Do you remember when you first got the Internet in your home? If you were like millions of Americans, you had snagged one of the quintillions of AOL discs*, installed the software, connected your computer to your phone line, and jacked in to the Information Superhighway. Well, after several minutes of the most horrific screeches ever belched forth from a 56k/v90 fax modem.
You would be logged in to see a plethora of options, from news and chat rooms to email and Instant Messaging to weather reports, sports scores, and searches. Oh, the searches. The Internet was a new place, and as you would venture forth for your first sojourn into the World Wide Web, you might use Altavista, Yahoo!, AOL keywords, or even that newfangled Google thing. All this information to explore with the click of a mouse or the tap of a keyboard! It was truly a marvel of modern technology.
But what happens now? You turn on your laptop, it grabs a wireless connection, and you’re online as soon as your OS has booted up. You might head over to Facebook, Twitter, Gmail or some similar social contact site, then head to a news site, tech blog, webcomic or whatever. If you need to look something up, you can always hit up Wikipedia or Google. And that’s pretty much it.
And while that might not seem like a big difference, here’s the thing: it’s a huge difference, and a big part of the evolution of the Internet.
The online world used to be search-based; you would look up whatever you needed, testing the boundaries of what was available online. It was still a static medium in that there was less user interactivity. You would usually only have a web page if you were a developer, or (later on) if you created a Geocities page.
But as the Internet grew, and people figured out its possibilities and boundaries, it became much more dynamic. Social networking brought with it an ease of personalized webpage creation. New resources for sharing like YouTube, IMDB and Wikipedia made finding large quantities of information in one spot easier than ever before. Social interactions have been forever changed. The dynamic evolution created a shift, though: the Internet became destination-based.
Rather than consistently exploring, people now have a set group of websites that they visit, a group only expanded through referrals or links by trusted sites that are already used, or by friends. Even as the scope of information has grown, the scope of attention has narrowed to the degree of selective ignorance. We move around in niche packs, with fewer and fewer people expanding their views outward.
One of the largest destination sites is Facebook, which has tens of millions of users. In fact, almost everyone I know is on the site. Lately, there have been many criticisms of the site’s new privacy policies, causing a large uproar in the online community. However, most people say that they won’t leave Facebook, as all of their friends are already on the site. In essence, it’s an Internet-based catch-22. You want to leave the site, but all your friends are on it, and they don’t want to leave because all of their friends are on it, and so on and so on. As long as there are no alternatives, people will stay.
This problem presents a number of issues, the biggest of which is not privacy at all: should everyone on the Internet all be using the same website to connect to each other? After all, we make thousands of connections in our lifetimes, and it might be prudent to have one place to find people to stay in touch with them. The solution of niche social networks would require some users to become members of dozens, or even hundreds of sites to keep up with their social and professional contacts (not to mention that the main social network building site recently announced that it will be switching to a pay model), which would get too confusing and convoluted. But when the utility of a site (connecting to everyone) is compromised by privacy issues, where do people go?
The way I see it, there are three choices:
- Regression: You can always go back to the older methods of communication: email, IM, phones, evites, in-person meetings, maybe even (gasp!) write a letter. All of these are still solid forms of communication, and chances are that they won’t be passing your info along to marketers.
- Lateral transition: Twitter is pretty up-front about its stance on privacy, MySpace is still around, and there’s been a video floating about on the net about how good ol’ AOL can make a comeback. Facebook isn’t the only game in town, after all.
- Search: Remember what I said earlier about the old pioneer spirit of adventure in the early dial-up days? Go out and find new communities and services – there might be something better just waiting to be discovered.
The Internet is a wonderful, expansive, open world of communities, communication, and information. So go out an play once in a while.
*I’m not gonna lie, you guys. My parents had dial-up AOL service up until last year. But don’t worry, they got better.
I, for one, will always mourn the slow death of the handwritten letter…just saying.
I miss that sense of wonderment that the Internet brought with it back in 1998. It was a big thing to read a newspaper or chat with someone from Russia on ICQ. Now, it’s all so ho-hum. Everything’s been seen, sometimes three times over.
Mehnaz – It may be a slow death, but it makes getting a letter that much more special and classy.
TO – I agree that the magic is lost. It’s kind of like ChatRoulette – it seemed like a good idea at the time, but once everyone gets in on it, it just gets kinda sad. And disturbing.