Fimoculous on Wired’s 15th: How Cloudy was their Crystal Ball?

I know I’ve been linking to Fimoculous a lot lately. I think it’s partly out of a sense of karmic duty – and partly just lingering regret over a missed opportunity to hang out with Rex and Anil Dash when they were in Toronto last year. But I felt I had to link to Rex’s piece on Wired‘s 15th anniversary if for no other reason than it exemplifies that Sorgatz is at his best when he’s a cultural critic. The article outlines the significance of Wired as a cultural linchpin and historical marker of the early internet age, examining how, among other things, the magazine consolidated and nurtured the then-tiny ‘geek culture’ and became its most mainstream mouthpiece. It’s an amazing read even if you, like me, only read Wired sporadically, and to steal from Mathew Ingram’s response, it contains just the right amount of nostalgia and critical distance.

Of course, this wouldn’t be Scrawled in Wax if I didn’t perform some half-assed ‘analysis’ and so, in a salute to never learning from my mistakes, here are some generally random tangents that struck me as I read the piece.

1) Who gets to decide what’s Wired and Tired? In many ways, the ‘Wired and Tired’ section hailed the rise of a technocractic elite. While the theory of influentials has recently been challenged, a ‘technorati’ was/is only possible due to the ever-increasing economic and cultural import of technology. Why do Apple announcements get so much play in the mainstream press? Because they are not merely product launches – they are cultural events. They speak to the growing confluence of technology and popular culture in ways far more intricate than the staff of Wired – or any of us – could have imagined. People like Gates and Jobs and their ‘Web 2.0’ successors influence our day-to-day lives in microscopic ways – from how we communicate to how we listen to music, these people are forces of culture as much as they of business.

2) Negroponte’s misguided “HDTV is irrelevant” bit: What Negroponte couldn’t have foreseen was twofold: 1) the brief ‘anti-mainstream’ bent of the early nineties would go up in smoke (around Cobain’s death?) and consumerism would hit new the-eighties-tweren’t-nothin’ heights – people wanted stuff more than ever before, and they wanted to make sure others saw it; 2) related: no-one could have guessed that technology would become the marker of both financial and cultural success. Seriously, what point is a Benz if it isn’t full of gadgets and if you aren’t driving the thing home to a 60″ plasma? Nobody knew that people would start to care much more about identifying through items of technology rather than what technology would allow them to do. (There are other things to be said about wealth producing elevated expectations and home-theatre becoming a viable alternative to cinema but you’ll have to look to another blog for those.)

3) So why did the age of hyper-personalisation never arrive? The hyper-personalised age never arrived because its proponents missed one simple fact: differentiating oneself has its limits. Why, I suppose, depends upon how cynical you want to get. The positive spin? The example of watching a baseball game from your very own angle is simply too personal, robbing individuals of the pleasure of collective experience. The negative take is that mass-commodity-culture performs an odd double move of celebrating individualism while promoting conformity. Perhaps customising a Netvibes page is about as much personalisation as people want, preferring instead to buy the same clothes as everyone else and then choosing to wear them with a different hat.

4) Can we still talk of a clash between culture and technology? One of Wired’s most prominent tropes was and is that of “the clash of culture and technology”. But the thing that struck me – and I’m pretty sure I’ve read Rex say the same thing – is that the dichotomy itself is becoming outmoded: that technology is culture and vice versa. While one can debate the relative merits or pitfalls of that fact, I think their inextricability is pretty incontrovertible in the richer parts of the world.

If you have any thoughts about these ideas or the article, hit the comments and engage in some half-assed ‘analysis’ of your own 🙂

News Flash: The Internet Can Bring People Together!

For every inspiring web proselytizer you come across, there are ten miserable sods who claim the internet will be the death of us all. Perhaps the most consistent bugaboo trotted out is that the Web will reduce us all to techno-hermits, glued to glowing screens and forgoing all human contact. The internet, according to its naysayers, is so utterly compelling, rewarding and addictive that people shall never leave the house again and will instead spend their lives refreshing their RSS feeds rather than going out to the pub, meeting someone and getting laid… It is, frankly, the end of civilisation as we know it. So fine, I’m being a bit dismissive. But to at least try and be fair, the fears that underpin this ‘ludditism’ aren’t entirely irrational. They are, I think, rooted in a growing sense of alienation and solitude as more and more people live in large cities, in massive apartment buildings and spend more and more time working. The diagnosis may be wrong – but the symptoms are very real.

Thankfully, Wired’s recent coverage of a Harvard study on online communication and its effect on the face-to-face kind suggests that geeks who always felt such fears misplaced were, in fact, right. The article argues that online communication, far from becoming a sphere unto itself, works in tandem with physical, interpersonal interaction. Most compelling is the argument about electronic mail – “that email’s real value isn’t in communicating with Kuala Lumpur but with Betsy in the next cubicle” such that “the most productive workers have the densest intracompany email web”. Far from a distraction for bored teenagers, email and things like it make people productive. The point is that electronic communication is not, as so many fear, a replacement for human interaction. It is a supplement, a method of plowing through the minutiae of day-to-day interaction, avoiding the constant interruptions of popping over to see someone, so that when you do get to the pub (or boardroom) you can talk about important things and social issues rather than the details you need to catch up on.

And think about it – are you out with your friends less or more since you got on Facebook? Do you feel more or less a part of a community since the advent of message boards and blogs? And as the article points out, why is the tech industry – in which tech use is tautologically at its highest – so dependent on geography? Wasn’t the Web supposed to smash physical boundaries? No – no it wasn’t. Because people use the internet to connect with each other in their real lives, not some mythical ‘virtual’ one – as if there ever was such a thing. There is no substitute for being around other humans. And while there are bigger questions to ask – about how what we do online may contribute to the same system that might cause alienation and solitude – at least now we have some proof that, if alienation is a problem, then ‘the internet’ is not to blame.