<nettime> Where did the Internet revolution go?

[toaster@pvv.ntnu.no]

Where did the Internet revolution go?

I feel cheated!

I was promised an Internet revolution, but where did it go?

Over six years now, ever since I first experienced the World Wide Web with
a beta version of the Mosaic browser, I have been promised an Internet
revolution. A revolution that would shake the very foundations of how we
would come to lead our life, a dramatic change of the global economy into
an Internet economy, and more democracy. I've been told that the way we
communicate with each other would be changed by the Internet, and that the
Web would have a profound impact on litterature. 

Having turned year 2000 I still shop my croceries in the same stores as I
did six years ago, I shop my clothes in the same stores I have the last
ten years, and I still pop by my local games store once in a while to look
for new games. Where did the Internet economy go? 

I admit that the Internet has changed one thing in my life: having turned
25 I started shopping per mail order. More precisely per e-mail order. Big
deal! It's not like other people haven't been shopping per mail order.
They have for ages. It's just that I've never found anything worth
shopping that way until now. Now I have amazon.co.uk, an electronic store
that is able to deliver books faster than my local book store. But it's
not like I buy all my books there. It's just that instead of ordering
books through my local book store -- something which ususally takes
between four to eight weeks -- I choose to order them from the UK because
they can deliver the books on my door within three days of me placing the
order. 

It's all a matter of speed. 

What the "new Internet economy" has brought me is speed. Instead of
waiting six weeks for a book I have to wait three days to have it
delivered on my door step. But is that a revolutionary step for mankind? 
Maybe for homo shoppus, but is that really what we're all reduced to? 
Shoppers? Consumers? 

Maybe I should look at how my communication has changed with the Internet?
Maybe that would give me a better clue as to how my life has been
revolutionized by the Internet? Let's see... OK, so I've made a couple of
friends in the US and Australia that I would not have made without the
Internet. And I'm able to keep in touch with my old flat mate from the
time I lived in Scotland. That's all nice and dandy, but I'm asking myself
how that has changed the way I communicate with other people? 

It has given me, and all of us for that matter, a more immediate medium to
communicate over. That has to a certain extent changed the form of my
communication. Instead of sending four paper pages to my old flat mate in
an envelope, I can send him a two-liner e-mail message asking how things
are. The form has changed, but has the way I communicate changed all that
much? I'm still sending him letters, e-mails. At their very core they're
still letters, aren't they? 

Once in a while I meet up with people on ICQ. Is that different from
talking with people on the phone? Yeah, it's a helluvalot less expensive,
I can testify to that! But has it changed the way I communicate in a
radical way? I think not (said the Decartesian philosopher and ceased to
be). The artifacts which I use to communicate has changed, but not the way
I communicate. 

I'm not adverse to believing that new media change the way we communicate.
The telegraph changed the way 19th century people communicated. Or at
least how certain classes of 19th century people communicated. I believe
the telephone changed the way large parts of the industrialized 20th
century population communicated. Movies radically changed the way dramats
-- authors, directors, actors, just to mention the most prominent --
communicate with their audience. From just staging an act, they were able
to immitate life through the new medium, the movie (something which has
been explored in a lot of movies: the difference between reality and
fiction in movies). But has the Internet changed us as profoundly? 

So far we've only been able to immitate old media with the new computer
network media, the Internet (we're not talking media as in cables here,
but as in mass media, the printed media, the movies as a medium, etc.). 
What is e-mail? It's an immitation and improvement of the world's postal
services, an invention of the 17th century (or at least the organization
is). What about all the different chatting software out there (IRC, ICQ,
to mention the most profilated at the moment)? They're all immitations of
the telephone and chat lines offered by the phone companies, a feature as
old as I can remember. 

But what about the World Wide Web? The WWW through its hypertext structure
is truly something new. Or is it? 

Academic work is hypertextual at its core. First of all, printed academic
works are often made up with a complex system of foot and end notes. These
are the printing techonolgy's equivalent of the web page's internal links
(or is that vice versa), the A NAME tag. At the end of a printed academic
work, in itself the printing technology's web page, you have a collection
of references. These are the external links of the printed work, the A
HREF tag. The printed work, whether it is an article or a book, includes
references to related material that the author thinks the reader should
read or the author uses to justify his means.  Just like we do with web
pages. 

So where's the difference between the academic work and the web page? 

The obvious difference is that of immediacy. With the printed work I will
have to seek out my library, which these days I can log onto via the
Internet, and search for the references I want to get a hold of in my
local library's database. Once the title has been found I will most
probably have to order it and wait a couple of weeks for the title to be
made available for me. If I'm unlucky, my local library has no way of
getting hold of the title, and I'm stuck. 

With the web page I can click on the link to a referenced work. If I'm
unlucky the page has been removed or the web server hosting the page is
down. This is the Internet equivalent of my local library not being able
to provide me with a title. Most probably, though, I will be taken to the
page to which the link points, within a matter of seconds. So we're back
to my previous point: that all the Internet provides me is a matter of
speed. 

Am I not willing to admit that the Internet has changed anything? 

Of course it has! I mean, this e-mail is an example of that, isn't it?  It
gives me the ability to express my views publicly to almost no cost at
all. It makes you able to read my ramblings. It gives us an immediacy
which has never before been possible in human civilization. 

My ripost is to ask whether this warrants to justify the claims that the
Internet is changing our lives radically? If anyone can provide me with
one simple example of how the Internet has revolutionized the late 20th
early 21st century society, I would be most happy. The matter of fact is
that we're still going about our business as we did in 1980. While the
potential for democracy through the Internet is there, I am afraid it has
already been embraced and consumed by the Western world's so-called
democracies. I don't see the Internet changing any of the strongly
facistoid traits inherent in the beaurocracy-democracies of the Western
world. I don't see any changes to the facistic structure of the corporate
world
(http://chumbly.math.missouri.edu/harel/quotes/d/capitalism.nc.html), the
third world power. We still bomb tyrannies that offends our public opinion
of right and wrong, that does not let themselves be intimidated by our
military superiority (look to Kosovo). However, without any coherent
justification we choose to ignore the genocide performed by tyrannts in
other places of the world (look to Sierra Leone). 

This is why I feel cheated. Where did the Internet revolution go? I'm
still being opressed by our collectively naive illusions of democracy,
equallity, and justice. 

(A webalized version of this article open for anyone to comment on-line,
can be found at
www.pvv.ntnu.no/~toaster/hacking/commentaries/revolution.php3) 


Thomas Oesterlie
E-mail: toaster@pvv.ntnu.no
Student by the master degree program
Institute of Computer Sciences, Norwegian University of Science and
Technology

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