The birth of the electronic community... and the backlash
New forms of community were emerging that stressed the actual
contributions of the participants, rather than whatever prepackaged
content they had in common. In many cases, these contributions took
the form not of ideas or text but technology itself.
The early interactive mediaspace was a gift economy (see Barbrook2).
People developed and shared new technologies with no expectation of
financial return. It was gratifying enough to see one's own email
program or bulletin board software spread to thousands of other users.
The technologies in use on the internet today, from browsers and POP
email programs to streaming video, were all developed by this
shareware community of software engineers. The University of Illinois
at Champagne Urbana, where Mozilla, the precursor to Netscape, was
first developed was a hotbed of new software development. So was
Cornell and MIT, as well as hundreds of more loosely organised hacker
groups around the world.
Invariably, the software applications developed by this community
stressed communication over mere data retrieval. They were egalitarian
in design. IRC chats and USENET groups, for example, present every
contributor's postings in the same universal ASCII text. The internet
was a text-only medium and its user was as likely to be typing into
the keyboard as reading what was on screen. It is as if the internet's
early developers released that this was not a medium for broadcasting
by a few but for the expression of the many.
People became the content, a shift that had implications not just for
the online community but for society as a whole. The notion of a group
of people working together for a shared goal rather than financial
self-interest was quite startling to Westerners whose lives had been
organised around the single purpose of making money and achieving
personal security. The internet was considered sexy simply because
young people took an interest in it. People who developed internet
applications in this way were called cyberpunks or hackers, and their
antics were often equated with those of Wild West outlaws, hippies,
Situationists and even communists.
But their organisation model was much more complex and potentially
far-reaching than those of their countercultural predecessors. Many of
these early technology and media pioneers would not have considered
themselves to be part of a counterculture at all. Indeed, many new
models for networked behaviour and collaborative engagement were
developed at research facilities dedicated to the advancement of
military technology. A US government policy requiring all firms
working under Defense Department contracts to test their employees'
blood and urine for illegal drug use led to a certain disconnection
between most Silicon Valley firms and the majority of the fledgling
computer counterculture. (In fact, of all the Silicon Valley firms,
only Sun computing quite conspicuously refused to do drug testing on
its employees.)
Whatever the applications envisioned for the communication technology
being developed, the operating principles of the finished networking
solutions, as well as the style of collaboration required to create
them, offered up a new cultural narrative based in collective
self-determination.
Online communities sprung up seemingly from nowhere. On the West Coast
in the late 1980s one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, Stewart Brand
(now co-founder of the prestigious Global Business Network), conceived
and implemented an online bulletin board called The Well (Whole Earth
'Lectronic Link). Within two years thousands of users had joined the
dial-in computer conferencing system and were sharing their deepest
hopes and fears with one another. Famous scientists, authors,
philosophers and scores of journalists flocked to the site in order to
develop their ideas collaboratively rather than alone. Meanwhile as
the internet continued to develop, online discussions in a distributed
system called USENET began to proliferate. These were absolutely
self-organising discussions about thousands of different topics. They
themselves spawned communities of scientists, activists, doctors, and
patients, among so many others, dedicated to tackling problems in
collaboration across formerly prohibitive geographical and cultural
divides.
The Backlash
These new communities are perhaps why the effects of the remote,
joystick and mouse represented such a tremendous threat to business as
usual. Studies in the mid-1990s showed that families with
internet-capable computers were watching an average of nine hours less
television per week. Even more frightening to those who depended on
the mindless passivity of consumer culture, internet enthusiasts were
sharing information, ideas and whole computer programs for free!
Software known as 'freeware' and 'shareware' gave rise to a gift
economy based on community and mutual self-interest. People were
turning to alternative news and entertainment sources, which they
didn't have to pay for. Worse, they were watching fewer commercials.
Something had to be done. And it was.
It is difficult to determine exactly how intentional each of the
mainstream media's attacks were on the development of the internet and
the culture it spawned. Certainly, the many executives of media
conglomerates who contacted my colleagues and I for advice throughout
the 1990s were both threatened by the unchecked growth of interactive
culture and anxious to cash in on these new developments. They were
chagrined by the flow of viewers away from television programming, but
they hoped this shift could be managed and ultimately exploited. While
many existing content industries, such as the music recording
industry, sought to put both individual companies and entire new
categories out of business (such as Napster and other peer-to-peer
networks), the great majority of executives did not want to see the
internet entirely shut down. It was, in fact, the US government,
concerned about the spread of pornography to minors and encryption
technology to rogue nations, that took more direct actions against the
early internet's new model of open collaboration.
Although many of the leaders and top shareholders of global media
conglomerates felt quite threatened by the rise of new media, their
conscious efforts to quell the unchecked spread of interactive
technology were not the primary obstacles to the internet's natural
development. A review of articles quoting the chiefs at TimeWarner,
Newscorp, and Bertelsman reveals an industry either underestimating or
simply misunderstanding the true promise of interactive media.
