In addition to my COMZ360 course, I'm taking a Sociology course on "Political Sociology", numbered SOCI333. Thus, today, I've been reading an article from my coursepack, specifically chapter 2 from Establishing Democracies about the rise of the U.S. democracy from what was supposed to be a constitutional republic.
Rather than ponder what this all means to the U.S. system of government however, or even about the various aspects of political structures in the physical world, I've been thinking about how it all applies to the I-Space. Also, rather than write the summary of the article as I'm supposed to do, for tomorrow evening's class, I have instead felt compelled to write the following essay...perhaps it is relevant to the aims of my project, perhaps not. In any case, here it is in its long (and probably slightly pompous and weird) entirety.
Don’t hesitate to tell me what you think of it or offer up corrections of any factual errors I've made.
Writer's Note: A few minor changes made 11/18/2002 in response to reader feedback/commentary. Deletions are marked with strikeout text, additions are very few, around the centre of the essay.
The Internet as phoenix:
The rise and fall and rise again of the personal I-Space
Originally, the Internet was a republic, governed by the universities and the U.S. government. By the provision of bandwidth and the free sharing of technical innovation, each university contributed to the greater good that was the Internet of the pre-image days. They shared research data, collaborated on cross-university projects and chatted together through individual chat boxes in the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) or sent one-on-one message missives called "Electronic Mail".
With the creation of the browser, of basic HTML and the advent of paid public access, the Internet was briefly (and gloriously, in my opinion) an egalitarian participatory anarchy. Netizens openly used the technologies of the time to connect, communicate and commune with their fellows. They managed themselves according to rules they themselves put in place, that they enforced on themselves and encouraged in others. Here was the rise of the standards of "netiquette", with its ideas of preserving the peace and the bandwidth for everyone to use to their own ends and pleasures. Here were the beginnings of the personal I-Space, vast arrays of websites created for the enjoyment of their owners, containing minute details about lives lived, dreams dreamed, and desires desired or achieved. Here were the origins of the blogosphere.
As HTML and the browser emerged, early-adopting corporations began to understand the possibilities of promoting themselves online. Early websites didn't sell things as much as promote the company itself. They were selling their own "brand", their own image and preferred way to operate.
Search engine companies went public.
The aptly-named Amazon emerged.
Hobbyist Internet service providers who were in it for the fun and the small dollars founds themselves unable to compete with deliberately money-losing giant "providers" and were forced to choose between extinction or selling their tightly-loyal membership-based online communities to dispassionate corporate entities who were in it for the money. They sold out, in droves. Members, in turn, became numbers or "users" overnight. Their new ISP lords stripped them of their ability to voice a say in the workings of their online world, deemed them a faceless mob that was inherently devoid of personality, of individuality. The lords were in it for the buck, not the community.
At the very top were the enormous telecoms and the increasingly dynastic operating system company from Redmond, WA. Individuals and non-profit groups began to get squeezed out to the fringes of the cyberplace. Online advertising arose and got steadily more obnoxious and intrusive. Imagery was everywhere, but most of it was meaningless shills for corporate monoliths.
Echoes of fascism began to emerge.
Technology continued its steady, relentless pace forward, only now it was yoked to the eyeballs and dollars movement. As the Internet technologies became more and more complicated, it became near impossible to do anything online without a legion of highly-skilled, highly-paid programmers and designers behind the scenes. Individuals who were neither found the new tech baffling, difficult and near-impossible to figure out or master. They began to lose space to the corporations, who flaunted their budgets and the technical prowess they bought and paid for. Virtual fences and walls emerged. Individuals slipped and were pushed out even further to the absolute outer fringes.
Reaction against this encroaching online corporatization and domination was small but fierce -- the idea of "hacking" began to arise. Whereas previously hacking was simply a benign way for intelligent computer users to test their skills and maybe gain a few hours of free access time in the process, it morphed into a demonstration of the seemingly powerless against the powerful. It became a type of tactical outcry against the walling off of the previously public online place. Tactics ranging from outright hacks of corporate systems to simple site defacements began to get more common.
