Digital Colonists III
The story so far: I’m writing in broad terms about the experiences of a group I’m calling – as opposed to “Digital Natives” and “Digital Immigrants” – “Digital Colonists”: the people whose formative online experiences happened in the 1990s, pre-Google and the Dotcom Boom/Crash. In the last post, I made a quick list of the kind of beliefs and tenets that were current in this phase of online evolution. This post I’ll take a look at what’s happened to these beliefs – how they’ve been strengthened, modified or in some cases transformed.
It’s worth quickly noting that I didn’t agree with all of these ideas at the time, and there were probably other common points of view I didn’t even pick up on. Also, there will have been smart people back in 1998 who called subsequent developments correctly - probably they are now a lot richer and more famous than yr humble author. My point though isn’t that we Digital Colonists were wrong or right, more that this stuff is in the intellectual DNA of a big tranche of web-users, some influential. So it’s worth thinking about.
Enough caveats! On we go!
The internet lets you free yourself from embodied identity: The idea back in the 1990s was that you could construct a new identity – or identities – online, in a more fundamental way than simply taking new opportunities or learning new skills. Rather, the Internet made possible the creation and projection of personae that were truer to aspects of ones self than those communicated by ones physical body, location, social status etc.
This concept has had a rough time of it for two reasons. First, misuse of the notion – by scammers, perverts, trolls, etc. – has tended to drive out the idea that there could be a creative or liberating reason to be someone else online. Second, online technology has moved strongly in the direction of embodiment – from lower bandwidth costs allowing photo and video to reinforce identity, through higher penetration increasing the viability of social networking, and now onto the mobile internet turning location and movement into an aspect of the online self. The identity-creation idea survives mostly in the form of virtual world avatars, explicitly either fictional or secondary to ones ‘real’ online presence.
The internet’s “killer app” is the way it can rapidly let you identify and contact people based on content not location.: This idea – of a digital meeting of minds – has survived but is less important now than it was in the ‘Digi-colonial’ (sorry!) period. Location has become more crucial – and the rise of the mobile internet will seal this. Mass connectedness means that for most interests it’s now feasible to combine content and location – to find fans who are relatively local to you. The long-distance friendships that characterised the web in its first decade are – I would hypothesise – proportionally rarer now.
Offline and “old media” culture misunderstand and mistrust the internet: This meme persists – complaints about how one or other representative of old media, old business, old politics etc don’t “get it” are still very common. Frustration remains the order of the day – but there has been a shift. In the 1990s, the mood was one of frustration mixed with defensiveness: the web was seen as a nerd’s paradise, the red-headed stepchild of communication. These days, the tone is of frustration mixed with contempt or pity. There’s rarely a sense any more that the nay-sayers represent a majority viewpoint – at most an annoying obstruction.
The internet allows you to get your opinions and ideas out directly and find an audience: I hesitated to include this one, as personal broadcasting (as opposed to interaction and search) was actually quite a minor element of the Digital Colonist mindset – it really took off with the rise of blogging from 2000 on. But it was certainly there: services like Tripod and Geocities were very popular, though few used them for much other than a basic point of presence. Also, of all the ideas current back then this is the one that turned out to be a real killer app.
It remains one, though people are a bit more cynical now than at its peak – the expectation that blogging would magically bring you an audience was a phenomenon of the early-mid 00s (it may linger in corners of the business world). The integration of “blogging” with social networking has returned personal broadcasting to its Geocities roots: once again, it’s just your family and friends reading, only now it’s much more interactive.
People on the internet are generally smarter and better informed than those not on it: There was a basic assumption that clever people got on the Internet before stupid people. Of all the Digital Colonist themes, this is the one I least sympathised with – it seemed a holdover from the very early days, when only a few scientists at a few universities used the net, and there was a sense that the further away from “scientists at universities” users got, the more the rot set in. Anyway, it’s withered on the vine – ideas like “the September that never ends”, snobbery about the ISP you use, etc. are largely gone. Actually, it’s partly mutated into the cliché that people who spend a lot of time online are fountains of rabid anonymous hate.
Newcomers to networks generally lower their utility: This follows from the previous one. When I was on USENET the assumption was that conversations didn’t scale: newcomers to groups were more likely to flame, troll, ask inane questions, cover old ground and reinvent wheels…. and the more newcomers who appeared the worse the situation got. This idea has been almost completely reversed: from Google onwards, the successful websites have been ones where new content has increased the marginal utility of the site, by allowing network effects to take place (PageRank, eBay auctions, social networks, etc.). For these examples it’s possible that there is a point where utility starts to decrease (eBay quite possibly hit it – there was a sweet spot where enough people used it to find a buyer and seller for anything, but not so many that your chances of being outbid became too high). But in general, the more people use a modern site, the better it works.
Bandwidth is precious: In the Digital Colonist era, with most of the potential audience on dial-up, text was best and bandwidth not to be wasted. I recall lengthy arguments about even allowing photos on the earliest web communities I was part of, and Flash was something close to a mortal sin. Of all the tenets on the list, this has been the most completely overturned from a user’s point of view – after reaching its peak during the orgy of schadenfreude that followed the fall of boo.com (at the time the online equivalent of Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome). Thankfully the rise of mobile has allowed the puritan colonial element some outlet!
The internet is outsourcing memory (like calculators outsourced arithmetic): The internet was seen as a marvellous archive of information which might save canny individuals a lot of time, even if it was annoyingly spotty (I remember spending an hour online in 1995 trying vainly to find a tube map). Most of its users probably didn’t anticipate the sheer extent to which nothing in the Internet era is forgettable (except, ironically, old content), so this idea hasn’t gone away – it’s just strengthened. But one important change is that back in the 1990s the focus was on the cultural change ideas like the “celestial jukebox” might bring about – not on whether or how anyone would pay for content. (Though my memory may be playing tricks on me here).
This has been an unintentionally epic post. Discussion of what the consequences might be – and the one glaring exception to all this (you can probably guess it!) – will have to wait for a fourth instalment.
