Of the many messianic Joes gracing the firmament of last week's The Sunday Times, the one that really caught my eye was the one hailed by Antonio Ghio's 'The Rise of Joe Blog'. This was an article about how 'Web 2.0' is 'drastically changing us'.
Among other things, the so-called 'new generation' Internet was described as: "making us rethink what citizenship and participation in the democratic processes of the state are all about"; "a rewiring exercise is in the making"; "the creation of a pure citizen-centric electronic Government"; and so forth.
This type of thinking is reminiscent of the early days of global babble, when the sky was dark with prophets swooping in to reveal how the new technologies would change our lives forever. Place would no longer be an issue, we were told. Crowded city life would be rendered meaningless as people moved to the networked hinterlands, and libraries would close down as texts came online. It sounded like something out of E.M. Forster's futuristic The Machine Stops and, as property prices in London soared and the British Library unveiled its spanking new home at S. Pancras, turned out to be equally fictional.
But, no matter, the pundits had another go at it. Having made a millenary fortune 'saving' us from a bug which never materialised, they then spent some of it blowing up a story about how the bookshops would suffer final defeat at the hands of the Amazons. I was doing fieldwork in India at the time and I well remember issue upon issue of the Indian news magazines carrying tales of how some six-year-old Raj from Hyderabad was worth sixty billion for having dreamed up, during a break from his homework, a website which would revolutionise the world market for incense sticks. When I visited India again a few months later in 2001, Raj was back to his long division. His sticks had gone up in smoke, as had his 60 billion. The dotcom bubble had burst.
Ah, but hang on. We now have it from the smart guys at Smart Island that what 'Web 1.0' did not change, 'Web 2.0' will. (I use quotes because it is far from clear what exactly 'Web 2.0' is - it may look technical but many argue that it simply refers to people's use of 'Web 1.0'.) And, if that doesn't happen, we can always look forward - as some brazen visionaries are doing - to 'Web 3.0'.
What am I getting at? I spend several hours a day online, and I really can't bear to recall what University life and scholarship were like before the modem. My point is not that the Internet is all hype, but that many of its effects have actually panned out very differently from what was prophesied.
Much has been said, for instance, about the pivotal power of blogs in the election campaign. I am myself rather sceptical. In the final weeks before March 8, I followed a number of blogs too regularly for my own good, and I really didn't get the feeling that these were decision making venues; on the contrary, people seemed to be posting what they had privately thought out and enjoying sparring with punters of the opposite camp. Youtube, on the other hand, did much to make and unmake reputations, and as such can be considered to have played a key part in a campaign based largely on the manufacture of gut feelings of trust.
More broadly, there are some important contradictions we need to resolve or at least come to terms with. On one hand, for instance, we are told that 'Web 2.0' heralds new models of politics, citizenship, identities, and such; we also learn, however, that it blurs distinctions between 'online' and 'real life'. But surely, if cyberspace and flesh and blood (or brick and mortar, in Ghio's version) are so indistinguishable, why do we expect them to be so different?
Likewise, 'Web 2.0' is said to have a real power over people. But then, the technology for online social interaction has been around for decades, and the fact that it is only now that its presence is being felt, seems to point rather towards the power of people over the Web.
This links up with the argument that is often made that 'Web 2.0' has shifted our online experience from top-down to bottom-up, with Joe Bloggs taking centre stage.
If this sounds like a good thing, it is also a major motive driving the Web's detractors. In The Cult of the Amateur (2007), Andrew Keen argues that the increasing control over cyberspace by mediocre amateurs is 'killing culture', notably in the fields of scholarship and journalism. Keen, in other words, makes the classic 'blind leading the blind' argument. His claims have been refuted by, among others, Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia), who questions the extent to which the Web is really being controlled by amateurs. For Sanger (and he should know), information does not spread across the Internet in 'neutral' ways; rather, it often follows some well-trodden paths of corporate and institutional power. Joe may post and upload, but does so within defined and controlled (cyber)spaces.
Take blogs, for many the quintessential 'voice of the citizen'. For starters, blogs are 'moderated' (i.e. controlled, but this word is not fashionable in webspeak). The 'moderators' in turn represent the sponsors of the blog, who are not usually your average Joe. Just look at Malta's most popular blogs. At least four are written by columnists whose prominence well pre-dates 'Web 2.0', and all are written by people who are in one way or another privileged. 'Common' citizens are free to respond and discuss, sure, but they normally do so within the topics and boundaries established by the writers.
Which sort of puts into question the 'decentralised' nature of the Web's architecture. As Harvard researcher Ethan Zuckerman put it to New Scientist (January 20, 2007), "We are very used to this notion that we live on one common Internet. That's not true any more, and it hasn't been true for a while. It stopped being true when the French and Germans started censoring neo-Nazi sites, and even more so when China put up an effective firewall to block certain websites". In other words, Zuckerman is saying that, as the Internet becomes differentiated (in fact he elsewhere talks of "the Internets"), we can expect hierarchies and contests of power.
Come next election, the one thing both parties will be trying to avoid is leaving 'Joe Blog' to his devices.
mafalzon@hotmail.com