I had an extraordinary time in Ghana with programme 1 of Digital Revolution, travelling around with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Apart from hanging out with Timbl, the most exciting aspect was meeting people in Abiriw, in the mountains outside Accra, and speaking with them about how they use the web.
I recorded this vlog for the BBC DigRev blog about my impressions of this superb journey:
Check it out on the Digital Revolution blog
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been rather po-facedly debating the contemporary Nation-State: one union under the World Wide Web, facilitated by the Internet, threatening the sovereignty of modern political structures. Now, we’re going to turn the tables and look at what the Web is doing to us. No, not along the lines that Internet- sceptics like Baronness Susan Greenfield propose (we’ll be getting into that in our final programme), but at what we are giving up of ourselves to the people behind the websites every time we go online.
In 1995, in the summer before I moved to the UK, I was living just outside the Washington D.C. Beltway, not far away from the world headquarters of America Online. In those days, AOL ruled the roost; in the States at least, they dominated the commercial world wide web home market, and had a pretty solid stake in the business ISP world too.
A few weeks ago, Sir Tim Berners-Lee made the case for free data access for all, promoting the libertarian ideals of the early Web pioneers. As I remarked in my response, this is a wonderful idea, but it’s unrealistic: technologically, a free and open platform could generate a knowledge-sharing revolution reminiscent of the printing press, the telegraph and the television; socially, once you add the fallible human beings into the mix, such phenomenal freedom would be co-opted and corrupted, twisted by the various -isms that we project into virtuality. And unfortunately, this is where issues of data control gets messy and a little bit personal.
The web is a levelling ground, founded on libertarian ideals of openness, freedom and a democratisation of information and knowledge. This has been replicated again and again, throughout the web’s history, in projects like the WELL, the WikiWikiWeb and, now, Wikipedia.
The blogsophere is dying, apparently. The long tail of user-generated content, brimming with idiosyncrasy and experimentation – the great hope of the libertarian levelling ground promoted by the Web’s founding fathers – is petering out. The anecdotal 1% of content creators (versus the 99% of content consumers) is moving away from the more formal end of story-telling/reporting (a process that takes time to craft, link, illustrate and post) because they prefer to keep in touch using quick-fire, low-cost tools like Twitter and Facebook. The result is a ghost town – nay, a ghost metropolis – of blogs that are, well, dead.
Oh the fickle, fickle Web. Oh the Ridalin-smoking, post-MTV, fast-edit generation. What have you done to our new media revolution? Don’t you realise that in your absence, the new media mega corps are stepping in to perpetuate the old media models, to establish Old Boy hierarchies and to open and close the gates of information at their whims and inclinations?
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