Defining the 'internet'

I read this in an article titled: "Web giants to deaf consumers: go away"

The Internet Association rushed to eBay's defense, filing a friend-of-the-court brief saying the web is far too complicated to accommodate disabled people.

“The Internet is complicated, and its technical inner workings are regulated not by any government, but by a combination of individual technologists and an interconnected web of technically savvy multi-stakeholder bodies that have overseen the Internet’s evolution from the beginning,” the group argues in its brief.

I spent many years reading definitions of the internet, of computers, of technology. In those years I ran across a few gems. One, by Swiss playwright Max Frisch, explained technology as:

“the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.”

I've read a great many things, mostly from the early days of the web, when then-surviving journalists in their then-surviving field spent time writing about and forecasting what the future with the web may hold. And after all that smoke cleared I recall, very vividly mind you, what one of my professors and mentors just audibly screamed from within the room where I had completed an oral defense.

"What is he going to do?"

It's complicated. This much I know. I live in its shadow. And because I made an academic exercise, an academic pursuit out of understanding contemporary trends in technology I am in a sense rendered obsolete by my role. This internet does not confer degrees for your interpretation, your research. No, if you can successfully launch campaigns using its many software components then you earn yourself a place in society. But if you question it, if you try to define it then you're simply being reactionary.

Tell that to all those men, women, and children in 1995 who still asked questions, who frowned at the prospect of the internet, who still knew how to put the damn thing down.

Like a dog, it keeps jumping up: into our laps, into our hands, onto our faces, into our minds.

What's next for this internet? That seems to be up to the technologists and the technology-savvy multi-stakeholder bodies.

A definition exists for this kind of power: technocracy. Simply put, expertise becomes the means for attaining power and influence in a technocratic society.

The internet was a clever end-game run around the normal channels of power, influence, and information sharing. Its impact should be clear. It killed jobs, consolidated professions, and blurred the distinction between media producer and audience. Now we watch child stars come apart in under 140 characters over the course of weeks. They stitch together a patchwork of web appliances and applications to document and broadcast their madness, their faltering grasp upon consensual reality.

And the web was supposed to bring us together? This much was clear from the start; its power lies in its ability to arrange data. In as much as we participate as data, data which is meaningful to us, we can arrange our lives in a way that gives us control over our web experience.

To make your web experience meaningful, to give it control you set up what is called a 'feed.'

Upon what do you feed? Experience? A sense of being there through a friend's update? A handle on your "diaried" life through multi-media self-presentations?

We've arrived at our knack, our technology. We've arranged our world in such a way that we don't have to experience it, as it is, without pretense, preparation, obsessive self-selection. No, we're experiencing a world managed by our choices, the choices we make about how we use our devices. We live in self-demarcated information ghettos.

That's fine; we live in ghettos of our decision making. We could conceive of our lives prior to the web as simply a web of activity that we engaged in on a relatively permanent basis. Structurally there is no difference because this is what we've always done. The only difference is that we've grafted this technology onto our lives, which shapes the patterns and the content of our activity. And because of it and its interface design we get stuck in these charmed loops of obsessive watching, checking and rechecking, waiting for a response, to so much graffiti, so much mail, so much video, so much music, so much information, so much interaction, so much.

It's obsessive. It's compulsive. It's what we get when we marry the technology that a technologist conceives with an application that makes the businessman happy. The data they want to collect we gladly generate through our choices, all of our choices, clicking about, swiping and swirling about, our interfaces, each generating some data point, assessing some worth, some value, some thing.

But we've since left the first decision behind, sometime between 1995 and 1999. Then we could have chosen, wholesale, whether or not we wanted to participate. So many have arranged their lives around this web of technology and inflated multi-format self-promotion that a sea change has already occurred. Now we simply make decisions premised upon the always-online reality that we accept. And we've so arranged our world that we don't see outside our creation. Our attention is permanently tethered to the gadgets we use and the habits they purposefully generate then support.

This is the world of the technologist, his lawyer, and their businessman friend. The musicians, the artists, the thinkers, the philosophers, become wrapped in the din, just more information. The technologist, his lawyer, and their businessman friend get to define the internet through legal briefings. And a Swiss playwright nailed it an internet century ago.