It was not long before the counter-reaction by corporations came along. Hackers, those freewheeling experimenters of the early days of the netspace were re-cast by the controlling online corporations as dangerous criminals who were detrimental to the online place. They were billed as contaminators of an online world that had become all about eyeballs and dollars, all about lining the pockets of the powerful few at the expense of the previously organic and self-sufficient online communities of the majority. The gavel fell. They were outcast, verboten, no longer welcome in the neat, bright, colourful and identical online places owned and controlled by the corporations. Bleeding but not beaten, they reluctantly assumed their enforced label of "criminal" and went underground, to simmer and emote anger in seclusion, on the fringes and underspaces of the corporatized Internet.
Aided by the early adopter corporations, the shopping cart metaphor emerged. Divorced from the physicality of a wired-and-wheeled conveyance for products, little virtual shopping cart icons began popping up everywhere, urging and exorting net "consumers" to "pick and click", to "spend, baby, spend" ... to "Whip out the credit card and give us your money!"
Bricks and mortar stores began referring to themselves as "clicks and mortar" as they stampeded over one another to go online. "www" became the new status mark for overfed, babied corporate brands.
The Virtual Gold Rush had begun.
The dot-com world boomed. People got rich. Life online became all about how much money you could made and how fast you could make it. The founding ideals of the netspace, that of selfless sharing, frontier experimentation and civic responsibility became subsumed to the race for the buck, the concept of finding the next big idea that would zoom to the top, let you go public, then laugh your way to the bank as the multitudes flocked to buy both your products online and your worthless stocks offline.
Many of us sold out and were applauded for it. Those of us who held back and commented in dismay at the state of the online world and the depths to which it had sunk were treated as pariahs, quacks, doomsayers and cowards. More of us turned our back in defeat and gave up on the online world.
The personal I-Space, forced off to the fringe of the online place, continued to struggle and flourish. The personal space sites that gave them voice either died or went corporate. Maintaining a personal space for one's own pleasures was made more difficult by the increasing proliferation of online advertising forced on to them by their newly corporate space providers. In order to continue to have a voice online, many individual netizens were forced to accept a glut of obnoxious ads onto their personal spaces, ads that were neither of their choosing nor of their desire. Subjugated, they accepted their powerlessness and bowed to their dictators.
Not all, however, gave in so easily.
Enter the blog. A small movement at first, the creation of tools by fellow bloggers that enabled them to maintain their sites in a quick and easy fashion without the need to worry about detailed HTML allowed the medium and method to merge. The blogosphere exploded.
It now exists as a space that is distinct from the corporate online place that surrounds it. At once intensely personal and openly public, the medium of blogging has allowed individuals to regain a voice online, without needing to sell out, corporatize or otherwise kneel down to the dominant corporate controlling forces online.
In organization, it most closely resembles a socialist republic, with the idea of acting for the good of all and with the notion that if one blog or one blogtool provider displeases or transgresses, the rest of the blogosphere can "vote with their mice" and click over to other spaces, ignoring them. Exercised judiciously, it engenders a kind of self-governance, a sort of socially-conscious democratic ideal of one for all.
The blogosphere does not depend on eyeballs and dollars to survive. It is voluntary, based on labours of love or passion or purpose or conviction.
To date, most bloggers willingly follow the unofficial code of ethics. As the medium and its messages change, so too (probably) will the guiding ethics adapt and change with it. The blogosphere is living changing proof that the I-Space is a perpetual phoenix, rising and falling to rise again, ever changing, yet strangely constant.
Will it survive? Can it last? I don't know. Much depends on what's next, whether or not the new technologies and methodologies and memes can be organically integrated into the blogosphere. It also may depend on size – is there such a thing as too big a space, too many blogs in the blogosphere, ultimate power to control and dicate the Internet by a single corporation?
I don't have the answers. I'm still caught in the mode of asking questions. What I do know is that I've found new meaning and pleasure and hope through the blogosphere, through being a blogger, through being part of the online space, with its self-governing systems and ever-changing technologies. It's a weird place to be at times, but I'm glad I'm part of it.
If you have an opinion on this post, share it with me.
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