Last year as Facebook went down
I was dismayed to hear the news cheered on late night TV. Usually the dysfunction of a service isn’t what people celebrate. When millions use a form of communication you might think the product's quality is what keeps it going in wide usage from year to year. If it was a terrible tool we are told that the free market will solve the problem on its own and the cream will rise to the top. Obviously that isn't what happened. A YouTube search on quitting social media brings an incredible listing of individual stories from those that made the switch to leave these services behind for an extended period of time. Some people will even make the argument to abandon them for good.
The internet's potential was squandered by putting so much focus on the commercial use. This is where the abbreviation .com came from. I just listened to a podcast interview from the guy who started much of the internet browsing technology. This was the person behind the Netscape browser which might have been one of the only options at the time. The way he decided what kind of engineer he wanted to be was to go down a listing of incomes and go with whatever amount of money was the largest. All other considerations into his career choice were not factored in.
When I first heard about the internet I was completely enthralled. I never viewed it as a burden that I was forced to deal with. When I look at this photo of me I remember sitting on a bus filled with other students wondering how the web would change the world. Even then I knew that traditional education was missing something and that this could fill the void. Perhaps regularly thinking about these things when surrounded by others was odd. There was just this part of me desperately wanting to supersede my limited understanding of the world. Most of what I knew was often about listening to whoever happened to be within earshot. This is why this project is largely about culling the important details of life that I think should have been made easily accessible but I can't find elsewhere online. I think too much of the reason people are online is too much about fame and money and I think there is other more important things to life than just that.
When you think through the most popular online services you will find that most fall short of the ideal. Instagram was working fine and then threw out the notification button for a store icon. The amount of video ads on website articles is sheer agony. Despite my not shopping at Amazon for years a brief return reminded me of how annoying it is. Like how it constantly asks you to donate to charity (I thought they were a store) or that it always pestered me to sign up for Amazon Prime despite hundreds of times of clicking no. I wish there were better ways to assemble content together without so much dependence on money. It is amazing to me that this inanimate object can have so much power over how one's time is spent. The overall value of a person's work should be taken more into consideration. Maybe other societies have figured this out better to various degrees. How it functions in the here and now is just frustrating.
Anyways going back to how I think the internet should work. In the early days of social media users had a lot of control over their account in a similar way that there was a wide choice in how a webpage looks and works. The consequence of this was that most of the MySpace users didn't have training in UI Design which usually resulted in profiles that were hard to navigate. It doesn't have to be this way. At the time the technology was limited but now we have vastly better content collaboration tools that make it so designers can be a bigger part of the process. Why not give this kind of hybrid workflow between website and social features another try? Most platforms are just copying each other now anyways. It is about time for someone to come up with a service that is actually different from the other ones available.
In the next article I talk about a film where are on characters on a search for what makes them come alive. I've been on this journey in the last couple of years. As I have been rearranging elements on this site I realize this is what does it for me. Especially at that moment when all the pieces start falling into place. People can be so different in what works as a purpose for life. I watched a TED Talk where the speaker said no matter how many followers he gained it was never enough. Maybe that is a bit more of an addiction for him, I don't know. I have a hard time judging what other people should do with their lives. They might not even know themselves fully. I know that for me, right now, a real feeling of accomplishment comes from tweaking webpage elements and having everything come together. It is about carefully crafting something over long periods of time. That everyday release schedule that is often done with social media isn't for me at this stage of my life.
I finished writing this article and then a couple of months later this great book by Ben Tarnoff came out. It deals with more of the specifics on how the internet became public and crossroads society could have gone with making it a tool for the broader good. There was a time when they experimented with such a route but they were very short lived.
He marks 1989 as the time politicians and corporations would really spearhead where the net was going. George Bush Senior was president then but the push in this directions certainly did not slow down in the eight years of the Clinton administration. I strongly recommend this book to understand how we can get to a better internet and not settle for an experience like what we have seen in the last few years.
