Web as Utopia

[This is what I remember saying to a session yesterday
at the Eastern Sociological Society meeting.]

I was an academic philosophy professor up until
about 17 years ago and I’ve spent the intervening
time doing my best to learn how to think sloppily.
What I’m about to say is an example. And, by the
way, I conflate the “Web” and the “Internet” because
that’s what the vast majority of users do.

I’m not defining a utopia as a perfect place.
Rather, it is a place with a particular nature.
Humans also have a nature. That’s probably a
terrible thing to say at a sociology meeting, but I
mean simply that — whether it’s socially
conditioned or not — there are characteristics
that make us humans. So, just go along with me for
now. A utopia is a place whose properties enable us
to perfect our human nature.

Now, I don’t mean that we become perfect in a
utopia. That’s not possible. We’re humans. We’re
imperfect. That’s why we’re not gods. Besides,
imperfection is the only thing that makes life
interesting. Perfection is homogenizing, at least
according to the tradition. Imperfection is where
all the fun and interest is. It’s a bit like the
fact that the price of free will is the existence of
evil in the world: the price of the world being
interesting is that we are imperfect creatures.

So, what I want to argue is that the
characteristics of a utopia that enable us to
imperfectly perfect our imperfect human nature are
properties the Web has.

First, utopias are always new starts, a fresh
page. The Web is definitely new and a fresh page.

Second, a utopia is a place and so is the Web. In fact it’s a world.
It is not a medium. A medium is something we send
messages through, and while we can do that with the
Web, I believe — and the fact that I believe
it should definitely be enough to establish it as a
fact ;) — that the excitement about the Web
hasn’t happened because it’s a messaging medium.
Rather, our language says that we move through the
Web. We, not our messages. This is very weird. While
the Web consists of pages, we go to them, enter them
and leave them. We don’t do that with real world
pages or documents. We experience the Web as a
navigable space.

This Web place has certain characteristics.

1. It’s persistent.That’s one reason we
experience it as a place. Sure, sites go up and
down, but there is a basic persistence to it, unlike other instantaneous media such as telephones and ham radio.

2. It’s conversational. It’s not really primarily
about companies marketing crap to us. The excitement of
the Web has something to do with the fact that we’re
connecting with one another by the most basic social
act: talking.

3. It’s hyperlinked. The Web wouldn’t be a web if
the pages weren’t linked. But every hyperlink is an
expression of interest. I link to your page because
I think my visitors might find your page
enlightening or amusingly wrong. The real world is
shaped by a geography of rocks and water. The Web
geography is shaped by links of human interest and
conversation.

Compare this to the real world. We’re born into
the real world. None of us asked to be born. Even if
God gave us the world as a gift, it’s still the
given, the datum. And fundamentally this world is
indifferent to us. We get buried in it, our atoms
dissolve, and the worms are happy and the atoms
don’t care. We make of this world what we will, but
it’s damn hard. You can’t move the mountains and it
takes a lot to make the desert bloom. It
fundamentally isn’t our world.

But the Web is a world that we’re making for
ourselves. And we’re doing so by connecting to one
another in conversation and by linking to one
another out of human passion and caring.

I can’t defend the following so I’ll just state
it: we humans are at our best when we are involved
with others. We are at our best when we are social
and connected. The Web is a world that is profoundly
social. Its geography itself is social, a map of
connections and passions. It is thus a world that
we’ve made for ourselves that is a reflection of our
best nature and a place where can imperfectly
perfect our imperfect natures.

Categories: Uncategorized dw