The notion that "information wants to be free" has been repeated so many times that its insight has eroded into banality. But as the Internet continues to go through the earliest stages of its evolution into a medium for mass interaction, we are only beginning to see just how many kinds of information -- the useful, the irrelevant, and the downright frightening -- are moving in ways that we never could have anticipated.
The Internet is now so massive and diverse that if you seek a particular fellowship -- any fellowship -- you are more or less guaranteed to find it. There is an old message-board chestnut known as Rule #34: "If it exists there is porn of it." We might go even further: "If it can be thought, there are people out there thinking it."
This seems especially true of those thoughts that are too distasteful to be given a hearing offline.
This state of affairs is an inevitable consequence of the Internet's progress. We've seen rapid decreases in the cost of moving information from one person to another. On the "sender" side, this has resulted in acts of "speech" that are faster, freer, and weirder, embodying a wider range of consensus than their offline equivalents. Whatever gets said has the potential to reach millions of other speakers, who often exhibit far touchier, and stranger, behavior than they would display in, say, a public park.
On the "receiver" side, all of this new speech has added to the information load that each of us must carry. The responsibility for filtering all of this stuff -- the vast majority of which is chatter, or worse -- has shifted from the high-walled slush piles of the publishing establishment to the wiring that connects our eyes to our brains. Despite attempts to filter the Internet with software or regulation, the job of managing what we pay attention to ultimately falls to us.
The job is getting harder. There's so much weirdness out there.
I'm tempted to use some kind of analogy here, to say that the Web shift I'm describing is like going from a little Italian restaurant that serves one entree a night to the food court at a mall, or a giant supermarket. But this analogy would only hold up if said supermarket had 39 aisles devoted to barely distinguishable brands of quasi-edible dirt, with a few razor-embedded apples thrown in here and there.
In the supermarket of the Web, there is no FDA or Department of Agriculture supervising the offerings. Instead, there are products catering to the most perverse niches.
Among the scarier apples out there are lively communities for white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, Japanese porn aficionados, people who dress up as cartoon animals, and an international sisterhood of hardcore anorexics.
One of the most disturbing incidents to ever occur online took place in November, when Abraham Biggs, a 19-year-old "lifecaster," killed himself during a live online broadcast. "Do it, do the world a favor and stop wasting our time with your mindless self-pity," wrote one of the thousand-plus anonymous voyeurs who watched Biggs's demise.
And here we might find a deeper understanding of why so many aisles are filled with dirt. The tendency of frivolous and dangerous speech to proliferate online is the mirror-image of the offline world, where we impose strict limits on what we're willing to listen to.
Rather than turn our noses up at the communities I've referenced, we might treat them as valuable dispatches from the silent and the ignored.
Yes, they're into some pretty awful stuff over in the dirt aisle, but in a formal sense its attractions are not so different from the mainstream Internet of Wikipedia and Facebook. People are seeking open public spaces, venues for experimentation, and a sense that they're part of something larger than themselves. They're building forums where freedom is wilder and more diverse than any offline equivalent.
They want the freedom to say what they can't say offline. They hope to find someone at the other end of the wires, listening.
— Mattathias Schwartz is a freelance writer who lives in New York
dlavie,
when we start to speak about "weird" , we automatically raise the question about "normal".But there is no answer to this question. Norm in one society can be considered as pathology in another.And probably, one of the most interesting sides of the Internet is that there is no concept of normal.I mean, it exists, but it is constructed by the rules that are brought from out of Internet space -like child porn is illegal both in real and Internet space n the US and legal in Thailand. But from some point of view, the Internet also is a space where there is no such concept as "normal". It has a place for everyone.
There was a time in my life that I had to quit substance abuse. Going to a 12 step group, standing in front of a group of strangers and admitting I had an embarassing character flaw was difficult, it was a little easier because everyone in that room was on the same page.
Everyone needs to feel some sort of acceptance or self worth whether he/she is trying change or justify his/her "thing". There is lonliness in being "different", ask any middle schooler.
The internet does reflect society, here we are calling people weird because they are different from us. I guess if web 2.0 can have internetevolution it can also support people who dress up as hentai characters.
"And here we might find a deeper understanding of why so many aisles are filled with dirt."
I think we have already found why? Anonimity, text communication, and many other feautres of the Internet make it possible. In my opinion, it is much more reasonable to think not why so many aisles are filled with dirt, but realize the fact that the Internet may be the first true reflection of our society , because here you can hide yourself, that's why you can't hide the reality.People let their essence out. In real world, we prefer to close our eyes and do not see many things we do not want to or do not like. In the Internet space, we just face it.So, the question is do people explore themselves in the Internet space, extending their boundaries ? Or is it just a chance to show the world their true nature?
So what can we learn from them? and should everything that can be taught, be learned?
I don't think those behaviors and activities should be allowed, but I must also admit that I don't see them going away (maybe hiding or not even that), they have a place in the internet that no one can really take away.
If there's anything to learn from them, is their behavior to try to make it harder for them.
