It's an odd sign when I check my home page only to find that the majority of posts in the past month have either been awkward short pieces or even shorted quotes/links of some description. I remember the times when I could come here and spout of some deluded ramblings on why I am right and the rest of the world is wrong - I very much long for those days. Consider this an attempt to reinvigorate the past.
Perhaps it's an even worse sign that when I thought about what I'm going to write about today, I wanted to find a post I'd written before. Instead of doing a search for Twitter or something like that... I remembered very specifically that I had used the word "draconian" in the post and searched for that. It is most worrisome when I can remember my ramblings here down to the word... Anyway.
A few months ago, when Twitter first caught on in mainstream culture, I had written a long manifesto proposing why Twitter is a good thing. Essentially I had one major point I wanted to get across, that Twitter was the start of a movement towards the concept of a stream being more important than its constituents. That the concept of meaningfulness was meaningless on the 'new' internet. I guess the buzzphrase web 2.0 is appropriate here.
Recently I started thinking about this idea in terms of terms I had learnt at uni, or at least got into the habit of usually casually in language, qualitative and quantitative. I'll admit, for many years in my life I just bullshitted my way through using those words without quite knowing which one had to do with the numbers. Now I know that's quantitative, but I digress.
Here's where I start talking about how wrong everyone but me is. Most people are stuck into this mindset that the internet and all components of it, whether it be Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, MMORPGs, are a quantitative extension to real life. The e-mail is essentially a letter but quicker, cheaper and replicable. VOIP is just a more organised phone system. Blogs are newspapers and the letters to the editor section combined. Downloading TV shows is just like regular TV except more convenient.
And I suppose to an extent that was the case. When the internet first came out and international interactions became possible instantaneously, when search engines revolutionised how content was stored and retrieved. However now, when we move into an aeon where virtually everyone in a developed country will have good access to it, it can no longer be said to be a quantitative change.
It's no longer an extension to real life.
It is real life.
It has moved beyond a mere extension and has integrated itself into being an essential part of how we interact with other people. E-mail is now no longer just letters on steroids, it can do things that letters could never even dream of doing (and not due to technical restraints, but just at a conceptual level doesn't work) - I mean look at how Gmail and its labels revolutionised things. Think about attachments, it's so intrinsically different to sending a letter to someone with a video tape in the envelope.
The internet, or rather the web 2.0 has completely undermined any preconceived notions we may have about how things operate. It is not only futile but also foolish to try and insist on quantitative standards on something that is qualitatively distinct. In fact, take a look at all the contemporary 'debates' happening with anything internet related and you'll find that one side, the people opposing the 'change' are trying to impose rules that are no longer relevant upon an anonymous and almighty collective movement.
Twitter
Just to quickly reiterate. Opposition is that Twitter does not provide meaningful messages and is often filled with boring pablum. This whole idea that interactions should be meaningful... it's a bizarre and inaccurate standard to apply not only to anything on the internet, but also odd to insist IRL. So where did this rule come from!? Less focus on the individual tweets and more focus on the people, on the stream or the consciousness a tweet stream creates. In many ways it is putting the focus *back* onto the individual, because interactions online are now very much real life interactions. This is where I think Google Wave has it right - it's directly latching onto this conceptual distinction.
Online friends vs IRL friends
Not sure if I have writtena bout this before, but it seems likely that I would've. This is a matter that is both near and dear to my heart. I've long since maintained that the friends I make online, SW Chris, Comit, Ferr, Esp, Syn ... all those clowns, they are not only as important and close, but as real as my "real life" friends are. The mere fact that I know my "real life" friends in a physical sense no longer carries any weight when talking about friendships.
Opposition always says that "you never know, they could be 50yr old paedophiles waiting to meet you and gruesomely plunge their penis into your anus". My response has been and always has been since I joined the internet at 11, "So what?" It's just as possible that a person I know, say a family friend, who is a 50yr old man can be extremely nice to me, but it turns out he has paedophillic intentions as well. The phenomena of deceptive personality is not confined to the monitor - yes, I would be able to tell if Comit who claims to be 25 was actually a 50yr old man. But surely what is the most destructive of deceptions would be that of the mind, rather than the physical?
