Rock the Internet Blues! (Part 1/3)
A critical view of the evolution of the Internet from civil society
Daniel Pimienta & Luis Germán Rodríguez Leal, June 2020
pimienta@funredes.org & luisger.rodl@gmail.com
This article is dedicated to the members of the virtual community MISTICA, which disappeared from cyberspace in 2007, and to Michael Gurstein who dedicated his life to empowering citizens in community networks and with whom we shared parts of that reflection in the corridors of a meeting shortly before of his physical disappearance in October 2017.
ABSTRACT:
Starting from an analysis of the differences between virtual communities and social networks, a critical description is developed of how the Internet has evolved in the last 20 years towards a situation marked by the end of dialogue and the obsessive promotion of visions centered on egocentric interests. The historical singularity from which this situation was triggered is identified in Google’s decision, in the early 2000s, to make advertising the focus of its business strategy and how it transformed, with the help of others Technology Giants (TG), users in user-products and then agents of their own marketing, with the use of their egomation. The paper investigates the role played by civil society specialized in global information society issues, where it has presented little resistance to the changes that have arisen along the way. In addition to representing a divorce with the shared initial utopias, this evolution is a threat with important repercussions in the non-virtual world, including the weakening of the democratic foundations of our societies. After showing some dystopian perspectives, some concrete guidelines are proposed to change course, highlighting the most important measure: that of declaring a digital emergency that contemplates massive education programs to insert citizens in the ethical challenges, the potentialities and risks of the global knowledge society and especially in what information literacy means.
Keywords: Internet, virtual community, social network, technological giants, digital emergency, information literacy, global knowledge society, information ethics, multi-stakeholder, egomation.
Contents
Abstract
Introduction
The end of dialogue
The way we get here
The opinion society and the “social contamination” via the Internet
The role of civil society
Governments ot TG: the cognitive bias
The digital emergency
Conclusions
References
(This part of the article covers the titles indicated in bold)
Introduction
One of the most powerful and interesting virtual objects that emerged in the early history of the Internet is the virtual community. A place[1] where a group of people who share a common interest or a specific topic exchange messages, usually in an environment of mutual respect. There are consensual rules that must be accepted by any person who aspires to join, and where anonymity is generally not allowed[2]. Some communities, also called learning communities, are fertile ground for the collective creation of knowledge. The cognitive enrichment of participants is fostered through intense dialogues, sustained upon arguments and cross-thinking.
One of the questions that motivates this article is how these especially creative spaces could evolve towards the insane and incoherent operation that we can observe in the current Net. We are facing a digital environment, based on the Internet, which includes the so-called social networks (SN) and the set of applications that configure a context with characteristics opposite to that which was once promoted. Broadly speaking, it can be recognized that, along with unquestionable benefits that it has as a tool, it is often a place for mutual disrespect, for the dissemination of false or biased information, without clear rules for the behavior of its inhabitants and, therefore, is a breeding ground for hatred and racism.
The authors were creators and animators of one of those spaces[3] where some 500 people gathered, mainly activists and academics, all motivated by the issue of the social impact of the Internet in Latin America and the Caribbean. It functioned, in the period 2000–2007, as a forum for reflection and collective construction of knowledge. At the same time, it served as a field for advanced experimentations on the very concept of virtual or learning communities.
This group was very active and had influence beyond the Latin American region during the World Summit on the Information Society process[4] (WSIS). From one of their meetings, the expression “shared knowledge societies” emerged, which the group considered more appropriate than “information society”, for two reasons. One was to highlight the importance of communication (sharing) and the other was to emphasize the plurality of possible options, referring to it in the plural. Today, the Internet blues that invades us (see Ref. [5]) could lead us to degrade the current situation as a “shred knowledge society”. In part this document could be a reaction, sometimes angry and deliberately exaggerated, to the pain of seeing the times gone when it was felt to be shared in these intense, productive and enriching dialogues in many aspects, professional and personal, emotional and rational. There are still wonderful realities and elements to be optimistic but it is necessary to face the dark side of the evolution of the Internet. The drift that has been taken is not the only possible option and we must avoid that the synergy proper to the original network now leaves all space for antagonism. A massive, articulated and urgent educational effort is proposed in relation to information, communication, knowledge and ethics. Information literacy[5] is an international emergency to empower users, developers and entrepreneurs who live in the digital environment. We recognize that users are the main actors who, with their behavior, must reverse the debacle that is in full swing.
