William Davis's essay on the
Cold, Cold Heart of Web 2.0 has been in the Broadstuff "To Comment" pile for awhile, but seeing Nick Carr's comments on it - and being late Friday afternoon - it seemed a good time time to get off our a***es.
The crux of the ColdHeart argument is that (allow us a bit of expurgating latitude here):
The first dotcom boom was principally about putting the internet to work in increasing the efficiency of existing services. There was already a market for books, but Amazon found a way of cutting out the inefficiency of the high street. The government already obliged car owners to pay tax on their vehicles, but the web offered a way of avoiding the tedium of post office queues when doing so. This became known as disintermediation.
The significance of the new Web 2.0 services is that it abandons this conventional one-to-many model of service provision, and sets about exploiting the many-to-many potential of the internet. Rather than using the web to connect producers to consumers, it is used to connect individuals to each other.
Of course many-to-many communication precedes even the internet we know today. Email mailing lists and message boards were features of the first Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), and migrated to the internet. They are both examples of individuals grouping together in a self-organising fashion.
What has changed is that these otherwise secluded and organic realms of social interaction are now the focus of obsessive technological innovation and commercial interest. The same technological zeal and business acumen that once was applied to improving the way we buy a book or pay our car tax is now being applied to the way we engage in social and cultural activities with others.
In short, efficiency gains are no longer being sought only in economic realms such as retail or public services, but are now being pursued in parts of our everyday lives where previously they hadn't even been imagined. Web 2.0 promises to offer us ways of improving the processes by which we find new music, new friends, or new civic causes. The hassle of undesirable content or people is easier to cut out. We have become consumers of our own social and cultural lives.
Leaving aside the debate as to whether Facebook et al are actually more efficient than the "web 1.0" social nets referred to above, the argument is in short that the ghostly invisible hand of the market is creeping down the human warmth our social networks. The concern is that making the way we use our "social structures" efficient devalues, rather than eliminates hassle, in the whole structure.
Technologies such as recommendation systems, used most prominently by Amazon.com to help people find books and music they may like, can erode valuable processes by which people discover new authors or artists. The process of discovery is speeded up to the point where the end product also becomes that much more disposable. Bands now shoot to fame with their first record, then disappear soon after. The pursuit of maximum convenience in the cultural sphere risks dissolving what we value in it in the first place.
Outside of the economy - and very often within the economy too - we find that the constraints and accidents of everyday life are the basis for enjoyable and meaningful activities. They don't necessarily connect us to the people we most want to speak to or the music we most want to listen to. Sometimes they even frustrate us.
Nick Carr's
key question on this point is:
Why in the world would anyone believe that the cultural effects of the internet would be beneficial simply because the internet's effects on business are beneficial?
(He then points to a number of people who - he believes - believe that business and social benefits are one and the same)
Now to me this all seems a bit theoretical, and what would be more helpful is to think through what this actually all means in pragmatic terms - i.e. is it really a chilly heart bearing below my Facebook, or will people just use what they think is useful and discard the rest:
For example, speaking (for myself of course) I don't miss the queues and "retail experience" one little bit - I love the fact that shopping is now hugely online. But the interesting thing is that at the time in Web 1.0, while this was all starting, I recall lots of research extolling how people saw shopping as "entertainment" and did it from joyful choice. However, looking at the alacrity with which others have taken to the online retail world, I suspect that once presented with an attractive alternative to all that wonderful entertainment they grabbed it with both hands. Also, it was quite clear that neither the shoppers - or the retail consultants at the time who served them - were really able to conceive of how they would use live in this world that did not yet exist.
So, fast forward to today. Same story - new technologies, lots of people playing with them, most of these technologies still very much in early adopter mode, commercial use cases that make anybody cringe. Social Nets are probably not in Early Adopter mode anymore, but they have scarcely gained a toehold in mass market usage yet. All sorts of predictions - hype to dire - have been made for them.
But going back to that retail example, wouldn't a highly likely outcome be that people will use what they need and discard what they don't. I'd bet that things we hold as truisms today about what people like in their Social Networks will be invalidated by real actions over the next few years.
To see where Social Nets will go, we probably are best served looking at the way we use our "real life" SocNets today, look at what Facebook, MySpace etc do better, and what bits of that we value and what bits are too much of a faff to keep going for the benefits. Now is not a good time to get that view from the Chatosphere...the Fanboys and girls are all over the noo media, and as its all very new lots of experimentation is happening anyway. And of course the Olde Farts are railing about how terrible it all is, and both lots are funding "independent" studies to support their points of view.
Plus ca change
But the question I would ask about its evolution is, to paraphrase Nick, is "Why in the world would anyone believe that people were not able to take what they needed from the Next 'Net and discard the rest?"
This presupposes two assumptions of course:
1. That the 'Net remains open and competitive so choice and open feedback exists - I would hypothesize that retail in 1997 was a "closed system", large corporate retail having pretty much defined the playing field and the game till then. Cometh the Web, cometh new channels to market, and cometh new and attractive modes of service. it wasn't happening in AOL, it wasn't happening in "bricks n mortar" retail, it needed a new channel.
2. That people are perfectly capable of working out what's in their best interest despite the snake-oil
I'd pretty much bet the farm on (2) above, we are as a species fairly well evolved to use social nets (in fact I would argue that the biggest problem with today's online SocNets is that they are so crass by our human standards - hardly any nuance or subtlety is possible)
Re point 1, to me we are in the "AOL/Compuserve" stage with Facebook et al - closed systems that allow a larger mass of people to do what geeky peeps have been doing for some years. Faffing around with naff "applications" on Facebook, or bewailing the river of drivel on Twitter etc is a sideshow, what is really useful to answer is "what are people actually using this machine for" And at some point the Social Net "Mosaic Browser" will be invented and it will all go open, and then we will see the really radical changes start.
