Chapter 2 No.2

The birth of the electronic community... and the backlash

New forms of community were emerging that stressed the actual contributions of the participants, rather than whatever prepackaged content they had in common. In many cases, these contributions took the form not of ideas or text but technology itself.

The early interactive mediaspace was a gift economy (see Barbrook2). People developed and shared new technologies with no expectation of financial return. It was gratifying enough to see one's own email program or bulletin board software spread to thousands of other users. The technologies in use on the internet today, from browsers and POP email programs to streaming video, were all developed by this shareware community of software engineers. The University of Illinois at Champagne Urbana, where Mozilla, the precursor to Netscape, was first developed was a hotbed of new software development. So was Cornell and MIT, as well as hundreds of more loosely organised hacker groups around the world.

Invariably, the software applications developed by this community stressed communication over mere data retrieval. They were egalitarian in design. IRC chats and USENET groups, for example, present every contributor's postings in the same universal ASCII text. The internet was a text-only medium and its user was as likely to be typing into the keyboard as reading what was on screen. It is as if the internet's early developers released that this was not a medium for broadcasting by a few but for the expression of the many.

People became the content, a shift that had implications not just for the online community but for society as a whole. The notion of a group of people working together for a shared goal rather than financial self-interest was quite startling to Westerners whose lives had been organised around the single purpose of making money and achieving personal security. The internet was considered sexy simply because young people took an interest in it. People who developed internet applications in this way were called cyberpunks or hackers, and their antics were often equated with those of Wild West outlaws, hippies, Situationists and even communists.

But their organisation model was much more complex and potentially far-reaching than those of their countercultural predecessors. Many of these early technology and media pioneers would not have considered themselves to be part of a counterculture at all. Indeed, many new models for networked behaviour and collaborative engagement were developed at research facilities dedicated to the advancement of military technology. A US government policy requiring all firms working under Defense Department contracts to test their employees' blood and urine for illegal drug use led to a certain disconnection between most Silicon Valley firms and the majority of the fledgling computer counterculture. (In fact, of all the Silicon Valley firms, only Sun computing quite conspicuously refused to do drug testing on its employees.)

Whatever the applications envisioned for the communication technology being developed, the operating principles of the finished networking solutions, as well as the style of collaboration required to create them, offered up a new cultural narrative based in collective self-determination.

Online communities sprung up seemingly from nowhere. On the West Coast in the late 1980s one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, Stewart Brand (now co-founder of the prestigious Global Business Network), conceived and implemented an online bulletin board called The Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link). Within two years thousands of users had joined the dial-in computer conferencing system and were sharing their deepest hopes and fears with one another. Famous scientists, authors, philosophers and scores of journalists flocked to the site in order to develop their ideas collaboratively rather than alone. Meanwhile as the internet continued to develop, online discussions in a distributed system called USENET began to proliferate. These were absolutely self-organising discussions about thousands of different topics. They themselves spawned communities of scientists, activists, doctors, and patients, among so many others, dedicated to tackling problems in collaboration across formerly prohibitive geographical and cultural divides.

The Backlash

These new communities are perhaps why the effects of the remote, joystick and mouse represented such a tremendous threat to business as usual. Studies in the mid-1990s showed that families with internet-capable computers were watching an average of nine hours less television per week. Even more frightening to those who depended on the mindless passivity of consumer culture, internet enthusiasts were sharing information, ideas and whole computer programs for free! Software known as 'freeware' and 'shareware' gave rise to a gift economy based on community and mutual self-interest. People were turning to alternative news and entertainment sources, which they didn't have to pay for. Worse, they were watching fewer commercials. Something had to be done. And it was.

It is difficult to determine exactly how intentional each of the mainstream media's attacks were on the development of the internet and the culture it spawned. Certainly, the many executives of media conglomerates who contacted my colleagues and I for advice throughout the 1990s were both threatened by the unchecked growth of interactive culture and anxious to cash in on these new developments. They were chagrined by the flow of viewers away from television programming, but they hoped this shift could be managed and ultimately exploited. While many existing content industries, such as the music recording industry, sought to put both individual companies and entire new categories out of business (such as Napster and other peer-to-peer networks), the great majority of executives did not want to see the internet entirely shut down. It was, in fact, the US government, concerned about the spread of pornography to minors and encryption technology to rogue nations, that took more direct actions against the early internet's new model of open collaboration.

Although many of the leaders and top shareholders of global media conglomerates felt quite threatened by the rise of new media, their conscious efforts to quell the unchecked spread of interactive technology were not the primary obstacles to the internet's natural development. A review of articles quoting the chiefs at TimeWarner, Newscorp, and Bertelsman reveals an industry either underestimating or simply misunderstanding the true promise of interactive media.

