Why are we so invested in projecting our lives online?
Social media has transformed us. Uncover the paths that led to the web 2.0 in the latest episode of our podcast series about the impacts of digital technologies and their history.
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The rise of social media has changed everything, unleashing a new age of digital communication. The Internet giants of the 21st century have been born and, with them, a new way to express humanity. We revisit the key elements of one of the processes that founded the Digital Environment that we know today.
Dive with us into the recent tech history and let’s understand the origins of this current uncertainty.
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Episode 9: Web 2.0
The 2000s saw the rise of social networks and their consolidation as a fundamental part of our online experience. If we tried to name them, the first that would come to mind would be those we use every day or those we once participated in and were important to us. Maybe their names will bring up memories, either happy or sad, but always in relation to other people. MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, Flickr, OkCupid, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, ICQ, Foursquare… and the list goes on. A huge number of platforms were and continue to be developed, some international and others regional.
It would seem that once we understood that we could relate to each other commercially online, we asked ourselves: what else could we do? Is it possible to move our social customs and needs online, as well? Just as we projected elements and symbols from our life in the Natural Environment and began to set up our virtual neighborhoods with libraries and supermarkets at the outset of the process of appropriating the Digital Environment, a time came when people felt the need to satisfy other aspects of their lives online, beyond the merely productive.
In keeping with our experience so far, the first step of this process had to do with attempts to imitate our social logics in the Natural Environment in the Digital one. For example, Meta, which at the time was called Facebook and presented itself as a social networking company, started out as a way to connect students at Harvard University to one another. Students could upload pictures and share information about their lives or even their class schedules. Ultimately, Facebook was created to be a university club, but online. Two years after it began, it reached five million users, amply exceeding the university population. By that time, the network had already been opened up to other universities in the U.S. and abroad. Finally, in 2006, the club opened up to anyone over the age of thirteen. In 2022, it had some 2.32 billion users worldwide, and more than 83 million pictures were being uploaded daily. What is truly interesting about these numbers is that today there are other networks that are even more popular and exceed that amount of traffic.
Facebook’s exponential growth shows the capacity of projects to multiply and grow in the Digital Environment. Without the limitations of natural space, they explode and develop beyond spatial and temporal limitations in ways never before imagined. Harvard’s virtual club ended up becoming a powerful international company. Facebook changed a great deal over the years, just as we changed in our relationship with digital technology. Once the network was open to a massive audience, we began to use it in different ways, which even caused changes in the network and the company.
The social processes triggered by these technological changes transform us as people. We can see this in both processes of the technological revolution. In the previous section, we discussed the first initiatives and platforms that were established in the Digital Environment. In this section, we will address how people are organized in their different roles with regards to advancements in this technology. Along the way, we will explore how the speed of those advancements requires that people rearrange their perceptions at a dizzying pace.
Another useful case for thinking about how we initially migrated the social logics of the Natural Environment into the Digital Environment is the online community Second Life. This program has its own economy and currency, which is used to buy and sell goods and services created within the virtual world. Possible transactions include buying and selling plots of virtual land. In addition to the presence of more than forty-five multinational companies, we also find embassies from several countries in Second Life, on Diplomacy Island, and virtual spaces for some religious organizations. Nowadays, the possibility of buying and selling digital land has evolved into a digital real estate market located in the different metaverses that, in 2022, reached total sales of more than 500 million dollars.
That first relocation of private and public institutions, like embassies, speaks of the need to reflect in the virtual space everything that is important to us in the Natural Environment. We could also relate the abundant activity with an impulse of wanting to somehow live in the Digital Environment.
The way people assert their presence in a space without matter, which they cannot reach with their bodies, is through symbolic ceremonies. But are they practiced the same way in an intangible environment? Although we applied the same logics to both spaces early on (I buy a plot of cornfield / I buy a plot of land in Second Life), once we gained a bit of experience in the Digital Environment, we began to develop new ceremonies. As we have seen, old conceptions of commerce, intellectual property, and surveillance failed. Our culture in the Natural Environment was challenged and began to change.
We can understand a great deal about our present moment by looking at history, and this also applies from the perspective of human development. To understand the process of internalizing networks that connect us virtually, it is useful to think back to the 19th century. We can compare these steps toward appropriating the Digital Environment with an innovation that helped determine our relationship to time and space during the Industrial Revolution: the train. In this sense, the relevant literature occasionally refers to the development of digital and information technology as the Third Technological Revolution, in reference to a third moment in humanity’s relationship to machines, linked to informatics.
In the first stage of its introduction, both the steam engine and computers opened the playing field to a movement whose consequences had a significant influence on people and the Natural Environment. The movement begun by those who imagined these projects was one of technical transformation, of hardware. While the steam engine multiplied the speed and force available to industry, the introduction of computing allowed for the optimization of processes in brand new ways. However, during those first few years, no one could have imagined that the development of these technologies would be the first step toward transformations in our territories and societies, the consequences of which we are still trying to understand today.
Both steam and digital technology had their greatest impact when the machine came out of the factory and became part of the city and of people’s lives. The arrival of the Internet in people’s homes and the possibility of connecting every computer to a shared network is what truly separated the machine from its users. This revealed the digital realm as a territory available for human development. As we have seen, once we understood this, our urge to explore it appeared.
One of the ways in which the steam engine entered our daily lives was through the creation of locomotives and the laying of a rail network. The machine began to have an impact on people’s lives in very visible ways as that network allowed us to appropriate new territories.