The end of dialogue
If one observes the dominant behaviors in the network, one detects what could be called the end of dialogue and the propensity to transform the act of communicating into one of just informing. In other words, the basic sense of “communication”, as a dialogue exchange between people, has been transforming into broadcasting, an act of communicating one-way, one to many. The situation has reached such a point that each user behaves today predominantly as a “diffuser”, in the sense of designing and carrying out one’s own projection on the network. Thus, the original dialogue proposal tends to be set aside to favor a distribution of information that responds solely to the issuer’s own interests. The extraordinary factor of serendipity that characterized the Internet is being replaced by some kind of highly redundant and elliptical circulation of information in a loop. Today the sequences of exchanges between people (threads) that are authentic dialogues are not frequent; they have been reduced to their minimum expression with the “likes” typical of the SN and to their maximum expression with a comment, which rarely will provoke a thread of responses or in statements. Statements are nothing more than the dissemination of definitive opinions which do not appeal to dialogue and cut off a potential collaborative process of building new knowledge. Finally, these platforms are increasingly being abandoned as a place to elucidate differences or to build consensus.
Dialogue has been replaced by what we are going to name with a neologism: egomation[6]. Egomation includes information that can be described as trivial and without charge of general interest, except, as we will see later, for those who want to market some products (examples: my current state of mind, what I am eating, where I am, and other selfies) and an articulated projection of the person, his virtual self. It can include statements based on issues relevant to the interests of that self and beliefs on any topic and whatever opinion on whatever subject.
It is noteworthy that the egomation processed by the Technological Giants (TG) with business motivation includes a series of elements that the user does not explicitly express, such as the content of their communications (for example: chats and emails), the sites they browse and the terms they submit to search engines. The purpose of this article is not the detailed analysis of what egomation includes, although there is strong suspicion that this analysis has been conducted in the research laboratories of the TG to better adapt the offer of advertising with the potential demand of users.
The egomation is then a kind of predominance of the self together with information related to what is directly or indirectly relevant to that self. And, not surprisingly, each person seems to be much more interested in designing his egomation than in knowing that of others. These conditions are not very conducive to dialogue. The “cogito ergo sum” was reinterpreted in the virtual world in “egogito ergo sum” where “egogitare” would be another Latin neologism to “design my egomation” and its new meaning is then “I design my egomation in the SN so I exist”.
The sum of egomations is a noise in terms of knowledge, a noise that TG learned to use for their benefits. And it is still a noise for society, no matter how loud it is and in blatant contrast to the amount of valuable information that the digital environment of the global knowledge society has managed to gather. That background human noise has always existed, but before the arrival of the mass media, that noise stayed close to its source, be it home, the pub or a telephone conversation with its ephemeral existence. In the global knowledge society, digital platforms magnify this noise, which has unavoidable social repercussions and could have as additional implication that the total neguentropy[7] of the Internet has initiated its slope down due to the growing entropy caused by that noise.
The way we get here
How was the dialogue lost along the way? Why does the common mortal now behave as a marketing agent for himself? What makes a person believe to have the duty and the right to have an opinion, as an “expert”, about all the human and the divine subjects and, unfortunately, too many times without having enough arguments on the subject matter which is addressed? How did dialogue transform into recursive and dichotomized exchange of egomation?
We have a fairly simple explanatory theory, perhaps too simple, for a first approximation to a phenomenon as complex as this one. We do believe that there is a singularity (original sin to put it another way) that triggered a series of events which pave the way that has led us there. It is the decision of the first of the hyper-powerful actors that emerged, Google, and that was followed by the others, creating a powerful and apparently irreversible pattern in the virtual business. This decision created the conditions for the TG to concentrate the ability to transform users into products and thus have made the business profitable. At the same time, they have managed to ensure that the same users assume massively and fully the product role that was assigned to them. The consummate expression of this fact is that they have become marketing agents of themselves without realizing that (through their egomation) they are the profitable product that benefits others.
