There has been a lot of commentary about the downsides of the Internet generally and of social media in particular…lowered attention spans, on-line bullying, growing narcissism, rapid spread of untrue information, etc–even, perhaps, inhibiting the assimilation of immigrants…and many of these concerns are indeed valid. However:
Imagine that there is no Internet.
In this alternate history, the traditional media still rule They may choose to provide online access to some of their content, but user-generated content will be enabled only in the form of ‘letters to the editor’, which, like their print prototypes, are published online very selectively and at the total discretion of the major media organizations. In the sphere of commerce, large corporations may offer some form of online ordering, but there is no such thing as just putting up a website and seeing what you can sell.
Would this no-Internet world really be an improvement?
I’ve previously quoted something said to me once by a wise executive:
When you’re running a large organization, you aren’t seeing reality. It’s like you’re watching a movie where you get to see maybe one out of a thousand frames, and from that you have to figure out what is going on.
If this is true about running large organizations, it is even more true for the citizen and voter in a large and complex country. The individual can directly observe only a small amount of the relevant information, for the rest–from the events on the border to international and military affairs–he is generally dependent on others. And that gives those others–those who choose the frames and the sequence in which they are presented in the movie analogy–a tremendous amount of power. This is especially dangerous when those controllers of the information all have similar backgrounds and worldviews.
Some may argue that we managed without the Internet, not so many years ago, and that that absence didn’t lead to disasters. And some have argued that without a feeling of threat from increasingly-dominant Internet competition, the legacy media would be more balanced and responsible, would not have become so one-sided and tendentious. As a guide what an Internet-less world would be like today, though, I think these arguments don’t apply. Thirty or forty years ago, local and regional networks and broadcasters were more common and more significant than they are today, and journalists were more diverse (in a professional and background sense) than they are today. (And even back then, there was plenty of group-think and lack of coverage of important issues and topics.) My own view is that a non-Internet world would be conformist, intellectually stifling, and very dangerous in terms of the evolution of national policies.)
Not to mention the malign effect on economic dynamism.
Yet I get the impression that a lot of people would prefer, or think they would prefer, such a world.
And European countries do seem determined to use censorship and threats to try to simulate a pre-Internet world as nearly as they can. We will see how that works out for them.
Your thoughts?
Related posts: Betrayal, also Starvation and Centralization.
Back in the day, we used to say “the internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it”. Of course, that was when internet culture was “shockingly libertarian”.
I can see how censorship of facebook could end up being a good thing: people might decide to stop getting their information from feed troughs. On the other hand, I could easily see that not happening. Most people in the Bay Area seem to prefer censorship. It makes their lives easier.
> forty years ago
The only way I could tell CBS from ABC or NBC was the talking head presenting the national news, and that’s because I’m not Asian, or Vulcan, otherwise they would look alike to me …
But I would expect them to complete each other’s phrases, if needed. Astounding uniformity, who knew the free market could breed such unanimity.
(Vale Brokaw, Jennings, Rather)
If you think about it in terms of bandwidth, the internet is more of a continuation of a trend that goes clear back to the beginning of radio broadcasting. A fairly steady increase in the number of channels available. Until the mid oughts, the internet was primarily a print medium depending somewhat on just where you were and what sort of bandwidth you could get.
In terms of diversity, national news and opinion plateaued very early at three hardly diverse outlets with local news just a little more competitive. That ended when Ted Turner started CNN and even a little earlier with the advent of “super stations”. Just having to fill that 24 hour hole meant that a lot of stuff got out that wouldn’t have when national news was limited to 30 minutes, carefully curated, less commercials, a day. Arguably, the watershed for the internet was Drudge breaking the Lewinsky affair. Even though the internet was still essentially text based, people started to understand that there was a whole world out there that they weren’t going to see unless they went looking for it. That genie isn’t going back in the bottle.
Now platforms like Facebook that feel they must have a widely dispersed geographic footprint are at a disadvantage. They have to somehow maintain their appeal while somehow mollifying all the bodies that find the wide dissemination of information problematic. So we find “free” Europe, Russia, the CCP, Iran and numerous other countries, not excluding the U.S. desperate to somehow control this flood of information. Anyone with even modest intelligence would understand this was an unwinnable and adjust to the new reality. Governments, being notably excluded from that category, will continue to fight and lose indefinitely.
I’m so old I remember when Gopher was the hot new thing on the Internet.
There are actually a couple “different” dimensions to the Internet when viewed through the OSI stack. There is of course the application layer, but also the transport/network layer with TCP/IP; that was the critical innovation. If you remember up until the early 90s there was still mutterings about constructing an interconnectd from the ground up using the French Minitel. TCP/IP was viewed as too clumsy; however, it was the open protocol that got the ball rolling. That open architecture combined with the ability of having an open application layer is what made things go.
As Tim Berners-Lee said, it’s the “Internet of things” more than any given application that is key.
Yes it’s true that every village has an idiot and the Internet connects them all… but so what?
The one thing that is interesting is the ability of governments to step in and gain sophistication in controlling it. Part of that is because the concentration of social media which allows governments to not only monitor a smaller number of sites but to apply political pressure. Elon Musk is perhaps the world’s most dangerous man right now because he has shown the willingness through not only riling up regarding the British rape gangs, but his interviews with Trump last year and the AfD leader a few weeks ago. This will be the critical battle to come especially as AI becomes deployed at central nodes to sniff packets.
Btw….rumor has it that Bezos and Zuckerburg will be joining Elon on the podium at the Inauguration. If so, that will be huge signal.