Many aspects of television and the Internet are more alike than different–especially in their economic impact. Advertising is the commercial lifeblood of both–Google’s advertising revenue in Q3 2009 was $5.94 billion, up 7 per cent from Q3 2008 despite a recession.51 The owners of television sites also enjoy the advertising rents that flow from creating cities in the air. In social terms, too, television and the Web both reinforce the consumer society, making it ubiquitous and inescapable at any time of day, every day; incubating ever more sophisticated forms of marketing, and ever more valuable brands; and concentrating markets, with the leaders taking more of the spoils.
And what are we doing with the Internet? We are colonising it in much the same way as we did with previous connecting technologies. We’ve rushed to build the same hub–link structures as we’ve done before in order to support the same types of activities and desires as before–the desire to be social, to transact, to be heard, the gain information, to belong, to be entertained–yet with more flexibility and freedom than before.
From this perspective, the Internet is important not because it is a new world, but because it is an old world. It has brought a terrific intensification of the communication and network trends seen in the decades and even centuries before its invention. So, far from being a discontinuity, the Internet is a profound continuity. It has not created fundamentally different ways of communicating, but there has been a dramatic change in tempo and volume. We do similar things, but we do them more often and faster, while expending less energy, time and money: almost effortlessly. The world is getting smaller while our opportunities and choices are becoming staggeringly greater.
Imagine the universe of relationships, hubs and links available to someone living in a small town in rural England a hundred years ago. Only a couple of hundred people in the town would have been the same age, and far fewer of those would have been suitable marriage material. The town might contain twenty shops, a single factory, one or two institutions, perhaps a library sparsely populated with dusty books. If you were lucky, one of a few small businesses might have provided you with something resembling a trade, profession or career. Imagine how few interesting new conversations most people would have each day, and how hard it was to escape from that existence.
Compare what is available to an equivalent person today. She can research any book or idea on the Internet. She can meet people with similar interests online. She can escape her town by visiting other places or tapping into other people’s experiences on innumerable websites. Within her budget, she can find and buy anything she fancies. She can hold simultaneous conversations with dozens of people across the globe. She can participate in a business enterprise located anywhere in the world from her home computer.
From a network perspective, our degrees of separation from others have decreased. More profoundly, our degrees of separation from people’s thoughts and ideas, their words and images, have plummeted practically to one–we can find all these ‘proxies’ for people on the Web. For instance, in writing this chapter, we needed to find statistics for media consumption and so they were Googled. Much of what we don’t know is only a Google search away.
Choice–of hubs and links, information and communication–and diversity are the two aspects of our society that have been increased most by the Internet. For the first time ever, we can have too much information and a surfeit of choice. More networks bring more variety, more information, more chances to succeed, but also more chances to feel that we are failing. We’re as dependent on the half-hidden structure of hubs and links as ever before, but the choice of hubs and links is vastly more complicated and visible than it used to be, stretching before us in confusing complexity. And the more mobile and successful we are, the more choices we have–hugely multiplying the number of wrong moves we might make.
How do we deal with this? The simple answer is to realise that life can be better than it used to be and to embrace the opportunities, while avoiding the pitfalls of the new environment. These opportunities can be charming and simple. Avoid being dispossessed–a grandmother can easily learn how to video-call her grandchildren for free on Skype. But to use the new tools effectively in a world of excessive choice, we must build and hone our screening capabilities, our personal online and offline spam filters. We should remain open to high-quality new ideas and contacts, but screen out the dross that will steal our time and drive out original thought and creative contact. Ideally, we will be open to random new weak links, especially from different worlds, but selective when turning a weak link, new or old, into a friendly acquaintance. We should examine many potential hubs where we could spend our time, but ensure that we choose them, rather than the other way round. There is huge cost to not selecting or not selecting well, simply because there is so much choice. As we’ll see later, there are many small payoffs in life but only a few really big ones.
Happily, there’s a lot of help online. Runaway choice has spawned technologies and services that let us search, list, sort, compare, review and sift through the flood of information. Sites compete to become the trusted adviser or market place–Amazon for books and CDs, Rottentomatoes.com for movie reviews, Etsy.com for handmade goods, and thousands of others. For instance, most of us have looked with interest at Amazon’s recommendations based on what other customers like us have bought.
Even without such filters, there’s a network phenomenon that lets everyone else help us pick our sites. Within any particular category, from the huge number of websites that are available, users tend to gravitate by unspoken agreement to just a handful, and usually only one or two. How convenient! Strikingly, concentration–the share of the market taken by the leaders–is usually greater on the Internet than it is offline.
Take any offline manufacturing or commercial category–cars, publishing, salad dressings, insurance, advertising agencies–and you’ll typically find that the top three suppliers account for between a third and two-thirds of the market. For instance, the top three US car-makers command 53 per cent of their market; globally, for mobile-phone handsets, the top three manufacturers take 64 per cent; and the top three ice-cream-makers have 39 per cent of their trade. Considering the total number of suppliers in any of these fields, the picture is pretty concentrated.
On the Web, however, concentration is even greater. In the American online search market, Google and Yahoo command 84 per cent. Globally, Betfair has 95 per cent of online betting-exchange transactions; Wikipedia more than 95 percent of online encyclopedia enquiries. Amazon controls a stunning 34 per cent of the total American e-commerce market, with almost complete dominance in books. All this is more than a little weird, considering that the Internet allows free and easy access for anyone–the barriers to entering a market are far lower online than they are offline, yet online concentration is so much greater.