We all need to care for the Internet
I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the first TEDx event in Perth – called TEDx Nedlands to locate it more precisely. Here’s the modestly great idea I was able to share, slightly edited for online presentation…
We all need to care for the Internet
It is a pleasure to be here. Thank you for your attention and interest in this event – my thanks to the organisers for being asked to participate! Feel free to tweet and blog during my brief talk – augment the reality of the event through whatever channels you desire. I’d almost feel offended if you were not multitasking at some stage. [Refer to the great TED talk by Renny Gleeson on anti-social phone behaviour that had preceded me]
When you research and analyse the Internet professionally, as I do, it can be quite daunting to be asked to come up with ‘a great idea that is worth spreading’. So many people around the world have incredibly good ideas about what to do with the Internet, and on the Internet that I am more likely to want to hear others’ ideas and not present my own. Indeed, the Internet so easily allows those good ideas to spread around that there is a very wide audience for them: an audience of which I am an enthusiastic member. If you have a great idea, it’s easier than ever to bring it to people’s attention, directly and without having to rely on the filtered, controlled and limited channels of traditional media and knowledge dissemination.
Of course TED is one of the best examples of this phenomenon – what a great idea it is to use the Internet to spread around great ideas! And, you see, in this event today not only the spreading of ideas – definitely modest in my case – but also the spreading of the very idea of TED. It’s a synergy between content and process, between information and meta-information. This synergy is what the Internet is all about. Data does double-duty: it is itself, and a reference to itself.
Today’s theme is “Opportunity. Resource. Endeavour”. While we can think of many ways to explore it, I am struck by how, in this one short phrase, we have a really clear statement about the power, potential and challenge of the Internet in our society today. The net is a profound opportunity – opening up new lines of communication and collaboration, new social, business and political possibilities for action and innovation. The net of course is also a tremendous resource – frustrating at times in its multiplicity and chaotic distribution – but wonderfully fulfilling as a source of information.
On these two points, I suspect there is nothing more to be said. But the third, Endeavour, is perhaps less obvious, more open to interpretation, question and debate. It is the inspiration for my presentation, because it reminds us of the direct, personal role that we must take. To have endeavour is to strive, to make something of those opportunities, with those resources. It is both reassuring and demanding all at once.
So, what is the modestly great idea I am sharing today, inspired by this call for endeavour? It’s simple. My idea is that, we all need to care for the Internet. We, meaning us…you and I, collectively and individually. We don’t need to be careful of the Internet – we do need to tend it, help it, nuture it and give expression through our caring for it of the importance it plays in our lives. To care for the Internet suggests we value it and express or enact that value by being present, mindful members of the Internet.
So what can we do to ‘care for’ the Internet? It’s easy: the injunction upon us all should be to contribute to, not just take from, the Internet. Let’s look at Wikipedia for an example.
Wikipedia is a great resource, multiplying and expanding constantly, but only as good as the contributions made by all of the people who create, edit and sustain its content. It has gaps, it has errors, it has disagreements. What should be done about it? Rather than constrain its use (the foolish advice, often passed out in our high schools and universities, ‘don’t use Wikipedia’), we should embrace it and value it, but only on the condition that we always seek to improve it. I looked yesterday at the Wikipedia entry for TED and thought – there’s a project! It needs a lot of work and could be so much richer and more informative.
Wikipedia, more than any other of the early online innovations from the first wave of the Internet in the last last century, models for us the idea that individuals, working without centralised control and direction, could nevertheless collaborate on a shared endeavour. It also models for us the fundamental basis of the Internet’s power to change the world: the effort invested by one individual is, because of the global reach of the Internet and the internetworking of content, capable of realising disproportionately high returns on that investment. Finally, Wikipedia shows how the Internet – especially when conceived as a read/write web, in which consuming and producing content are conjoined and equally available in the same techno-cognitive moment – reduces the cost to the individual contributor to the point where that investment is worth making.
Because Wikipedia empowers the individual work as part of a collective without the overhead costs of that collective, and leaves open to the individual the calculation of investment and return (in whatever currency matters, but most usually regard and reputation rather than cash), it best models the revolutionary rise of user-generated content which has marked the last five to ten years of the Internet in our lives. But, despite this empowerment of the individual, Wikipedia remains a collective enterprise: the individual is only able to participate because of everyone else who is doing the same thing and we can observe them at work, in the traces of activity on the Wikipedia pages. We see everyone, someone and ourselves among them all at once.
