Pretending To See The Future

so happy there is INTERNET COVERAGE, irina slutsky, 2008

In a mobile multimedia multichannel world it's difficult to imagine just how centralised information and communications were in years gone by. I'm not quite old enough to have grown up with the web (online just short of a decade) but I do know from having limited access when abroad that disconnection from the hive mind is like suffocation. It's hard to understand the shared experience of millions of people listening to the radio as Chamberlain declared war on Germany in 1939.

I remember looking at the audience figures in What's On TV? in the 90s and the major soap operas would bring in a maximum of 9 million viewers. Only something like a Christmas Day special of Only Fools and Horses would break that and be able to claim the nation itself was focused on that channel in that hour. But to think of something with the same gravity as a declaration of war, that could only be 'September 11th'. The first global event of the modern era. I first heard it over the radio when I got in from school, then I went online to see it on every news site, and I turned the tv on to see every channel carrying US news feeds. There were probably instant messages and e-mails and phone calls all communicating the same thing to others.

It was the first and perhaps the last. As it stands in a world with more entertainment options than lifetimes, the chances of drawing a world audience on a single event again is quite unlikely. An historic moment that unravels over a sufficient number of hours to form an ad hoc narrative but sudden enough to take everyone by surprise. 9/11 was genuinely the turning point of modern history, more so perhaps than the end of the cold war. No single show, or channel, or website will ever have more than a few percent of the world's eyes. Though the multichannel drive towards the lowest common denominator and the cheapest form of programming, directly contradicting the point of having more channels, will probably mean we're effectively watching the same thing.

The narrative constraints of traditional journalism are why the traditional media is unable to properly report about the internet and the web. Hollywood outputs depictions of the net like Hackers (they bought everything Emmanuel Goldstein told them) or Swordfish ('visualise the code'). The Six O'Clock News reports to the forty-somethings about Google, and Twitter, and Facebook and Apple to the point where each of the aforementioned becomes a metonym for a technology. The media's narrative must parse the multi-stranded fractious happenings on the internet into an easily digestible story about someone that did something, just as with television news. Hence 4chan and Anonymous continue to confound old media.

The idea of audiences having more than one channel to choose from is now well established, but the idea of having one channel (a website) and having its audience moving in two or more conflicting directions - standing against Scientology, saving abused cats, griefing websites - is without foundation in the broadcast models of television and radio. Here's an interesting exchange I saw on The Register about Dusty the Cat in which two Anonymous clash on this very issue:

#Proud to be Anonymous
It makes me laugh to see all the little kiddies from /b/ taking credit for this after the event. "Rules 1 and 2", "we don't care about abuse, we're just doing it for the lulz" etc. The actual people who put the work in to find this cat actually did give a damn about Dusty, as you would know if you'd have been in the catraid channels piecing together the evidence and looking for clues. I'm happy to go uncredited for my part in saving the cat, but one of the prices that must be paid for saving the cat is that I have to now watch little 15 year old retards with their boring memes taking credit for something I did, and imposing their own stupid philosophy on my work.

#A-non-E-moose
lol you're a massive hypocrite. If you didn't care about being credited for your part, why the hell are you stroking your own ego you faggot? Anonymous is legion and like or not, if one part does something the rest can and will lay claim to it. Stop trying to set yourself apart from newfags; you spend just as much time doing nothing as they do.

The philosophical and social implications of Anonymous are myriad and will one day be the subject of academic investigation.

On the topic of Google, and Twitter, and Facebook. Despite appearances, all three sell the same product. It's not 'search', it's not instant mass communication, it's not social networking. Their product is you. Audiences flock to these bait sites to see adverts or hand over all their personal information to be sold on to marketing analysts, though of course you get something out of it. In that respect, none are intended to be a technological revolution, rather an alluring façade to an advertising revolution. Actually, not so new as this is exactly how the newspaper business operates. Data mining is the only possible rational behind the Dirty Digger buying MySpace. Or it could be that he just doesn't understand the internet and bought it because he saw it on Sky News in a report about how paedos are stalking children on 'their myspace'. What a visionary.

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Edit 01/10/10: Found 'Dusty the Cat' exchange