What was that decision? In what context did it occur?
The Internet was built in the 1980s within the world of academia and libertarian civil society groups[8]. Their DNA was to share, free of charge, openly and inclusively, the foundations of their creation and following developments from these principles and values. These traits, which condition the Net evolution in sociological terms, unleashed the multiple and attractive utopias that accompanied it in the early stages, while at the same time represented a barrier for profitable businesses, even when dealing with valuable initiatives. A notable example in this regard was the AltaVista search engine that did the job effectively[9], without violating the privacy of users, and was dethroned by the young company Google between 2000 and 2003.
Fighting a culture based on gratuitousness, so anchored in the depths of the community of developers and initial users, was an impossible challenge and could only be overcome by the influence of an actor of a maximum power who managed to break another deep cultural foundation of academic and civil society heritage: not mixing advertising with inter-human professional relationships[10]. To promote in this context, you had to donate back to the community a part of your own experience[11].
At the beginning Google had two options:
1) Break the free status and propose services at a fair price.
2) Continue with the free culture and find another indirect way to generate its incomes.
Option (1) had a need for financial schemes capable of easily invoicing cents or fractions of cents. The system had the ability to do it. Either every search or every email sent could have been billed at those magnitudes. The benefits of option (1) would have been significant:
· The price parameters could have been adjusted so that the services generate the same income, without making it a critical amount for users[12];
· It would have meant the final end of spam in email, a toxic parasite generated by gratuitousness;
· It would have represented a solid basis for an information ecology[13];
· It would have provided a solid foundation for an information economy and greater coherence for the long term[14] ;
· It would have kept intact other key elements of the original Internet culture that have to do with privacy policies and protection against improper and unwanted advertising.
Google selected option (2) and found no resistance from civil society. A terrible historical mistake was made in not understanding that the time had come to break one of the original principles so to allow adapting the Internet in order to make profitable investing to deploy new services. With that decision, Google opened the virtual world to the huge advertising market that eventually it will dominate[15].
Thus, the users and their profiles were transformed, together with the egomation that they could directly or indirectly generate, into juicy products. The popular expression “There is no free lunch!” ended up hitting us in our virtual flesh: our data no longer belonged to us, Google had seized them and was doing excellent business with them. In doing so it was going to give rise to other powerful players to get in action, expanding and extending the same logic, mainly and not only Facebook.
The destiny was drawn:
· Google was going to keep the search history of each user and thus know more about each of them than their psychologist.
· Progressively, with an undeniable technical and prospective talent, the company proposed very effective free applications that were massively adopted and that allowed to complement the capture of egomation in all directions: the content of emails (1.5 billion active Gmail users in 2019[16]), visited sites (80% of websites use Google Analytics to collect traffic data[17]), registered images and videos, all complemented by the spatial positioning (via GPS) of cell phone users who use the Android operating system (88% of them[18]).
Somebody found advertisements about the car of his dreams came to his email right after he emailed about his intention to change car to a close friend; an amazing coincidence he thought. This naive user was not understanding that his virtual representation was being raped[19]!
So, we arrived, very discreetly and two decades later, at the moment where the Internet dog that said in 1993 “On the Internet nobody knows that I am a dog!”[20] is no longer anonymous. Not only does Google knows that it is a dog, but it also knows its breed, what it likes to eat, its taste for bitches, what disease it possibly suffers from, when it will go to the groomer or buy a bone. Google reports this information, in some way and certainly not free, to companies that want to sell some bone to this dog.
Following a behavior consistent with its founding principles, Google proposed that content providers leave a space on their websites for dynamically placed advertising, selected according to its audience. Depending on the traffic, the producers will receive a remuneration that could reach significant figures. The motivation is twofold: enter the business and make the number of visitors as high as possible. Many actors in the digital world, including from civil society, entered that dance and were properly educated to join the trend that increases the number of visits as their most important goal and became intermediaries for digital marketing and advertising agents.
