a military research derived system of communications. He saw back then where things were going. Always a little ahead of his time, my uncle even had a "laptop"; he's credited with creating the first graphically interfaced, interactive, conflict simulation program. This, the very first "war game" from which all others proceeded, looked like a game of "Submarine" with two flip up screens back to back.
I digress, but my point is that George, a very smart guy, held the veiw that the new communications system would revolutionize scientific research at very least. Now, you and I may waste our time tweeting our friends, but somewhere a medical researcher, a nuclear physicist like my uncle, even some ad guy in a "digital agency" is making connections with people and thinking and information to which they simply would not have access.
Postage stamps not withstanding, the internet does change things, for the better and the worse. As a seasoned film director, I deplore the ready acceptance of shooting, editing and sound that has an embarrassing lack of craft or skill. But if I'm writing something or designing a scene and have in the back of my head the spark of an idea from a 1950 French film ...then the opening scene from Max Ophul's La Ronde is a few keystrokes away.
I love the internet (and it loves me back).
Posted on September 22, 2009 10:52
I feel that in addition to all the wonderful acceleration and democratizing of information that the internet allows, the most important change that it is spurring is a deep cultural shift in what we perceive as 'private'. That is something 'new' and arguably more important than the effect that TV had in the 20th century IMO.
Posted on September 22, 2009 11:18
when i recognize that many hospitals are still on DOS prompts -- but someone can twitter about their bowel movement at the red lobster punch bowl --
good post ... thanks.
Posted on September 22, 2009 11:44
Thanks for this post, Mike. I think you’ve really clarified some nagging feelings I’ve had that the internet just isn’t taking us far enough yet, in terms of how we interact with our structures of knowledge and creativity. With some notable exceptions, such as the work of Jonathan Harris, I feel that, as you point out, we are simply moving our old techniques and structures into a new space, without fundamentally shifting our conceptual models to realize the potentials of that space.
One of the real powers of the internet, I believe, is its potential to atomize our knowledge of the world into smaller and smaller pieces, to be used for imaginative, collaborative remixing and exploration. Imagine taking all the concepts and language in Wikipedia, for example, and breaking them down to the statement level, tagging them, and allowing people to build entirely new concepts from them, for further exploration by the community (discussion, ranking, experimentation, etc). This would be a true advance in how we “do the knowledge” in the digital age. For all its democratizing power, Wikipedia is still, at its core, an encyclopedia. We’ve had that knowledge structure for over 2000 years. It’s time to create the next step.
(Not to hate, but when it comes to great advances in knowledge and creativity, I'd rank the post-it note as far more important than Wikipedia)
Posted on September 23, 2009 08:32