And this permanence, once fully realized and experienced, only pushes the more cynical user to increasing layers of anonymity. After all, if every comment we make to blogs or articles might be used by a future employer to evaluate our suitability for a job, we might as well say nothing—at least not with our name attached.
But caving in to this sentiment has real costs: the civility of the net, the integrity of our self-expression, and—perhaps most significantly—the openness of our society. Once we surrender to the status of the anonymous, our resentment at having to do so will seep into our posts. We become even less present than we are to begin with, less responsible for what we do, and less likely to sense the impact we are having on others. We become yet more anonymous actors in a culture where it’s hard enough not to antagonize the people we know—much less those with whom we interact namelessly and facelessly.
On the other hand, maintaining a strict sense of identity online is liberating, even empowering. We realize that nothing we commit to the net is truly off the record, and learn not to say anything we aren’t proud to see quoted, shared, and linked to.
We don’t put words into the digital realm unless we are willing to own them.
* * *
4. Mele Koneya and Alton Barbour, Louder Than Words: Nonverbal Communication, Interpersonal Communication series, (Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, 1976).
5. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011).
VII. SOCIAL
Do Not Sell Your Friends
In spite of its many dehumanizing tendencies, digital media is still biased toward the social. In the ongoing coevolution between people and technologies, tools that connect us thrive—and tools that don’t connect us soon learn to. We must remember that the bias of digital media is toward contact with other people, not with their content or, worse, their cash. If we don’t, we risk robbing ourselves of the main gift digital technology has to offer us in return for our having created it.
Almost immediately after the first computer networks were developed for Defense Department use, their system operators noticed something strange: the scientists who had accounts were spending more time and bandwidth talking about their personal research interests and favorite science fiction novels than official business.
While the Internet—then Arpanet—was a technological success, it had become overwhelmed by social use. The government decided to give it away. AT&T turned down the offer to take it over. In what may have ultimately been a kind of wisdom, they couldn’t see a business application for what appeared to be an academic social scene. The government ended up setting the net free, to a large extent, with the proviso that it only be used for research purposes.
No one thought the net would end up going anywhere—not least of which because people conversing with one another over networks seemed to be a financial dead end. The net was compared to Citizens Band radio—a two-year fad that faded even before a movie about the truck drivers’ lingo and culture could be shot and released. My own first Internet book was actually canceled by the publisher in 1992 because they thought the net would be “over” by 1993, when the book would finally hit the shelves.
The social, noncommercial net continued to grow and grow. By 1994, studies showed that families owning a computer modem were watching an average of nine hours less television per week. Worse, at least to marketers, they were spending it in a completely commercial-free medium. Finally, after a series of violations by small businesses looking to promote their services online, the net was opened for commercial use. Legislators used the argument that it couldn’t be held back effectively anyway.
At last, businesses were free to use the net to peddle their wares. Everyone got involved, putting a “dot-com” behind every word imaginable. And while a few businesses actually succeeded online, most of them failed—miserably enough to take the stock market down with them.
This wasn’t entirely the net’s fault. The stock market had been looking for a new, exciting sector to lead it upward ever since the biotech crash of the 1980s. Digital media, suddenly unleashed to become the electronic strip mall for the twenty-first century, seemed like a great new place for all that investment money to flow. Problem is, most Internet businesses didn’t really need all that venture capital—much less common stock. Three hackers in a garage were capable of building most online businesses for a couple of thousand dollars in pizza. Besides, Internet users were spending more time in chat rooms and conferences than on the intentionally “sticky” and heavy-handed sales sites of stores. And they were constitutionally and habitually opposed to paying for anything on a medium that had always been free.
We didn’t want stuff, anyway; we wanted one another. The dot-com boom was followed by an even louder dot-com crash. And most people—at least most businesspeople and journalists—seemed to the think the net was over.
Left to our own devices, however, net users began to blog. And link. And comment. The manic investment of the dot-com boom had given us a robust network and fast connections, with which we could now do as we pleased. The web still had businesses on it, but the vast majority of connections and conversations were between people. It turned out, content is not king—contact is. And so what we now call “social media” was born.
Smarter businesses took notice. AOL, GeoCities, Friendster, Orkut, MySpace, and Facebook have each risen to channel all this social energy into a single, centralized location where it can be monetized. Successive rounds of investors figure that in all these digital connections and exchanges there must some marketing research to sell, some modeling that can be done, or some way to turn people’s contacts into sales leads.
What all these social networking businesses keep getting wrong, however, is that the net is not becoming a social medium. It already is one. The history of the Internet can probably best be understood as a social medium repeatedly shaking off attempts to turn it into something else. And it will keep doing so. Our digital networks are biased toward social connections—toward contact. Any effort to redefine or hijack those connections for profit end up compromising the integrity of the network itself, and compromising the real promise of contact.