The real attacks on the emerging new media culture were not orchestrated by old men from high up in glass office towers but arose almost as systemic responses from an old media culture responding to the birth of its successor. It was both through the specific, if misguided, actions of some media executives, as well as the much more unilateral response of an entire media culture responding to a threat to the status quo, that mainstream media began to reverse the effects of the remote, the joystick and the mouse.

Borrowing a term from 1970s social science, media business advocates declared that we were now living in an 'attention economy'. True enough, the mediaspace might be infinite but there are only so many hours in a day during which potential audience members might be viewing a program. These units of human time became known as eyeball-hours, and pains were taken to create TV shows and web sites 'sticky' enough to engage those eyeballs long enough to show them an advertisement.

Perhaps coincidentally, the growth of the attention economy was accompanied by an increase of concern over the attention spans of young people. Channel surfing and similar behaviour became equated with a very real but variously diagnosed childhood illness called Attention Deficit Disorder. Children who refused to pay attention were (much too quickly) drugged with addictive amphetamines before the real reasons for their adaptation to the onslaught of commercial messages were even considered.

The demystification of media, enabled by the joystick and other early interactive technologies, was quickly reversed through the development of increasingly opaque computer interfaces. While early DOS computer users tended to understand a lot about how their computers stored information and launched programs, later operating systems such as Windows 95 put more barriers in place. Although these operating systems make computers easier to use in some ways, they prevent users from gaining access or command over its more intricate processes. Now, to install a new program, users must consult the 'wizard'. What better metaphor do we need for the remystification of the computer? Computer literacy no longer means being able to program a computer, but merely knowing how to use software such as Microsoft Office.

Finally, the do-it-yourself ethic of the internet community was replaced by the new value of commerce. The communications age was rebranded as the information age, even though the internet had never really been about downloading files or data, but about communicating with other people. The difference was that information, or content, unlike real human interaction, could be bought and sold. It was a commodity. People would pay, it was thought, for horoscopes, stock prices and magazine articles. When selling information online didn't work, businesspeople instead turned to selling real products online. Horoscope.com and online literary journals gave way to Pets.com and online bookstores. The e-commerce boom was ignited. Soon the internet became the World Wide Web. Its opaque and image-heavy interfaces made it increasingly one-way and read-only, more conducive to commerce than communication. The internet was reduced to a direct marketing platform.

The burst of the bubble and the re-emergence of community

Few e-commerce companies made any money selling goods, but the idea that they could was all that mattered. When actual e-commerce didn't work, the internet was rebranded yet again as an investment platform. The Web was to be the new portal through which the middle class could invest in the stock market. And which stocks were they to invest in? Internet stocks, of course! Like any good pyramid scheme, everyone was in on it. Or at least they thought they were.

News stories about online communities such as The Well, or even discussion groups for breast cancer survivors were soon overshadowed by those about daring young entrepreneurs launching multi-million-dollar IPOs (Initial Price Offerings of formerly private stock on public exchanges such as the NYSE or NASDAQ.) Internet journalism, written by option-holding employees of media conglomerates, moved from the culture section to the business pages and the dot.com pyramid scheme became the dominant new media story.

A medium born out of the ability to break through packaged stories was now being used to promote a new, equally dangerous one: the great pyramid. A smart kid writes a business plan. He finds a few 'angel' investors to back him up long enough to land some first-level investors. Below them on the pyramid are several more rounds of investors, until the investment bank gets involved. Another few levels of investors buy in until the decision is made to go public. Of course, by this point, the angels and other early investors are executing their exit strategy. It used be known as a carpet bag. In any case they're gone and the investing public is left holding the soon-to-be-worthless shares.

Tragically, but perhaps luckily, the dot.com bubble burst along with the story being used to keep it inflated. The entire cycle, the birth of a new medium, the battle to control it and the downfall of the first victorious camp, taught us a lot about the relationship of stories to the technologies through which they are disseminated. And the whole ordeal may have given us an opportunity for renaissance.

Back here in the real world, the internet is doing just fine. Better than ever. The World Wide Web, whose rather opaque platform ascended primarily for its ability to serve as an online catalogue, has been adapted to serve many of the internet's original, more technologically primitive functions. USENET discussions have been reborn as web-based bulletin boards such as Slashdot, and Metafilter. Personal daily diaries known as weblogs have multiplied by the thousands. Blogger.com provides a set of publishing tools that allows even a novice to create a weblog, automatically add content to a Web site or organise links, commentary and open discussions. In the short time Blogger has been available, it has fostered an interconnected community of tens of thousands of users. These people don't simply surf the Web. They are now empowered to create it.

Rising from the graveyard of failed business plans, these collaborative communities of authors and creators are the true harbingers of cultural and perhaps political renaissance.