Reading the Net: A cultural, not technological, revolution

by John Battelle

Let me start with a bit of heresy, particularly in these days of relentless Internet hype from the mainstream press. Before too long, the Net, as we currently understand it, will disappear--vanish from our memories. Terminology like baud rates, SLIP connections, UNIX, internetworking, Gophers, FTP, even the World Wide Web, will soon recede into history. After we've all forgotten what a T-1 line is, historians and anthropologists will remember this period of our history as the beginning of a cultural revolution.

The Net is the nexus of this cultural revolution, one so broad, deep and potentially frightening in its implications that many prefer to outlaw, regulate, or ignore it. This cultural and generational shift threatens to topple our current forms of government, challenge our assumptions about education, and rewire the means by which our society communicates, interprets itself, and executes its decisions.

You've heard this before, and you kind of buy it: The Net heralds a revolution. The Net changes everything. You must join the conversation at alt.digital.steamroller, or be forever relegated to alt.analog.roadkill.

Forget this hype. It's time for all of us to stop thinking of the Internet as a technologically driven revolution, and start viewing it as the manifestation of a cultural one. The Net heralds a quiet and subtle cultural shift, with technology as its means, media as its method, but communication as its core.

* * * In the past 50 years, we have indeed become what Marshall McLuhan called the Global Village. But we are toiling under an unprecedented fact: there are simply too many of us on this planet to properly communicate our collective desires to one another in such a fashion as to resolve all our differences. In essence, there's far too much noise, and not enough coherent signal in this world.

There's a problem with McLuhan's global vision: the lack of a town newspaper, a community medium, a method of connecting this vast and varied world we now inhabit. In his day, McLuhan saw television as that medium. He was only half right. Without question, the Internet is our own attempt to create that medium and that method. The Net is the small wheel spinning within the much larger wheel of a much larger cultural need: the need to discover a medium for our increasingly crowded times.

When mankind faced a similar situation during the agrarian revolution some ten thousand years ago, we eventually invented written language, an arcane form of code mastered by the few and the powerful and used as an instrument of that power. During the Renaissance, the mass-produced book heralded the eventual breakdown of power. Later, as we migrated en masse from the farms to the cities, we saw the rise of mass literacy and the penny newspaper. And as we learned to live with each other in those cities and searched for new ways to understand ourselves, literacy was again redefined--in the 1950s, you simply weren't culturally literate if you weren't watching television.

When you think about it, you realize that the time between these media revolutions is rapidly diminishing. Guttenberg first ran his press 400 years ago. The newspaper hit its stride 150 years ago, radio and film, about 70 years ago--and television became a national institution only 45 years ago. So what's next? At last count, the Net count grew 100 percent in just one year, but it is still perceived by most as a frightening place, an unknown corner of an arcane world populated by hackers, pedophiles, thieves, and recently and perhaps most horrifically, politicians. Since only about 5 to 10 percent of our own population even uses the Net, and many of those are either college students, high-end businesses, or journalists and librarians, the Net is often portrayed as a technology-driven or sophomoric phenomenon, one that, to provide much benefit, requires either fantastic willpower or a spiffy university-provided network.

What this new medium really needs is more navigators, more intelligent agents, more sophisticated, opinionated guides to the world being created before our eyes. It's no surprise that the most successful companies to recently emerge from the Internet are companies that make search engines--Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek. And it's no wonder companies like Yahoo and many others are busy hiring librarians and editors. Because searching alone is not enough. Searching the Net is a glorified, lonely trip into the world's largest card catalog, where all the cards have been thrown into the wind. People are social, they are communicators, they love to interact with others--it's our most basic, and efficient, mode of learning.

One of the biggest problems with the Internet today is a lack of focused communication--a reference desk, so to speak, a place where people can come to ask questions, get advice, engage in conversation about knowledge. Until recently, the technology to create this kind of environment did not exist. Now that it does, building these kinds of places on the Internet is our civilization's next task. Building them will not be cheap and it will not be easy. We certainly could use the aid of a few digital-age Carnegies to get there. But we must get there.

* * * Let me step back and try to contextualize this Internet phenomenon a little bit. The fact is, the Net is still in its first stages, its adolescence, as it were. It's a lot like radio in its early days: back in the 1900s, the only folks using radios were those who had the time, money, and geek-inspired desire to build one. You could do it, but spending all night twiddling with vacuum tubes was apt to make your friends wonder if you shouldn't get out a little more often.

But there's an even more apt media allegory to think about when we consider what the Net is and is not: television.