With the progress of this dynamic, users were nurturing the immense databases that TG have built on people and their personal profiles. These companies, treating this egomation with tools associated with Artificial Intelligence (AI), big data, data science and other technological developments, have been able to consolidate a business scheme based on the ability to predict the behavior of individuals and groups. The establishment of surveillance capitalism marked the period. We will expand on this point later.
Something that marked the beginnings of Google was the adoption of a contribution that would later be used to shape its business logic. Academia measures the prestige of researchers with the number of times that others cite their publications; That indicator is more meaningful that the number of publications. Google enhanced the algorithm introducing recursive valuation of the references: it is more significant to be referenced by a person who is in turn highly referenced than by someone less mentioned.
With that algorithm the sorting of the search results became highly meaningful and represents an important milestone in the history of the Internet. However, when its business model was institutionalized, this work initially conceived with the mindset of open access to knowledge was ruthlessly perverted. The direct distortion occurred by placing in top search results from paying sites. Indirectly, the algorithm evolved by presenting first the sites that generate the greatest advertising prospects. To manage that the algorithm incorporates additional parameters such as the user history of searches. A capsule is created that more accurately describes the market segment to which the user belongs and contributes to keeping the user closed in a bubble, despite the immensity of valuable content available. Thus, an authentic crime against virtual humanity was perpetrated. It only remained to lead the user-products to believe that it is not worth going beyond the first screen of search results to obtain the perfect crime. This tendency to enclose the user in an increasingly narrow niche of information (which is found in most massive applications) leads to the fact that, despite the growth of the Web, the average user has reduced its effective reach; this is a paradoxical negation of the very essence of the Web, universalism, and isolates the user inside certainties instead of confronting diversity.
Incidentally, the providing of the number of occurrences of results for a search term, which was an objective and reliable data which allowed valuable works on the Web[21], became a mockery.
Now the most important thing is not anymore to present quality content but to reach the largest number of visitors, achieving the highest level of virtual fame, no matter the excellence of the proposal or under what criteria the visit originated. That evolution shaped the opinion society.
NOTES:
[1] Often supported by a simple discussion list, that is an email address that mails to subscribed addresses.
[2] Quite the contrary, subscribers are often invited to present themselves to the group.
[3] MISTICA (Methodology and Social Impact of Information and Communication Technologies in Latin America and the Caribbean) whose website remains largely preserved despite the fact that the project and the institution that supported it ceased operations: http://funredes.org/mistica. See Ref. [1].
[5]Reference [4] provides a commented definition of information literacy within its context (digital divide and the information society). It would be necessary to complement this concept with two elements that seem more necessary every day: the need to provide, from basic education, at all levels and also towards citizens in general, a minimum of cognitive tools for managing complexity and statistics.
[6]This new word does not pretend to have an etymological meaning, it was only formed that way due to its phonetic resemblance to information (something similar to the word “telematics” that suffered the same defect in its time). In a more etymological sense, it should merge the root “info” with the narcissistic condition of the dominant sense of circulating information on digital platforms. The drawback in this sense is that the phonemes have less charm for controversy.
[7] The neguentropy, the opposite of entropy, was introduced by Léon Brillouin, in “Science and Information Theory”, 1959. He extended the work of Claude Shannon (“A mathematical theory of communication”, 1948) for the physical definition of information and served as a starting concept for various following thinkers in their contributions to system and complexity theories.
[8]The official discourse confuses the history of Arpanet (and the Internet communication protocol, TCP-IP) with that of the Internet, and this obscures a much more complex reality that should not be interpreted with the sole prism of technology. The cultural and sociological foundations of the Net have little to do with Arpanet and its paternity is more clearly located in academic networks like Bitnet and libertarian networks like Usenet. The fact that there was finally technological convergence towards TCP-IP should not confuse the network of networks with the technical protocol that animates it. That confusion between Internet (the protocol) and the Internet (the network of networks) was abusively decreed by the Internet Society a few years ago. The fact that technologists continue to have the most control over the Net is questionable. In a way, that group has become an unusual gatekeeper (would you accept that the architect of your house tells you how to cook your lunch or paint your bedroom or that the builder of your car decides where you should go on vacation? ) and is one of the underlying symptoms of the drifts that we live. Information professionals (librarians, documentalists, and the like) should have more influence than technologists in a network where the upper layer (content and applications) ends up being more important than the lower layers of transport. For example, it would make perfect sense for IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations) to have more teeth in network stakes than ISOC, but this is not the case, and while that time comes, the fight to avoid unwanted drifts will be complicated.