People are able to sense when a social network is really serving some other purpose. Seemingly permanent monopolies on our online social activity lose their constituencies more quickly than they earn them. When one network begins to sink, users flock to the next one, rebuild their contact networks, and then go on with their socializing. Yes, each commercial social networking site—no matter how seemingly permanent—will ultimately go the way of its predecessors. This is why I have attempted to use so few brand names in this book. The leading players seem permanent to us in the moment, but are forgotten just as quickly as they once took over the headlines. Remember Compuserve? Or America Online? How about MySpace? The social bias of the medium rejects the business bias of any particular venue.
This essential bias is consistently misunderstood and mischaracterized as fear or selfishness on the part of net users. The anger people feel over a social networking site’s ever-changing policies really has less to do with any invasion of their privacy than the monetization of their friendships. The information gleaned from their activity is being used for other than social purposes—and this feels creepy. Friends are not bought and sold.
Yet this is precisely what most Internet businesses are trying to do. Every company of every size is looking for a “social strategy” through which to extend its brand. Each company wants to build its own social network of customers—or to build pages in existing social networks and win “friends,” “fans,” or “likes” from the millions of potential users out there. It’s as if having what amounts to an email list will breathe life into brands already decimated by the Internet’s powers of deconstruction and transparency.
What they don’t yet realize, however, is that it is too late for a business to go social. Every business already is social. Transparenc
y is no longer a choice for businesses in the Internet age—it is a given. Where there are people, there will be conversations. Those conversations are already happening, with or without any particular company’s page or hub. The truth about what they do and how well they do it is already a topic of conversation.
The real way to “go social,” if they wanted to, would not be to accumulate more page friends or message followers, but rather to get their friends and followers to befriend and follow one another. That’s how to create a culture in a peer-to-peer, networked medium. Instead of looking to monetize or otherwise intercede between existing social connections, those promoting networks should be looking to foster connections between people who are as yet unknown to each other yet potentially in need of each other. And then let them go about their business—or their socializing.
The danger, of course, is that today’s “penny for your friends” social networks will survive long enough—at least one after the other—for their compromised social standards to become accepted or even internalized by users. Kids growing up as members of networks devised to exploit their social lives are not nearly as scandalized by all this as those of us who still hold on to the ideal of genuine, agenda-free connections between people. If the social urge online comes to be understood as something necessarily comingled with commercial exploitation, then this will become the new normative human behavior as well.
Many people—and not just young people—are already incapable of seeing any ethical drawback to misrepresenting themselves to their online friends. “So what if I’m getting paid to tell everyone in my network that I’m a fan of a band I’ve never heard of before?” “Everyone is doing it.” “Caveat emptor—let the buyer beware.” The problem is, these people are not talking to buyers, but to friends. They don’t even experience their online social networks as somehow separate from their personal lives, but one and the same. Unlike the businessman who is ruthless on the job and loving at home, they are equally ruthless with friends and strangers alike. This may be more consistent, but it is hardly more evolved. It’s equal opportunity exploitation.
Who ends up exploited most, of course, is the person who has been convinced to behave this way. And that’s where some awareness of how particular interfaces, tools, and programs influence our behavior is so valuable.
Social networking sites are filled with features, games, and activities that are compellingly addictive yet ultimately more rewarding to the network’s owners than its members. Taking an action in a game instantly (and usually invisibly) turns one’s entire network into a spam distribution list—selling her friends, and her friends-of-friends, to the game’s real clients: market researchers and advertisers. Instead of being rewarded with cash, the player is rewarded with game points, new abilities, or in-world treasures for each further infringement on her social network. Does it feel like bribery? Not really. It’s just the rules of the game. Once the first few social barriers have been broken down, the stakes inside the game world begin to feel more real than the risk of insulting some “friend” in the social networking site, anyway. Those aren’t real friends, anyway. They are just fodder for the game.
Sadly, though, they were real friends. Whether forged online or in the real world, these virtual connections are an extension of our social reality. These are the people who help us find the right doctor when we are sick, who support us when we’re out of work, and who comfort us when we lose a relative. They’re the ones who help us find a couch to sleep on when we’re traveling, a decent party to go to on Saturday night, or the right graduate program for a cross-disciplinary research interest. Finally though, all these contacts are less valuable for the particular things they might do for us than for the mere fact that they are they are connected to us at all.
Friendships, both digital and incarnate, do create value. But this doesn’t mean the people in our lives can be understood as commodities to be collected and counted. People are not things to be sold piecemeal, but living members of a network whose value can only be realized in a free-flowing and social context. We have yet to find out what that value might be.
