Who Sets The Rules In The Digital Space?
Witness how the Internet has transformed from a simple information-seeking tool to an intricate web of connections, as we examine the foundation of digital spaces through social networks, online shopping, and the ever-present influence of mobile devices.
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In the age of intangible assets, how do we stake a claim to what’s rightfully ours? It’s been over two decades since the internet became an indispensable part of our lives, evolving from a mere communication tool into a vast digital landscape. But as we navigate this brave new world, one question remains: who sets the rules in the Digital Environment?
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Episode 8: A Web Of Our Own
We connect to spaces, we appropriate them, through rituals and ceremonies that we carry out in community. That is how we seek to transcend time, through legacy and space, through communication with something that is not present. If we search our cultural history for those acts that truly reflect our will to make a place our own, we will find that often the first thing we do when we discover a new place is to mark it in some way. “Planting a flag” implies the action of erecting a pole with a cloth attached to it, but it also calls to mind, through its ritual element, the will to confirm the presence of a collective of people in a particular place and the transformation of that space due to that presence. When the Apollo 11 mission reached the moon, one of the first things the astronauts did was to place a United States flag into the rocky ground. The symbolism of this act seems stronger than the act itself. Following the same premise, we could say that appropriation is tied to symbolic acts.
Perhaps we conceive of the Digital Environment as something that has always been the same. If we think back, various images appear, programs and uses that are very different from today’s, and which will probably not look like tomorrow’s. It is not the same thing to talk about the year 2000, when we were just starting to connect to search for information or chat, as it is to talk about our present, in which there hardly exist people who do not access the cloud every day. Wifi and smartphones were still ideas someone was imagining. In a few short years, the change has been enormous. Today we cannot think about the Internet without also thinking about mobile devices and social networks. That reveals something central to any symbolic act: it always involves another person, and it is the presence of that other person that is definitive in our process of appropriation.
Another action we take the moment we arrive to a new territory is to found towns and cities. For the Roman Empire, the foundation of cities was a sacred act. Both the place and the date were chosen by consulting with the oracles, and a ceremony was carried out on that day. The Cardo, with its north-south orientation, marked the center of the city where it crossed the Decumanus, which ran from east to west. The city’s most important buildings were located at the intersection of these two streets. In a way, recognizing space was also a divine act. The moment of foundation evoked a transcendent desire that connected ancestors with descendants, those who had been with those who will be. The act of foundation is always a call through time that recaptures important aspects for a particular society at a specific moment.
Our need to recognize ourselves in a space and evoke the spirit of something unmoored in time speaks to our essence and reflects (at the same time as it reinforces) a cosmogonic model. Often, in their eagerness to relate foundations to cosmogony, societies create their own mythology around this act. The story of the foundation of Rome, for example, tells of the twin brothers Romulus and Remus to narrate the struggle of different peoples to find a place to settle, as well as the material and political construction of a city and a state.
We might say, then, that foundation, as a central element of symbolic appropriation, is a way of relocating prior cultural baggage, of extrapolating concepts from that culture in order to create a new model of ideas and begin to establish it. Although we might not be able to articulate it in theoretical terms, most of us have an idea of how foundation works in the Natural Environment. But how does foundation occur in an immaterial place? What happens when we cannot plant a flag, cut a ribbon, or drive in a shovel?
Even though appropriation is an action related to foundation, there can be foundation without appropriation and appropriation without foundation. It is also an action that is not always carried out in a premeditated way and does not depend on a single actor. While Y2K was a moment at which we as humanity recognized that digital technology was an environment, we could understand 2001 as the year in which the actions in the Digital Environment could directly affect the Natural Environment. It was a place where things deserving our attention occurred. September 11th, 2001, when a group of terrorists took control of airplanes and used them as weapons against the people of the United States, was a turning point. A traumatic event caused concern in sovereign nations. That attack on the security of the greatest world power, which until that point had been inviolable, shook the world. When it was discovered that the terrorists had communicated using tools from the Digital Environment and that these communications had gone unnoticed, several nations took note. Institutions invested a great deal of money in strengthening their digital infrastructures and their presence in the Digital Environment.
The changes that were made after this event in the Digital Environment were not common knowledge until Edward Snowden, a technical consultant for the CIA and the NSA, decided to make them public in 2013. Snowden revealed an unprecedented cybersecurity development that was being implemented, especially as of 2001. We can characterize these initiatives launched by the governments of the most powerful countries in the world, essentially based on the massive and unrestricted accumulation of data, as one of the various attempts at appropriation of the Digital Environment. In this case, it was a development driven by fear and aimed at building a structure of control in a space that was perceived to be threatening. This attempt at digital foundation was a response by economic and political powers to a security problem. The idea that the network was a dangerous and controlled place exacerbated fears tied to newness for some, while others felt that their privacy was threatened with regards to the activities they were already carrying out online.
This was a type of foundation, the consolidation of the Digital Environment as a territory that needed the presence of the state, a kind of digital panopticon, but it was definitely not the only one. At the time, many people had already organized online, around productive notions. Since the Internet had a direct impact on our ability to produce and do business at the commercial level, we saw the emergence of approaches that surpassed the limits of a webpage: they let us do some activities online that only took place in the Natural Environment before. Amazon, for example, began as a virtual bookstore and gradually grew as shopping shifted from the natural world to the digital world. More and more people began to buy books on the Internet. Purchasing products online is commonplace today, but at that time, it was entirely new, an activity that seemed less real because it did not involve buildings or in-person interaction. In fact, in 1997, the bookstore Barnes & Noble sued Amazon for describing itself as “the world’s largest bookstore.” The complaint was not that they sold more (Amazon was already selling books in more than forty-five countries); the brick-and-mortar store argued that “Amazon is not a bookstore at all.”