With that new speed, the rail system proved to be a powerful tool for expansion and political unification. The landscape was transformed in such a way that we can see the impact of this innovation even on the concepts used to conceive of it. The modern metallic profile of the machine traversed the countryside at previously unknown speeds and left behind it a concrete trail: around the stations, towns formed. The developments made by the English with this phenomenon in England, but especially in India and other territories, is exemplary. However, the case of the United States is an eloquent example of the parallels between the railway and digital expansion. Some seven thousand towns and cities on the current map of the United States were originally depots and strategic stops related to the railway system. A similar phenomenon has occurred in countries around the world. The railroad was the first great human mark on that territory.
The concentration of people around train tracks gave rise to the need for creating banks and, in consequence, security systems to protect them. The first system of control came not from a federal government but from private initiatives. The rule of law was imposed by whomever was strongest, generally the bodyguards of railway representatives. At the same time, the government was merely a user of the services provided by these companies.
The protagonists of the period were those businessmen associated with the ambition of conquering and connecting more and more land, like Cornelius Vanderbilt or his rivals, Jay and George Gould. Charles I’s motto describes them quite well: they wanted to go “beyond,” but in this case, progress was not necessarily occurring within a territory at the outer limits. However, the idea of expanding the frontiers of civilization was at play. The Earth itself was not being expanded, but the known world was. Fundamentally, this impulse aimed to connect and put into operation the middle of the continent with railway networks that ended up shaping the United States, integrating vast swaths of land into the nation’s industrial project. Just like those explorers who ventured across the seas, these businessmen were called “pioneers,” though in this case, “of American industry.”
The change that came about after the invention and implementation of this machine was so profound that it questioned the relationship between human beings and the most fundamental of physical characteristics. The naturalist John Muir expressed this idea when he declared that the transcontinental railroad had “annihilated time and space.” Such an advancement at the technological level thoroughly changes the way we relate to our surroundings. Evidently, moving through a territory for weeks in a wagon train was not the same as moving through it in days aboard a train. The way people perceive time and the changes that affect that perception have the power to transform our experience of the world. In this regard, we can trace how technology modifies that perception. We mention the railroad here, but we could have discussed the telegraph and how it shortened the time necessary for communication and the flow of information. For people living in the 21st century, the Internet had a similar impact: it annihilated time, but in a completely new way. In any case, this is something we must still explore.
The dynamics that shaped the experience of the wild lands of the United States were transformed, and that changed even the national imagination. In the rise of the Internet, we find a similar effect. Let us explore this analogy. In the Digital Wild West, we can identify two forces. On the one hand, we have the “railway companies,” the large communications companies that were established first. Among these are Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, for example. Web 2.0, whose impact through social networks is described above, is dominated by these large companies that behave in the same way railroad companies did. As owners of the infrastructure, they are in a position to determine the possibilities for movement of traffic, that is, the rest of the digital population’s ability to move around. Just as the railway model gave rise to linear towns that were not imagined based on benefits for habitability and were not centered on people, the digital model of online communications companies maintains its own logic.
This experience of the Natural Environment also had its parallel in our march through the Digital Environment. The entrepreneurial figures in this century set the pace and style of digital progress, which determines how people move and act in the new environment. Thus arise personalities like Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook who became a new model of success (the hoodie-wearing millionaire from Silicon Valley) and was later demonized for his role in data mining and sale. There is also Jeff Bezos, with his controversial image including the worldwide expansion of Amazon, complaints from his workers, and his progress in the new space race. Finally, we have Elon Musk, who, after creating the leading payment system worldwide, turned toward developments like the most exclusive electric car on the market and participation in the race for private exploration of space. These renowned figures serve as an example to think about who it was that set up the different networks that shape the Digital Environment as we now know it: the network of goods and services (Amazon, Netflix, Youtube), the network of financial transactions (Paypal, Payoneer, Wise), and social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter).
As an example, we can consider the human cultural baggage that we have migrated to the Digital Environment. This allows us to understand two very important elements of our digital existence. First, we have the dizzying success of these companies. Google, for example, was born as a university project for indexing information. Its overwhelming growth established it as the necessary network of connections for moving between different clusters of information. Like a railway network, Google connected different corners of the Digital Environment with its own logics, making it possible to access largely uninhabited areas, but at the same time controlling the speed and direction of travel. Back then, communication could only take place from point to point.
On the other hand, we can also use this method of understanding our progress to grasp the size of the leap implied by the incorporation of mobile access in 2006. In the configuration of these traversable networks, giving each traveler their own vehicle changes the game completely, just like the changes that took place in urban modes of transportation. However, mobile connection devices introduce a particular kind of power: they are portable objects that both move people and have the ability to change the environment.
That power was foreshadowed by the new logics of content production introduced by social networks. Disorganized but with the vigorous drive of the “beyond,” individuals began to appropriate the Digital Environment without much reflection, much like the multitudes who take scheduled trains to visit or interact throughout a country’s stations. In the 21st century, they did so by incorporating digital tools in their daily tasks and developing their most vital needs on social platforms. But unlike railroad users, the users of digital networks cannot be reduced to a passive role. We are not merely travelers on digital networks. The interpersonal connections that are possible through social networks give rise to a new role for the individual on the Internet, which simultaneously constitutes a new social role.
In the next episode:
Discover how smartphones transformed the way we interact with the Digital Environment and the impact they have had on our daily lives.
Digital Pilgrims is a podcast based upon the book “Digital Pilgrims. Towards a Quantum Humanity” by Adrián Sicilia.
