I WANT TO REVOLUTIONIZE THE INTERNET BEFORE I TURN 25
or, my grand (social) theory of the future of the Internet.
It turns out that bike riding across Cambridge during a cold winter sunset can be very invigorating for the mind.
These past few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of the Internet. What should it look like?
2 main thoughts occurred to me after asking myself about the future of the Internet: 1. Media is the Mother. 2. What is the Internet for? That is, what should it be for?
I’ve come to a tentative theory, that I’m going to lay out here, albeit in a pretty simple manner (thank goodness for near-instant self-publishing).
1. Media is the Mother. What does this mean?
After we’ve grown up, left home, and graduated, we’re not under the influence of parents, and we’re no longer in school. If that’s true, where do we learn values as we continue to evolve as people? The media. We continue to learn about the value placed on fame and money, through the celebration of society’s success standards in television and magazines.
But while media educates, as parents do, it has a more important role in this metaphor: Where do we seek approval, after we realize that satisfying our parents is either not possible or not sufficient any longer? From the press. And it’s not merely that positive press is a good thing - “any press is good press,” as they say. While negative press can be understood as censure, press attention itself is a moral good. It means that one is doing something that is interesting, different, and perhaps even historically important—worthy of becoming part of the public record.
So, when we have outgrown our mothers, whether we realize it or not, media becomes the mother—our mother. No, media cannot love in the same way. But the media is always there—which in itself resembles unconditional love by taking the form of unconditional presence.
2. What should the Internet be used for?
Stupid cat videos, obviously. Cheap shot, whatever. The Internet is so-called “New Media,” and as such, it becomes a transmitter and mirror of social values. Let’s take a step back, though. Can we even ask this question in the first place? I would argue yes. We may ask the question “What is life for?” but since that is questioning the entirety of existence, which contains systems but exists outside and above it, the question has no validity—or at least, no logical way of being answered.
But the Internet does exist within a system. It exists in our world. That is, it exists in a world where capitalism, personal desire, and media are intertwined. There are three clearly identifiable and separate types of success in this world (according to my initial thoughts—let me know if you would revise this): 1. Financial/Monetary/Capitalistic, where success means earning a lot of money. 2. Status/Political/Interpersonal: having a lot of friends, or being esteemed within a community. 3. Moral/Ethical: being a good person, whatever that means to you, in your religious system or otherwise.
On the simple, definitional level of utility, the Internet provides 1. The ability to quickly and easily store and access large amounts of INFORMATION and 2. The ability to quickly communicate and SHARE information with other people. When we ask what the Internet should be for, we have to consider it in terms of these pre-existing systems, with their rules and standards for success. Since the Internet is mainly a mode of communication, with a much larger capability for “memory” and storing human “knowledge,” it is essentially the extension of all of its users’ brains. We can ask it any question and probably find an answer. We can use it to store our information, including personal information, and we do.
The thing is, though, is that the Internet should help us. It should help us achieve human goals—the things we want to do. And here’s the part where I might get a little crazy on you.
Western (particularly American) society as it has existed for at least the past 100 years has relied on a financial system called capitalism. In order to maximize efficiency, this system’s organizations and infrastructure has relied upon an idea - a way to organize people - called bureaucracy. Presumably, this is because people work better together when they are organized into a structure and given specialized roles. We’re used to power being a function of groups. As humans, we can only have power as groups. Whether that’s political - as in the party system - or capital - as in corporations.
But I’m going to argue here that the Internet will give power back to the individual, in a way that may appear to take power away. Power comes from groups, supposedly. But in some ways, that’s simply because they are nodes: places where people congregate, for one reason or another. It must be a fundamental truth that power exists in the individual - else, how does power manifest in the group? While there is power created in the reaction or interaction between people, it could not be created without some initial power in the individuals. The problem with our society pre-Internet is that it’s harder to track, and it’s harder to see. So people end up working together based on their resume, an interview, word of mouth.
WHAT IF, though, people could expose how powerful they were? They could track their consumer decisions, so they could demonstrate their consumer buying power. They could track their income, so they could show their financial worth. They could graphically display their friends, the strength of their connections, and the range of industries and fields of interests that their friends are in, to show breadth and ease of cross-pollination. There are things that aren’t as trackable—how do we measure motivation? Potential? Creativity? The positive and regenerative effects of time spent on vacation, doing a simple task, or “doing nothing” (which more often than not, is actually something)? But perhaps these could be tracked in blogs where we expose our feelings, thoughts, and ideas, flickr accounts where we post our pictures, places for our art, sites where we mark our goals and track our projects, sites where we log the time we spend doing various things. It sounds like big brother. It sounds like big brothering ourselves. But we’re already doing it - in multiple sites, across the web. It’s like the US National Budget—a lot of the information is there, available for public access. And like the budget, the challenge is not the existence of the information, it’s the accessibility, and most importantly, the organization. This problem, for the budget, will be tentatively solved with a forthcoming iPhone app. For the problem of tracking personal capital, the solution may be a little while off.
Because even though it seems like we’re really almost there - there is so much of ourselves out there on Facebook, on blogs, Youtube, Flickr, Toggl, Daytum, Yawnlog, personal information sites like Yawnlog, and so on and so forth - we lack a way to gather and organize all of it in the way I’m describing. We can sort of do it on sites like Flavors.me (see my page for an example—they call this phenomena “lifestreaming”), but these sites aggregate links - they don’t aggregate, organize, and visualize personal data. Which is a more complicated and interesting task.
Clearly, this blog post is already too long, especially for a tumblr. But the point is this: (see, we’re coming around full circle, here’s the system of thought closing itself in) No matter which of the three systems - financial, social, or ethical - we consider ourselves most firmly entrenched in, the Internet should help us achieve our goals in these realms. In order to do this, we need to understand and utilize our personal power. In order to do that, we have to record, analyze, organize, and share our personal data: a task that the Internet is specifically suited to do. It is supposed to be the extension of ourselves—a place for us to learn from the memory and consciousness of the entirety of wired humanity, towards greater personal efficiency, more fulfilling existences, and better lives - whatever “better” means in our systems and to us personally.
The Internet, while distracting and perhaps disposing us toward shorter attention spans, does not have to make us dumber. And it should not be seen as simply a tool that makes more entertainment consumable by chopping it into shorter doses, or simply a mechanism for mass voyeurism (read: I do NOT think that LonelyGirl15 style vLogs are the most important phenomena for the future of the Internet). The Internet, when used properly, should instead be used to disincentive laziness - to make us more of the people that we enjoy being, for a larger portion of our lives.
I wrote this blog post to live the ideas and principles espoused here. They were written without having read many other theorists on the future of the Internet (I like to write my thoughts on a topic before I read others). I absolutely welcome critique and further conversation!
[One possible criticism I did not yet address—what if people mold their behavior to the approval of others? If media is the mother, and we crave the approval of others through comments, what prevents us from becoming very similar automatons? I would argue because the Internet fosters as many unique interests as people have, forming more opportunities for small communities based on niche interests.]
