Many years ago, when Google already existed but wasn’t a verb yet, I wrote a research paper for uni about online media. I wish I had that paper and especially the sources I used (academic articles in English that I translated into Russian). Unfortunately, they are all long gone but I do remember the gist of them surprisingly well.
Two particular ideas are stuck in my memory: 1. How texts (will) change when published online. 2. The influence of gatekeepers on how information is filtered and spread online.
There was a lot of speculation back then about how articles posted online would transform due to the differences of online media. Hyperlinks would change texts, they would enrich each other and present new demands on the reader’s attention. Imagine a network of articles, creating a three dimensional narrative through linked texts, possibly written by various authors. How different would it be from a traditional book or a magazine, both in execution and perception. What a wonderful new world.
If you ever get lost on TVTropes.org, you might taste a little of that vision. Overall though, that prediction now seems like a dream of someone completely removed from the realities of human’s attention and perception. What actually happened is that – in general – texts became shorter, headlines are manipulated to produce maximum outrage, people are attacking each other in the comments over the headline not the article (and those are not just Daily Mail’s readers). Texts disappear overnight to be replaced by something new and seemingly everyone is bemoaning our inability to read longer texts. Navigating through a maze of hyperlinks is the least of our issues these days.
Then again, Substack seems to be doing alright, even if it’s not quite a garden of links creating a united complex narrative.
The idea of gatekeepers who determine which information we consume back then was attached to Internet directories, something incredibly common before search became more reliable, and personal blogs – influencers, in other words even if that word didn’t exist back then. Overall it wasn’t a prediction that feels completely wrong now: we do, after all, have social media that makes it possible for a piece of content to go viral. There are groups of people who reinforce their convictions through posting links to content that confirms their beliefs. And while it’s rare in the West for access to information online to be restricted (apart from paywalls), it turns out people often just don’t want to read or watch something that contradicts what they are already thinking. It once again feels like the reality of what we are seeing today – the abundance of misinformation and attempts to control the narrative – is not so much interesting as depressing.
I wonder what the authors of those papers could be thinking now? Did they shake their heads at their early works about online media, wondering at their naiveté? Or did they gradually changed their opinions and completely forgot that there was an age when the Internet seemed like a blessing, when all of us were enchanted by it and it wasn’t all so complicated?
Although of course it’s not complicated at all to a lot of people now either – it’s just that if the Internet and technology in general used to be seen as majorly good, it is now seen as predominantly evil. According to many people, it’s the technology that is destroying democracy and our ability to pay attention and think critically.
There’s another article that I read ages ago and to my delight it still exists online – here. When I re-read it now, 13 years later, I am struck by the optimism of it as the author discusses economic impact of free content and new economic models related to it. How different it is from the view of today, of “enshittification” which is tightly tied to monetisation and economic growth at all costs.
I do miss the sense of enchantment with technology and with life in general. It might be that my own social circle is different now; I work in tech and it’s far less of a happy place now that interest rates went up and money became expensive. I am tired of listening to stories of doom and gloom though; I find that it’s not hard to be pessimistic. It’s easy to predict that the Internet will die or become useless due to abundance of AI slop. It’s also a low hanging fruit these days to write about everything that is wrong with technology and how our attachment to mobile devices destroys our attention span and our will to live and connect with other people.
What I take comfort in is that most predictions don’t seem to come true, even when – and maybe especially – when they seem obvious. The general mood of the era seem to affect the predictions more than anything else and right now we seem to be in an era of profound pessimism. We take it for granted that it’s easy to do a lot of things now, like pay bills or buy a book, to the point that we start doubting that it’s actually good for us – but I don’t think that it’s the technology that makes things easier for us that is the problem. It’s what we do our time that we could be spending in a queue to pay a bill. It’s up to us how we use the technology. We have agency. And the future is still up in the air and not known by anyone.
Sails and Commas 