[9] A search would keep absolute criteria of objectivity and scientific rigor and be independent of egomation.
[10] In a virtual learning community, nothing more reprehensible than showing up to try to sell something!
[11] The wonderful Argus Clearinghouse site, now disappeared for having no sustainable solution and whose memory has been preserved by another extraordinary site, archive.org, is the best testimony to the immense human capital that culture managed to organize:
https://web.archive.org/web/20051029102009/http://www.clearinghouse.net/
[12] Something like paying a moderate fee for every 100 searches or for 100 emails sent.
[13]The unregulated use of Internet resources led to unbridled electricity consumption (mainly in the GT data centers), which in 2007 represented an impact on global warming comparable to that of air transport (see Ref. [2]) and today could probably be well above. Pricing could have played a natural regulatory role by reducing unethical traffic. On the other hand, a suitably structured tariff scheme could have avoided the acute financing crisis suffered by the traditional information media in the current situation where GoogleNews uses them without mercy and without cost.
[14] The neguentropy equation proposed by Brilloin (op. cited) is analogous to Shannon’s state equation
where P(xi) is the probability of event xi and provides an efficient way to measure the quantity of bits of a probabilistic set. Mathematical intuition dictates that an economic model sitting on that equation would have sound basis and then will have the best probability of being sustainable.
[15] A market of 560 billion US $ (2019) of which more than 50% is on the Internet and of which Google has 33% (https://www.statista.com/topics/990/global-advertising-market/ and
[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail#cite_note-Petrova-1
[17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Analytics
[18] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266136/global-market-share-held-by-smartphone-operating-systems/
[19] Imagine what would happen if the Post Office opens and reads our letters. Why then do we accept it from the email provider?
[20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog
[21] See for example the first works we carried out to measure the space of languages on the Internet in http://funredes.org/lc
REFERENCES:
[1] — D. Pimienta, “At the Boundaries of Ethics and Cultures: Virtual Communities as an Open Ended Process Carrying the Will for Social Change (the” MISTICA “experience)” in the book “Localizing the Internet. Ethical Issues in Intercultural Perspective”, Capurro, R. & al. (Eds.). Schriftenreihe des ICIE Bd. 4, München: Fink Verlag, 2005
http://funredes.org/mistica/english/cyberlibrary/thematic/icie/
[2] — JG Koomey, “Estimating total power consumption by servers in the US and the world”, Stanford University, Feb. 2007
http://www-sop.inria.fr/mascotte/Contrats/DIMAGREEN/wiki/uploads/Main/svrpwrusecompletefinal.pdf
[3] — Y. Eshet-Alkalai, and E. Chajut, “Change over time in Digital Literacy”, Cyberpsychology & Behavior, Volume 12, Number X, 2009
[4] — D. Pimienta, “Digital divide, social divide, paradigmatic divide”, 1st edition of Journal of ICT and Human Development, 2009.
http://funredes.org/mistica/english/cyberlibrary/thematic/Paradigmatic_Divide.pdf
[5] — Bernard Stiegler, “Le Blues du Net”, 2013, Blog “Réseaux” of the French newspaper Le Monde.
[6] — S. Zuboff, “The secrets of surveillance capitalism”, Frankfurter Allgemeine, March, 2016 — http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/shoshana-zuboff-secrets-of-surveillance-capitalism-14103616-p2.html
[7] — LG Rodríguez Leal. “The Disruption of the Technology Giants — Digital Emergency”, January 2020.
https://www.academia.edu/41701222/La_Disrupcio_n_de_las_Gigantes_Tecnolo_gicas_-_Emergencia_Digital
[8] — H. Chneiweiss, Interview in Recherche №557, Mars 2020, page 70. (in French)