This dispute captures the tension between the urge to relocate prior cultural baggage to the Digital Environment without modifications (a faithful recreation in the Digital Environment of our habits in the Natural Environment) and the realization that that was impossible (a bookstore that proposes another way of thinking about bookstores). While some people thought of this space “theoretically,” certain cultural actions were transforming it into a common meeting place through one of the quintessential activities that define our socialization: shopping. Amazon was much more than a bookstore, but it was also taking on the form, unknown at the time, of modern-day online businesses.
Another aspect of foundation as a strategy for appropriation is that it allows us to project our own cosmogony onto a territory. The plans of Mesoamerican cities demonstrate this parallel. Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, was divided into four large zones that symbolized the cardinal directions; in the middle was a ceremonial center considered to be the heart of the fifth direction: the union between the Earth and the heavens. Temples and palaces were also laid out in an orderly fashion, in accordance with an east-west layout that followed the path of the sun. The Aztec city, as a habitable space, served as a map not only of the cosmos but also of the Earth where it was located. The layout of the habitable space emulated their worldview. Something similar happened in the Digital Environment. We began to project our most familiar town: the bookstore, the library, a global market like eBay, and meeting places like forums. Little by little, our online activities began to draw a map of human encounters and habits.
Up to this point, the Digital Environment seems to be laid out as a walled city, monitored by other eyes. In the middle are people, curious about this new space, but within a framework forged by fear, a story that made appropriation difficult. However, there were those who were inspired by the wide-open possibilities of this environment and established a foothold, showing that the flipside of institutional or state advances are community initiatives.
In this sense, we can discuss the first strides of Peer to Peer (or P2P) technology. What began as a necessity and a desire to share large files efficiently ended up shaping a network flow that reflects the way in which these communities believe goods should circulate. Developments like Napster drew the map for a new way of thinking about intellectual property, about consuming and creating communities around the flame of culture. Its level of disruption involved disproportionate responses by the state and companies, attempts at institutional control, but that model was an indispensable outline for the format of our modern media culture.
There are certainly many ways to think about these first steps, but what we are delineating here is a tension between two movements: progress marked by the methodical application of theoretical ideas projected onto the environment and progress made by communities, appropriating spaces through their ceremonies. Foundation is not always as linear or premeditated as choosing a special day on a calendar, consulting an oracle, and locating the ideal coordinates. We also found through norms and habits, as these become ceremonies and rituals. But for a physical act to have a corresponding symbolic representation, a social component must grant that symbolism.
With regards to the network, the relationship that each individual forged with the Internet was the most important thing at first. There were no common organizing principles, basically because humanity had not developed virtual ceremonies. Some of us can still remember when we “signed on” to the Internet to look up something specific, a bit of information or a webpage, typed in a web address, did what we wanted, and then logged off. Many of us even downloaded information to read it later, offline. However, those who remember that also evoke a feeling common at that time: the sensation of being someplace else.
Early on, many people who went online found a place where they could leave their ideas, opinions, or even words directed at another person. And it was not only people they knew that they could talk to but rather, for example, someone famous or someone who had passed away. Behind that impulse to communicate, to reach others who are not with us, we find many of the representations of the end of the century that ended up shaping the sensation of the global village. For example, there is a firmly established idea in popular culture that everyone in the world is connected to each other through six — or fewer — social connections. Although this theory lacks scientific validity, it has been the subject of various studies. Even more important, it is the jumping-off point for SixDegrees, considered to be the first social network.
Until it appeared, there were no tools that allowed geographically distant users to socialize with each other online, beyond email or a chat room. “The challenge is to build a community, the stake is to light a flame,” explained Andrew Weinreich, who created the network. The site let users connect to “friends of friends.” Although the network was launched in 1997 and closed in 2001, it reached its goal: it lit a flame in the middle of the unknown territory that was the Digital Environment. The idea that the Internet, in addition to providing us with information and facilitating our work lives, could also let us connect with each other and form communities opened a new world of possibilities.
It was not so much an individual decision as a collective and unstoppable push forward that changed everything. Through these new social practices, we realized that the network is whatever we make it. Social networks gave us the means to begin, little by little, to develop a ritualizing phenomenon. Even without a clear or directed foundational objective, the phenomenon of interaction opened up a universe.
In this sense, we can highlight the immense importance of that flame lit by SixDegrees. That torch lit other fires with the immediate creation of other social networks in a process that continues today. We do not need to agree on whether this was caused by the first social networks to exist (SixDegrees or Classmates) or by the first ones to achieve a global impact (LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.). The important thing to recognize is that from that moment on, the unstoppable desire to begin the move into the Digital Environment began to spread and reach people who had no interest in using a computer.
Technology attracted enthusiasts, information attracted scientists, tools attracted office workers, businesses attracted buyers, and, finally, the organized individuals who began to move in social networks attracted everyone else. The process of symbolic foundation began when we decided that networks were a place in which to extend our existential reality. In contrast to the foundation leveraged by institutions, it is difficult to identify the moment in which it occurred at the collective level. There was no flag and no special day. There were small, individual steps that came together in a general tide of people who began to enter into that new aspect of reality and make it their own.
In the next episode:
Explore how social media is pushing the internet to new levels and how we are becoming the protagonists of the Digital Environment.