The whole idea that the persona presented in person and their actual personality having to be congruent is not something that is longer applicable to interactions online. If the internet were an extension, then I suppose yes, you could say that. But looking at it as an integrated change, the persona *is* the person and asking any more of it is bizarre and impossible.
Wikipedia - source of information?
This one is amazing. Every time anyone of an academic marker standard (whether it be a lecturer, tutor) whenever discussing assignments will ALWAYS, without fail, say "don't use wikipedia". I have so often wanted to stand up and shout "why the fuck not?". "Because anyone can change it," the cunts will regurgitate out, as if that's a worthy excuse.
For one thing, changes on wikipedia are also large and obnoxious. Changes of the vandalism kind are never insidious. For instance a vandal will attack the page on Pi by turning it into a "LOL I IZ KITTAH" or something like that. They aren't going to go in and change 3.14 to 3.15. Their attacks are always going to be loud and very obviously fake. If you go in and use "LOL I IZ KITTAH" as a value of Pi then you deserve the public humiliation and failure you've got coming. So the only possibility for getting erroneous information from wikipedia would be if the authors were mistaken or confused about a point.
One must always remember that there are tens of thousands of people who contribute to wikipedia. Each subject area has hundreds if not thousands of people who would be contributing content and ten fold more people editing and reverting any vandal attacks or changes that are subject to debate.
Furthermore, the whole idea of an information source having authority doesn't exist on the internet. Encyclopaedias that need you to pay to use it, journal databases that are password protected etc, they're all trying to latch onto whatever power they can. Their excuse for their behaviour will always inevitably be one that looks at the internet as a quantitative extension to real life.
Personally I'm confident in saying that things that appear on wikipedia are not only correct, but in a sense they are correct because they are on wikipedia. As a qualitative change, information is revolutionised. It is no longer a case of well educated people to lecture to us from their pedastals, rather the knowledge of the world falls firmly into the hands of the people. It is ours to know and play with. Experts no longer hold the same status. They will maintain prestige, but one that is, you guessed it, qualitatively different from the experts of the Copernican age (for example).
Finally...
Piracy
This one boils my blood the most. Copyright companies that are suing people for infringing upon the rights of artists, people who are trying to maintain a financial monopoly over their distribution, governments who indulge these fantasies and make fucking copyright laws, these morons under the wrong impression. The internet is not just a faster way to deliver content and an easier way for pirates to make their copies, it is a hollistic change, revolutionising everything, including the concept of piracy.
The whole notion of illegally downloading movies, music, games, that no loner applies. Benjamin the German aesthete wrote about the death of auratic art. That in the age of mechanical reproduction, artworks lost their aura. People wouldn't go to see the Mona Lisa because they could go see replicas. Movies and books are mass produced for the masses. It was a revolution. There was a quanlitative change then and there is one now.
Now, instead of mass production allowing for easy access to replicas, the internet has allowed to perfect, identical duplicates. Anyone can download perfect quality songs of any CD that comes out, they themselves can burn that onto a disc and have the CD for use (though why they'd do that instead of mp3 player is anyones guess...).
It not only is a fruitless endavour to try and stop piracy from happening, but they shouldn't anyway.
And people always react to this kind of view by saying "how will artists make money?". One, fuck the money. You shouldn't be doing it for the money in the first place. Two, the money will come, have some faith in your fans and the internet. Plenty of people, young people might I add, who capitalise on producing content for Youtube, for example, don't do it by a subscription service but through adspace. I mean ideally my world is one in which money ceased to exist and people did things for pure pleasure - and I am confident that soceity wouldn't change one iota, we'd pretty much ave the same system, but that's a post for another late evening. Three, if you stopped thinking about things in the narrowminded quantitative view, you'd realise you're doing more harm than good by bizarrely trying to retain onto your "artistic rights".
Conclusion
Problem with late night posts is you start out writing a pretty coherent and grammatically/spellingly correct piece of writing only to have it disintegrate by the conclusion. But I think what I had to say was pretty simple and I got it across. There has been a paradigm shift - the ease and ubiquity of the internet has revolutionised the way we interact with others and as such we need to view the internet in the right light. It is an integrated part of our lives now, it is not some extension that makes interactions "easier" or "quicker". The sooner we can forget that latter perspective the sooner we will cease trying to impose illogical rules that are antiquated and irrelevant to the web 2.0.