Content was never king, contact is. Yet the possibilities for new levels of human connectedness and collaboration offered by networking technologies have hardly been tapped. We are too slow to realize that people are not a form of content—a resource to be bought and sold; they are fellow cells in the greater organism of which we are all a part but are barely aware. We value our increased contacts for what they might provide and miss the greater value of the contact itself.
But it is this contact, this desire to construct a social organism together, that has been the driving force of digital technology all along. The instinct for increased contact is the evolutionary imperative we feel to become something greater than ourselves. Just as atoms combined into molecules, molecules clustered into cells, and cells collected into organisms, we organisms are networking into greater levels of organization.
This is the real draw of the many interactive devices we have brought into our lives. In a sense, the people dismissing the net as another form of CB radio had it right: We are still just finding novel ways of talking to one another. From the ridiculous faxes people used to send to each other containing lists of bad jokes to the tweets we now transmit by cell phone, each new communications technology provides a new excuse to forge connections.
The content is not the message, the contact is. The ping itself. It’s the synaptic transmission of an organism trying to wake itself up.
VIII. FACT
Tell the Truth
The network is like a truth serum: Put something false online and it will eventually be revealed as a lie. Digital technology is biased against fiction and toward facts, against story and toward reality. This means the only option for those communicating in these spaces is to tell the truth.
Before what we think of as media even existed, the majority of our information exchange took place at the bazaar—the market and social space where people gathered to buy and sell goods, meet up with friends and, probably most importantly, learn what was happening in their world. While people may have actually spoken more at home, they were only exposed to new ideas when they entered the social and commercial realm of the bazaar. Everything took place there, from romance to betting to entertainment to shopping. Even the Torah was read on market days, for these were the only times a crowd would show up in one place.
The activity of the bazaar was characterized by a multiplicity of interests and connections, all overlapping. Religion mixed with politics, romance mixed with commerce, and entertainment mixed with money-lending. Everyone was speaking with everybody else, and about all sorts of things and ideas. The bread man might share news of a friend’s wedding engagement, while the priest might have a recommendation of a new blacksmith. And while there were certainly a few storytellers—usually foreigners bringing the tales of other cultures—the majority of the interactions between people were based in nonfiction. They talked about their products (who was selling the best fruit that day), gossip (who was sleeping with whom), weather, crops, local news, or even church politics. People exchanged the ideas, rumors, and facts that mattered to them. The only mythological material came to them from the scroll read to them by a rabbi, or as ritual recited by a priest. The interactive medium of the day—conversation—was almost entirely based in facts.
All of this information exchange allowed people to improve on themselves and their situations. The ideas passing between them—what we now call “memes” (rhymes with teams)—behaved like genes. Memes passed from person to person, and replicated if they were useful and powerful or died out if they were not. Just as a species can get stronger through natural selection of genes, a society gets stronger through the natural selection of memes. Memes are just ideas that spread. The meme for exchanging grain receipts works better than the one for depending entirely on one-to-one bartering, and so the meme spreads and many towns develop coinage. Someone else has an idea for a second ge
ar in the windmill mechanism. It works well, and so as other millers learn of the innovation, the meme for a second gear replicates and spreads. So does the meme for “Joe makes better shoes than Sam,” or “plant the seeds a week later this year.” We spread the ideas that we think are true, because this will increase our value to others.
This is how the bazaar turned a feudal society of peasants into a new thriving middle class. It was a culture, constantly churning, mixing, and improving as individuals sought to improve their status. By the Late Middle Ages, the bazaar was working so well as a peer-to-peer economy that the aristocracy began to fall. As the former peasants rose to become a middle class of merchants and craftspeople, they were no longer dependent on feudal lords for food and protection. Families who had been in power for centuries were losing ground.
The royals hired some finance experts to help them reverse the trend, and they came up with two major innovations. The first, centralized currency, required that no one use any means of exchange other than the coin of the realm—which had to be borrowed from the royal treasury, at interest. This was an easy way for people who already had money (the aristocracy) to make money simply by having money. The second invention, the chartered corporation, prohibited anyone from competing against one of the king’s officially sanctioned monopolies. Simply stated, no one could be in business for himself anymore, but had to work for one of the companies in which the king had invested.
So the peer-to-peer bazaar that almost brought down feudalism was dismantled, and feudalism evolved into what we now think of as corporate capitalism. Sadly, along with the peer-to-peer economy went peer-to-peer communication. Companies tried to replace what had been relationships between people with relationships to brands. Instead of buying your beer from Bob the brewer, you’d buy it from the officially sanctioned monopoly. The seal on the bottle was to substitute for whatever human relationship existed before. To make this transition work, brands turned to the sorts of mythologies still in use today. The Quaker on a package of oats has nothing to do with the grain in the box; he is a story.
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