Eerie similarities between TV and the Net

Imagine that in year 1946 I came to you bearing news of a brand-spanking-new medium that promised to be revolutionary in its effect upon the public; that would provide researchers, writers, and creative types of all stripes nearly unlimited potential for expression; and, really, was just about the coolest things since the Guttenberg printing press.

Well, that new medium would have been television, and we've been living with its rather pedestrian applications for the past 50 years. We are now at the cusp of a similar media shift, and I'd feel remiss if I didn't make a point of encouraging you to make this one your own. At the moment, there are still too many marketers and nerds running this medium--and Hollywood is right behind them.

Here's the key and somewhat obvious difference between the generation that grew up on TV and the freshman class that universities welcomed last fall: the freshmen grew up with media their parents never had--Nintendo and Sega, Apple and IBM, for example. But their parents also grew up with a new medium to which their parents had limited access: television. And their grandparents probably grew up listening to FDR's fireside chats on the radio and actually reading newspapers.

However, there is a major distinction in this new medium, the digital medium of games and computing: responsiveness. We have grown to expect two-way communication with our media devices. In fact, we have begun to expect that our media not only connect us to news and entertainment, but also that they connect us to each other. As you know, this is a radical departure from the "one to many" model of mass communications that has dominated the past 50 years, and it has significant implications. This new medium is here to stay, and it represents a profound cultural and economic shift.

Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and sociologist at the Massachussets Institute of Technology, has been studying what she calls "the culture of computing" for more than 20 years. In a recent book, Turkle points to what she calls a new "culture of simulation," a cultural shift in which our society--particularly our youth--has grown accustomed to representing itself in the nonphysical space of computers and computer networks.

I'd highly recommend Sherry's book. (And really, it's just a coincidence that she was on the cover of the April 1996 Wired).

With television, we understood as a culture what it is like to see ourselves represented. With computers and the World Wide Web, we understand what it is to represent, to toy with our own cultural identity. It's remarkable how similar the initial, adolescent period of both new forms of media are.

Think of television. Do you see it as a technology-driven phenomenon or as a cultural one? Indeed, do you see it as reflective of culture itself, whether that be good or bad?

The history of television's development tracks eerily like that of the Net, or the National Information Infrastructure, the InfoSuperHighway, the InfoBahn, whatever you want to call it.

Television, like the Info Highway, was hyped for years before it actually happened. In the 1920s, magazines and newspapers wrote tirelessly about "radio with pictures," "sight radio," and "radiovisor receivers." In fact, the first television sets cost about as much as an automobile and there was almost nothing on. (The first UNIX workstations, by comparison, cost about $15,000 and could only be used for specialized applications).

Television, its proponents claimed, would "eliminate newspapers" since news would be broadcast; "eliminate social evils and racism," since races were all perceived as equal to the camera's eye; and create a "democratic forum that uplifted and enlightened the masses." Does that remind anyone of the empty promises made about today's new media?

Television even had its own titans of industry, just like today. David Sarnoff, the imperialistic ruler of television maker RCA, was, according to his biographer Kenneth Bilby, "the last of that remarkable strain of individualistic entrepreneurs--Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie--whose autocratic governance of industrial oligarchies bruised the precepts of free competitive enterprise but spurred the growth of the late 19th and early 20th centuries." Evidently that biographer was unaware of Bill Gates and Microsoft, or John Malone and TCI.

During the rise of television, monopolists like Sarnoff quickly cornered markets and standards (can you say "Microsoft Windows"?) and the Federal Communications Commission was seen as largely a toothless organization. Some things never change--Newt Gingrich is now proposing the elimination of the FCC.

Television's proponents claimed the new medium would herald a revolution in communication, and in fact, the rapid and steady growth in home TV receivers tracks almost point for point with today's adoption of computers and modems. As TV became America's favorite medium, content became king, and major production studios and networks scrambled to lock up the best-rated talent-- exactly what's happening in the online world right now. (Michael Kinsley now works for the Microsoft Network, after all, and some former librarians are earning six figures, according to many reports, in new careers as "information brokers)."

Lastly, and probably the most interesting of the similarities between television and our current media revolution, is the fact that, for the first ten years of TV, no one could agree on what standards broadcasters and receivers should be using. That should sound familiar to anyone who has tried to set up a Web site or configure a PC for multimedia.

If you agree that television has become a profoundly cultural institution, one that has redefined who we are, how we understand each other, and how we relate to one another, then I'd like to take this comparison to its logical conclusion: The Net will be equally, if not more dramatically profound in its relation to our culture.