This article originally appeared in the January, 2000, Number 4 issue of *spark.
We’re all agreed that there is too much information on the World Wide Web, which, as the Web grows, makes it increasingly difficult for the average person to find what he or she is looking for. As V. Lenin asked, “What is to be done?”
A couple of years ago, newspapers and magazines were touting “push” technologies as a solution to this problem. Sign up for the service, tell us what your interests are, and we will send only the information you want directly to your desktop. Of course, some advertising will have to be attached, but the service has to be funded somehow, right?
People, as they say, stayed away in droves, and, a year after its big introduction, push was all but dead in the water. One obvious reason is the contradiction between offering people easy access to information they want, but attaching it to advertising they don’t necessarily
want. (How could nobody in the industry see that one?!) Another reason offered for the death of push technologies is that the culture of the Web is such that people are used to going out and getting information
(“pulling” it to them); having information sent to them at somebody else’s convenience felt too much like television.
The life and death of push would probably be no more than a blip on the public consciousness (like Beta VCRs) if it weren’t for the fact that it points out a fundamental disconnection between the corporations which are developing new digital technologies and the people who actually use them. This disconnection is symptomatic of an inherent contradiction in the techno-utopian vision of the future.
You know the techno-utopian vision. On one hand, access to digital information technologies will democratize…well, pretty much everything. It’s great for individual citizens. On the other hand, it is driven by hyper-capitalism; many of the most vocal techno-utopians are free market libertarians. Techno-utopianism – it’s been in all of the papers (mostly in the business section). It’s got its own popular house organ (Wired magazine, which, not surprisingly, was a major pusher of push). Hell, even Time has written about it, which, as the saying goes, means it’s at least 10 years out of date.
As the failure of push technologies suggests, the interests of the major corporations (seven transnational entertainment conglomerates, if Herman and McChesney’s The Global Media is to be believed) are not congruent with that of individual computer users. Sometimes, the
needs of the corporations will coincide with the needs of individuals; at other times, though, the needs of these two distinct groups will conflict.
This contradiction has been obscured by a myopic vision of what individual computer users want from digital communications networks. The major corporations consider individuals solely as consumers of information. In this scenario, whatever improvements they can make in
delivering precisely targeted information will benefit consumers as well as the corporations’ bottom line. Voila: everybody wins.
As I argue in my Ph.D. dissertation, however, the main advantage of the Web is not that it distributes information more efficiently (if the complaints are to be believed, it doesn’t), but that it gives individuals access to a medium which allows them to distribute their
own information. Think about this for a moment. Still cameras have been in individual hands since the 1960s. Video cameras have been available on a widespread basis since the 1980s. Anybody can pick up a pen and write on a piece of paper. Why aren’t we all publicly acknowledged artists? Because the channels of distribution are limited and closely guarded by a relatively small number of gatekeepers.
At least, that was the situation until the World Wide Web gave individuals a medium with huge bandwidth which allowed them to bypass traditional distribution channels.
This is the true democratizing potential of the Web: individual citizens communicating with each other. The traditional outlets are scared that this will undermine their very profitable domination of the media. They should be. When everybody from David Bowie and Public Enemy to Joe’s Garage Band put their music on the Web; when everybody from Spike Lee to various independent filmmakers put video on the Web; when anybody and everybody seems to be putting their text-based stories on the Web, the importance of music, film and publishing companies appears to be seriously threatened. Thus, the contradiction in the techno-utopian rhetoric between individual empowerment and free markets should become clear.
Push technology was a relatively benign first move in this conflict, since it didn’t preclude Web users from putting up their own pages. Other technologies being developed are less so. The set-top boxes of WebTV, for instance, may enhance some television viewing experiences with limited interactivity, but at the cost of limiting the amount of the Web available and making it impossible for users to create and upload Web pages. Asymmetrical distribution systems such as used by
digital cable and satellite (high bandwidth into the home, low bandwidth out) are clearly intended to keep users as information consumers rather than consumer/producers.
The example of push offers the hope that, when large numbers of people recognize that a new technology is not in their best interests, they will reject it. In the next few years, a dizzying array of new technologies will be introduced into the marketplace. They will be
sold under the banner of user convenience, which is sometimes true, but more often is an insidious mask hiding corporate interests. When, in the future, you encounter a new technology, ask yourself: “Does this
allow me to do what I want to more easily, or am I giving up some of my autonomy (that is, ability to determine how one lives one’s life) for somebody else’s benefit?”
Answer honestly and choose accordingly.
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