I think Terry hit on what is really new. "BBSes and listservs were serving that communitizing purpose" long before Web 2.0 took off.
I think what is new is that non-members of these niches can now find this information. You had to seek out and signup and login to BBSes and Listservs. But with these niche groups now on web sites and Google searching for these web sites - more and more people have access to these niche sites.
A BBS site dedicated to people who dress up like cartoon animals impacts nobody else. A web site dedicated to this may well show up on search results entered by a 10 year old.
In today's digital society you don't have to "choose to hang with any of the" but you often have to explain them to your kids.
I think that the internet's displaying of the weird is important in two ways.
1) The worst thing is growing up thinking that you are in some way different than people around you. You feel ostracized and you begin to turn inward...This leads to your mind playing tricks on you and it makes you even more weird and even to the point of becoming the deviate you thought you were. Seeing that there are others that share the same proclivity as you can calm you to the point where, while not socially acceptable in the general norm, but can help you realize that you really aren't as weird as you thought you were.
2) It adds to the diversification of the masses. It allows people to see that people *ARE* different and what some may consider "weird" is acceptable to others. It allows one to expand their horizons and come out from under that rock they live under, and adds some acceptance to those "closet weirdos" (see item 1 above for details).
As to your example of that guy killing himself on the net with people cheering him on....I heard that this wasn't the first time he "threatened" to do this. Appparently it was SOP for this guy and people on the group just got tired of listening to him whine! So when he laid down and "went to sleep" people thought it was just another case of this kid crying wolf...The real villan here is his parents. Where were they in the development of this kid's psyche? Why did this kid feel it necessary to take the long sleep? These are the questions that need to be answered...
Not saying that the cult groups, conspiracy theorists are non-sense, I will ponder on behavior of the users searching-for, stopping-by, reading, absorbing the material online that they wont listen to off-line.
Your tolerance to absorb online non-sense is inversely proportional to the number-of-years-you-have-been-using-web. For many people, espcially in third world, web is still an experiential medium. Browsing (& Email forwarding) is still an end in itself, & not an activity to achieve another end. People spend time browsing in a cyber cafe's or at home just to relax & for the fun for it.
Drawing an analogy from off-line world ... Suppose you are off for vacation to Pakistan. When you are there you notice that there is a monkey show ("bandar ka tamasha" in Urdu/Hindi) going on at the side of the street. You might stop & spare ten minutes to watch the show & observe the native & foreign people who have also stopped by. You may also exchange smiles & also chit-chat with one of them.
Are you likely to exhibit the same behavior in your home town during your routine life? While some would still do, many wont. Why? Its the vacation mode or exploratory behavior that let you spend time on things that you otherwise wont. A good number of the people when browsing (esp the ones new to browsing & internet) are on that vacation mode or exploratory behavior & so they would spend time on stuff online, but not off-line!
A big part of the Internet's attraction is that it allows us to carry out what the late Lewis Thomas described as the core competency of the human race -- communication. But because it is set on a grand scale, the Internet also tends to magnify the voices that flow through its corridors. Weirdness has always been a part of our existence, but up until now, it didn't have the opportunity to be exposed. The Internet offers the opportunity for these dissonant voices to be heard. More importantly, similar voices can now easily seek each other out, and they now have the venue to synthesize and develop. Granted, much of the weirdness out there is frightening, but it has its role in the evolution of society, just as rogue genes are instrumental in the evolution of species. Imagine, for example, how weird, or even downright dangerous, Copernicus must have sounded to people when he first preached heliocentrism. Weird is to be expected on the Internet, and that is good!
Chris, your comment made me think of Mary Douglas's famous description of dirt as "matter out of place." This stuff tends to become especially bothersome when it isn't properly sorted and tagged.
The ThinkerNet does not reflect the views of TechWeb. The ThinkerNet is an informal means of communication to members and visitors of the Internet Evolution site. Individual authors are chosen by Internet Evolution to blog. Neither Internet Evolution nor TechWeb assume responsibility for comments, claims, or opinions made by authors and ThinkerNet bloggers. They are no substitute for your own research and should not be relied upon for trading or any other purpose.
My recent New York Times Magazine article, "The Trolls Among Us," discusses the escalating phenomenon of Internet trolling -- users who intentionally antagonize other users and disrupt online communities. It also discusses Postel's Law, also known as the Robustness Principle, which reads: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."
Big-data and analytics tools enable marketers to understand customers as individuals, identifying unmet needs and addressing each customer as a "segment of one," says John Kennedy, VP corporate marketing, IBM.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco kicked into high gear today, and we've already begun to see news emerging from that lovely city-state by the sea.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
your weekly update of news, analysis, and
opinion from Internet Evolution - FREE! REGISTER HERE
Wanted! Site Moderators Internet Evolution is looking for a handful of readers to help moderate the message boards on our site – as well as engaging in high-IQ conversation with the industry mavens on our thinkerNet blogosphere. The job comes with various perks, bags of kudos, and GIANT bragging rights. Interested?
To save this item to your list of favorite Internet Evolution content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
Email This
