The Myth of the Broken Internet
The internet puts at our fingertips more information that has ever been available to humans. How we it use must evolve.
Opinion by Tana Kantor, publisher of TheGreenEconomy.com.
As a person who has been in media most of my adult life, I am a believer that media is a tool. The modern media — that internet thing that has totally invaded our lives — is a part of a long history. Thousands of years before Christ, the written word changed culture: it affected memory and storytelling. Once a few could read and write, there was less need to tell the same stories over and over to hand along accumulated insights on medicine, or rituals about farming and weather, or how to understand human nature.
A new technology — the printed word — eventually lead Martin Luther to change Christianity forever. People started having opinions about what the bible said, and how to interpret its meaning. As reading spread information to more people, they could look things up, investigate science, imagine new kinds of poetry, and experiment with new ideas.
So now we have the internet, a new addition to the incredible changes starting with radio, phones, television, more television and computers. They all change how we think, and how we logically order our thoughts.
Television, with its chaotic and disconnected montage of shows broken up by irrelevant advertising, is an abdication of logic. People either watch a show, passively submitting to the chaos, or become serial clickers, floating in a sea of meaningless bytes of shows, adverting, news, sports. They make few real choices, and no logic choices. Watching one show does not bring up questions answered by another: “The Big Bang” sheds no light on the actions of Claire Dunphy in a “Modern Family”.
Computers, in contrast, force active choices: we search for goods and services, follow news items and click on links that bring us more information. We build on what we know, adding to it by searching through an archive larger than any heretofore available so fast to so many. That is a process that encourages logic. Social media, an overlay, is an array of services that are used differently by various people. It’s a game, access to other people and ideas, a way to reinforce privately held opinions, a connection to that ideal family we all want — one that always smiles and is eternally happy.
The importance of various sites is gauged by clicks. If more people click on Angela Jolie’s divorce than on the details of the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership, then it is assumed that we — US citizens— want more news about Ms. Jolie and less about the TPP.
But that is a closed loop, an erroneous way of gauging what is important. As an example, I like many people, can become absorbed reading fun but useless news generally filling the bottom of any media page or promoted on my Facebook and Twitter accounts. I am likely, on a grey day, to click more often on such material. Since many such sites get more clicks by giving me information in a series of images with captions, I may find it’s 12 clicks to who’s got the worst face lift, one to find out what is happening on Trump’s visit to the Middle East. 6 clicks to watch You Tube spoofs of Donald Trump, and one to find out about his budget plans for transportation.
Clicks as a way of accounting value affects investors — who fund the company, determining its market worth — as well as customers — that would be advertisers.
Facebook has a higher market cap than Dow and Cisco combined, although the company makes less money, hires fewer employees, and outputs less into our economy. Facebook also has far fewer real assets, and sells no real tangible property so has no inventory. Investors apparently continue to believe that those billions of clicks must mean something, and that at some point the revenue will match the value of the company. (Chart from 2016)
Advertisers are increasingly less sure as those millions of users do everything they can to avoid, not read, the ads that fund the site they are using. The information that Facebook aggregates and sells to companies is likely significantly less useful than Google or Amazon’s information about what users are searching for and buying.
The answer? Facebook will eventually charge users. It can be as little as $10.00 a year, but charge they will.
Such actions will do several things: it will weed out, even at ten bucks a year, those who really don’t use the site or have multiple accounts with various identities: some singularly unhealthy. It will certainly weed out those on Facebook who are dead, and therefore don’t use the site at all. It will make users take the site a bit more seriously, which will in turn begin to raise expectations about the quality of any unsolicited information.
Medium.com floated the notion of writers paying $5.00 a month, which isn’t a bad idea, but asking their users to do so is better. Paying for information raises the value of that information, and will reduce the noise.
Imagine, if you had to pay per click. If it cost me ten cents every time I went through the clicks to find out about Ms. Jolie, I would let her live her life in peace, protected from my curiosity. Especially if the choice was ten cents for Ms. Jolie, or 1 cent for a Wall Street editorial that helps me understand the nuances of our trade relations with the European Union.
As an aside, bitcoin is now being used by commercial companies for transactions of goods and services. The notion of charging by clicks, articles or time, on a subscription basis, is no longer far fetched.
If the public chatter on the internet, the abusive language, ranting, opinions staged as facts, is to change, everyone must pay for information. We must become discerning. In New York City, more people likely pay for the NY Post than the NY Times, but both exist. I may disagree with one or the other, but the news in both is better than what I will get on Twitter. The first to move in that direction will be the brave one, but the rest will follow.
We live in an era where researched information has become valueless, and opinion has become the currency that drives behavior. That has lead to a government no longer able to function with discernment, with people on all sides so entrenched that they regard even listening to other opinions as treason, and with a populous that is learning that nothing matters more than the satisfaction of being right.
It is not the fault of the internet, but the fault of how we are using an important new media. It is getting to be time for change.
