We may even question whether the Internet is really a new medium, rather than a fantastic transformation and heightening of all our earlier communications media–language and writing, letters, public assemblies and lectures, libraries, market places, newspapers, the telegraph and telephone, radio and the movies, network television, computing, videoconferencing and interactive TV. In making these earlier media much cheaper, more powerful and accessible, and presenting them in more combinations, on demand at any time to many millions of people, the Internet may be less a new medium and more a media supermarket whose aisles contain every means of communication, only in new and improved versions.
A summary of these competing views might be that the Net changes everything, and nothing. It pervades our daily lives–changing, for instance, how we communicate, our work routines, the way we access and process information, and how we consume media. No doubt, to some degree, the changes Tapscott foresees in education, government and business will come. And yet, against the benchmark of how speech and text fundamentally altered the way we think–the way our minds actually work–thus far, at least, the Internet has changed nothing.
So, conventional views of the Internet’s impact on humans might be wide of the mark. Therefore, to try to understand the significance of cyberspace, let’s adopt a different approach, the particular perspective we’re exploring. What light can the simple network model of human relationships–hubs and links–cast on the subject? How far does the Internet change the opportunities presented to us by our choice of hubs and weak links? Will it mutate the network structures that rule our lives?
Consider weak links first. Mark Granovetter wrote the first draft of his paper on weak ties back in 1969. From then to the rise of the Web in the 1990s, breakthroughs in communications technology made it much easier to develop and maintain a mass of weak links–cheaper national and international phone calls, the mobile phone, the PC and digital information, and increasingly affordable air travel allowed the average person living in a rich country to manage a hundred times more weak links than would have been possible a generation earlier. Think of the richness of links you or your parents had in the 1970s compared to those of your grandparents or great-grandparents. The small world and the proliferation of wonderful weak links are not just Internet-era phenomena.
The impact on hubs was similar. When weak links proliferate, we might expect hubs to do the same. And the 1970s and 1980s did indeed see an explosion of new hubs, especially in communications and technology, such as the founding of Microsoft (1975), Apple (1976) and CNN (1980), and the launch of the World Wide Web (1989).
What happens when the Internet and related technologies allow easy, almost costless creation of links and hubs? Well, we exploit them in much the same fashion as before, following our social and cooperative instincts, only more vigorously, because there is less holding us back. Facebook was founded in 2004 and has just passed a quarter of a billion registered users–it’s currently the third most visited website in America. Social networks, email, instant messaging, blogging, texting and every new little twist in our online communication options make it much easier for people to connect to each other. There has been an explosion of communication. All of this is undeniably impressive and important, but isn’t it just a more efficient way of doing what people have always done–talking to friends and acquaintances, consuming, and collaborating for work or pleasure? With a few exceptions, it is unlikely that anyone is doing anything online that they didn’t do–or at least want to do–before. Now they’ve just found a way to do it that is easier, faster, often more fun–and less inhibited.
The hub–link structures that emerge in the virtual world are already familiar components of the real world. Both worlds exhibit such phenomena as stores, market places, schools, clubs, cliques, charities, and pulpits for preachers, protesters, bullies, ranters and ravers.
Think of any website you know. Most resemble real-world structures, or hybrids of real-world structures. For instance, eBay is an auction room or flea market. Amazon is a record and book shop, and increasingly a shopping mall of smaller vendors. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Google has elements of a library and an archive, plus targeted advertising. Facebook comprises a club of clubs, a database organising the social map, a directory of people’s profiles, and a software store. These are not novel inventions, but translations and combinations of old ones.
It also works the other way round. Most communications media have online equivalents, or soon will. For instance, the telephone became Skype; television became YouTube. Even cities, which are one of the oldest and most important means of multiplying human connections and making the world smaller, have parallels in cyberspace–for example, in Second Life, online property is bought and sold for real money. Arguably, too, the great new hubs of the Internet are ‘cities in the air’, places where everyone congregates simultaneously for social and business reasons. The value of the ‘real estate’ is expressed in the rent it can command, not from tenants but from advertisers. The online rent reflects the number and purchasing power of the people attracted to the site, just as places in ‘real’ cities command rents according to the number and spending power of the humans passing through them.
When thinking of websites as new cities, it’s telling that many people spend more time in cyberspace’s cities than they do in real-world ones. Take World of Warcraft, the world’s favourite massive multi-player online game, with over ten million monthly users. Players inhabit the world of Azeroth, where they explore, defeat hostile creatures, and complete quests, often through teamwork. Knowledge and expertise grow; property, status and friends are gained.
A hardcore gamer will spend an impressive amount of time at it. So much so that China forced gaming companies to incorporate anti-addiction software to discourage minors who play for more than three consecutive hours each day. In Korea, the most wired nation on earth, a few per cent of the population, with another 10 per cent borderline, are thought to suffer from game addiction. There are even reports of game-related deaths, typically from continuous play without enough sustenance or sleep. Online hubs, apparently, can even exhibit the insidious gravity of their real-world counterparts–a cause for concern, maybe, but more vindication for the argument that there is little essential difference between offline and online hubs.
The similarity between online and offline structures supports the view that the Internet is not another communications medium, but another dimension of existing forms of communication. It is like suddenly being able to live under the sea or in the clouds, to create valuable new places where people may congregate, socialise and do business. It is truly magical in that new places can be created almost overnight with a good enough idea, with relatively little investment; and these new places can be reached in seconds from anywhere on the globe. If the pioneering science-fiction writer H. G. Wells (1866–1946) could join us in the time machine he conceived, he might enquire about cyberspace, ‘Where is it? How do I get there?’ Cyberspace would seem just as fantastic and miraculous to him as his time machine–more so, as it now exists. (In a manner of speaking. We would have a hard job explaining to Wells precisely where cyberspace is located. And he would suspect it was a capitalist trap, a mirage to make the masses spend more of their money to conjure up new billionaires. He would have a case!)
In this respect, we may look backwards and claim that television is just a primitive form of electronic communication, a step towards the Internet, with the television stations also creating virtual cities–assemblies of people at precise times for one common purpose, to watch a programme. And from the consumer’s viewpoint they are entirely compatible media. In fact, 31 per cent of Internet use occurs when we are also sitting in front of a television; and cyberspace increasingly features television programming–Hulu and other sites like it now provide many television shows online. Owned by NBC and Fox, Hulu increased its viewers by 57 per cent in the second half of 2008.