It is not just Wikipedia of course. I use it as an example. There are so many opportunities for contributing to the Internet that I can barely summarise them. We can write blogs, we can comment on blogs, we can promote blogs and share them. We can create social movements, networks, and communities as well as join them, shape them and make them work. There are countless special interest groups that exist and work to enrich their members’ lives through online forums and other interactive web environments. Literally thousands of emergent Web 2.0 sites exist whose sole purpose is to call out to you, the user, and say ‘hey, we’d love you to add something here’. You can originate content in many forms; you can recreate it through mashups. You can build the tools which others use to be creative. You can rate, rank, annotate, comment on and otherwise amplify that content. You can extend that content by sharing, forwarding, embedding and otherwise reusing it. You can curate that content by maintaining it, managing it, defending and interpreting it.
Originate; Recreate; Build; Amplify; Extend; Curate
Taking care of the Internet is not just about ‘adding content’ or streaming one’s life online. There is, to be frank, too much narcissistic sharing of the self, and not enough sharing of usable knowledge and information. Social media exchanges through Twitter and Facebook (to name the most important two at the moment) is important for connecting people’s lives, but we must be careful that the Internet is not reduced solely to this kind of exchange. I have long thought that the computer screens through which we connect with the Internet are also mirrors, reflecting back ourselves far more regularly than being the windows to the world we are often prompted to imagine. So caring for the Internet means: contributing content that is designed for others to benefit from rather than being designed for our own consumption. Social media needs to be ‘we’-media, not ‘me’-media.
Equally, however, we must care for the Internet by contributing to it so that its inherent potential for diverse voices, opinions, actions and engagements is not overridden by sophisticated conglomerate media producers and managers. There’s a lot to like about mass media – print, TV, radio and so on – but even as these forms are now delivered via the internet, mass media is not and must become the Internet. Caring for the Internet is about taking individual responsibility to ensure that the net remains common property, not the dominion of a few who can drown out much of what they find there: this responsibility is exercised by writing the Internet, producing it, in the way we desire as diverse individuals, and not just by consuming it. Otherwise we become the apparently passive, undifferentiated audience so desired by mass media [I say apparently because - of course - no audience is passive].
So, before I conclude today, let me ask of you three things you can do, sometime in the next month, to care for the Internet in this way: to contribute to it, to build it as the common, collective network of people and information which ensures it continues to offer resource and opportunity. Here are three things you should endeavour to do.
- Go to wikitravel.org. Find the page relating to Perth or, if you live somewhere further away from our glittering metropolis, your ‘home’ page. Make it better. Think about who will read this page, what they want to know and have at it. It’s easy. Even if you add one sentence, or correct one mistake, you have made a difference. Reflect on how your ‘home page’ might now be where you are or what you do, and just ‘my space’.
- Go to flickr. Before you do, have ready some great pictures of things you like, places that inspire you, events that move you. Share them. Give them away. Make a profile and a collection for yourself, and tag the photos so people can find them and use them.
- Go to hubpages.com. Read an article you need or want. Imagine you wrote it: wouldn’t you love to have a comment – detailed, useful and extending – added to your article? Go ahead and show respect for what you have just consumed by commenting.
I should add, I gain nothing at all by mentioning these three examples – there are many others you can use too! Perhaps more than anything you can take care of the Internet by finding the place, the people, the network where your contribution will make the most difference.
The Internet is, and can be sustained as, a commons: an information commons. Its resources are non-rival and cannot be consumed or spent; it is a commons which will not suffer from the traditional tragedy of the commons that Hardin outlined in 1968 in which the common availability of resources free for all will lead to the destruction of the very thing we value. But it is at risk nevertheless; the new tragedy, perhaps the farce, of the information commons will emerge when a lack of care and maintenance of its content begins to render it unusable as a commons.
The Farce of the Information Commons?
The sweeping all-consuming infoverse which now emerges from networking and communication may be non-rival, but it has thrown into sharp relief just how limited our resources are for engaging with it. Our will, our attention, our insight – all these resources are scarce and can only be used once at any time. But devoting a small amount of them online, to care for the Internet, is a necessary duty now.
In conclusion, let me rephrase this idea, that we all need to care for the Internet. What motivates people most of all to engage with ideas, knowledge, information, creativity is the thought that they are communicating with others, making and presenting themselves through what they say and to whom they say it. Caring for the Internet is, then, really about caring for those we rarely or never see and to whom we do not often or ever speak with: when we care for the Internet by contributing and curating online content we must always imagine the users, like us, looking online – we reach through the Internet to create connections between people based on the generosity of spirit with which we give freely of ourselves.