The real attacks on the emerging new media culture were not
orchestrated by old men from high up in glass office towers but arose
almost as systemic responses from an old media culture responding to
the birth of its successor. It was both through the specific, if
misguided, actions of some media executives, as well as the much more
unilateral response of an entire media culture responding to a threat
to the status quo, that mainstream media began to reverse the effects
of the remote, the joystick and the mouse.
Borrowing a term from 1970s social science, media business advocates
declared that we were now living in an 'attention economy'. True
enough, the mediaspace might be infinite but there are only so many
hours in a day during which potential audience members might be
viewing a program. These units of human time became known as
eyeball-hours, and pains were taken to create TV shows and web sites
'sticky' enough to engage those eyeballs long enough to show them an
advertisement.
Perhaps coincidentally, the growth of the attention economy was
accompanied by an increase of concern over the attention spans of
young people. Channel surfing and similar behaviour became equated
with a very real but variously diagnosed childhood illness called
Attention Deficit Disorder. Children who refused to pay attention were
(much too quickly) drugged with addictive amphetamines before the real
reasons for their adaptation to the onslaught of commercial messages
were even considered.
The demystification of media, enabled by the joystick and other early
interactive technologies, was quickly reversed through the development
of increasingly opaque computer interfaces. While early DOS computer
users tended to understand a lot about how their computers stored
information and launched programs, later operating systems such as
Windows 95 put more barriers in place. Although these operating
systems make computers easier to use in some ways, they prevent users
from gaining access or command over its more intricate processes. Now,
to install a new program, users must consult the 'wizard'. What better
metaphor do we need for the remystification of the computer? Computer
literacy no longer means being able to program a computer, but merely
knowing how to use software such as Microsoft Office.
Finally, the do-it-yourself ethic of the internet community was
replaced by the new value of commerce. The communications age was
rebranded as the information age, even though the internet had never
really been about downloading files or data, but about communicating
with other people. The difference was that information, or content,
unlike real human interaction, could be bought and sold. It was a
commodity. People would pay, it was thought, for horoscopes, stock
prices and magazine articles. When selling information online didn't
work, businesspeople instead turned to selling real products online.
Horoscope.com and online literary journals gave way to Pets.com and
online bookstores. The e-commerce boom was ignited. Soon the internet
became the World Wide Web. Its opaque and image-heavy interfaces made
it increasingly one-way and read-only, more conducive to commerce than
communication. The internet was reduced to a direct marketing
platform.
The burst of the bubble and the re-emergence of community
Few e-commerce companies made any money selling goods, but the idea
that they could was all that mattered. When actual e-commerce didn't
work, the internet was rebranded yet again as an investment platform.
The Web was to be the new portal through which the middle class could
invest in the stock market. And which stocks were they to invest in?
Internet stocks, of course! Like any good pyramid scheme, everyone was
in on it. Or at least they thought they were.
News stories about online communities such as The Well, or even
discussion groups for breast cancer survivors were soon overshadowed
by those about daring young entrepreneurs launching
multi-million-dollar IPOs (Initial Price Offerings of formerly private
stock on public exchanges such as the NYSE or NASDAQ.) Internet
journalism, written by option-holding employees of media
conglomerates, moved from the culture section to the business pages
and the dot.com pyramid scheme became the dominant new media story.
A medium born out of the ability to break through packaged stories was
now being used to promote a new, equally dangerous one: the great
pyramid. A smart kid writes a business plan. He finds a few 'angel'
investors to back him up long enough to land some first-level
investors. Below them on the pyramid are several more rounds of
investors, until the investment bank gets involved. Another few levels
of investors buy in until the decision is made to go public. Of
course, by this point, the angels and other early investors are
executing their exit strategy. It used be known as a carpet bag. In
any case they're gone and the investing public is left holding the
soon-to-be-worthless shares.
Tragically, but perhaps luckily, the dot.com bubble burst along with
the story being used to keep it inflated. The entire cycle, the birth
of a new medium, the battle to control it and the downfall of the
first victorious camp, taught us a lot about the relationship of
stories to the technologies through which they are disseminated. And
the whole ordeal may have given us an opportunity for renaissance.
Back here in the real world, the internet is doing just fine. Better
than ever. The World Wide Web, whose rather opaque platform ascended
primarily for its ability to serve as an online catalogue, has been
adapted to serve many of the internet's original, more technologically
primitive functions. USENET discussions have been reborn as web-based
bulletin boards such as Slashdot, and Metafilter. Personal daily
diaries known as weblogs have multiplied by the thousands. Blogger.com
provides a set of publishing tools that allows even a novice to create
a weblog, automatically add content to a Web site or organise links,
commentary and open discussions. In the short time Blogger has been
available, it has fostered an interconnected community of tens of
thousands of users. These people don't simply surf the Web. They are
now empowered to create it.
Rising from the graveyard of failed business plans, these
collaborative communities of authors and creators are the true
harbingers of cultural and perhaps political renaissance.