The similitude of the Technorati
Betapost - feel free to suggest improvements and additions.
I’m heavily into Internet culture- that’s is, foraging the web for patterns and emergent phenomena, trying to figure out what is going on and what will happen next. This is not a unique interest, nor is it particularly hard.
There is a substantial part of the Internet (probably a few percent) devoted to exactly this kind of scouting, sharing, searching, patterning and creating. They are also fairly easy to find, since they all self identify as such. They are at the nexus of tech/culture thought. They are the followers of the Internet mastodonts. They are the ones who will claim Silicon Valley capitalism can lead a revolution. They are also extremely similar in their use of technology, and has tendency to think the rest of the world uses it similarly.
They don’t. Not only is their involvement fairly much lower, they also aren’t interested in scouting out new ideas in this rather narrow field. They don’t surf. They don’t read blogs. They aren’t hunting their feeds for links. They just send goofy shit to their friends, post videos of terrible group choreography unselfconsciously to YouTube and follow celebs on twitter. And then there are the ethnic minorities yet further removed from this pattern. And further yet, the rest of the world.
Maybe this pattern of Internet usage is a reminiscence of the old informational utopian cyberpunk ethics that dominated early messaging boards - where our type of Internet user was raised and formed our habits.
Whether that is the case, it does have an important implication: we, who spend so much time demarcating the future of the web, have a tendency to see our own shadows everywhere. And if our ideas about the potential of the web is only informed by our own idiosyncratic usage, we might not realize the directions the majority of users are pulling the web in. This could lead to us getting disconnected to how the web is really evolving, or even worse: create a web that is only for people like ourselves.
That would be a shame. Because then social media marketers are surely going to take the baton from us and turn our beautiful utopia into a spamfest apocalypse.
