In a fascinating article for The American Prospect, Phoebe Connelly--Web Editor for Prospect--eulogizes the passing of GeoCities, the Homo neanderthalensis to Blogger's Homo sapiens.
In her piece, "The Life and Death of Online Communities" she makes three rather startling points: (1) that perhaps the rise of Facebook is little more than internet white flight, (2) that the Commons' of our world have increasingly become controlled by corporate interests--interests that do not necessary have freedom at heart, and (3) that--as Bruce Sterling pointed out--"Bits have no archival medium."
First Point. Connelly writes:
Online communities tend to mirror the shortcomings of the real world--racism, exclusivity, and class privilege. In a presentation at this year's Personal Democracy Forum conference, social media researcher danah boyd asked what really separated users of the older My-Space from the newer Facebook. MySpace, started by the advertising company eUniverse as a rival to Friendster, has always had a low bar for entry, allows users to remain anonymous, and enables more customization of profile pages. Facebook, by contrast, was born at Harvard as an online version of freshman--orientation "facebooks." It slowly opened admission to other Ivy League universities, then most colleges, and finally to the public at large. While both sites enjoy about 70 million unique visitors, in recent years wealthier, more educated users "were more likely to leave [MySpace] or choose Facebook," boyd said. "Those who deserted MySpace did so by 'choice' but their decision to do so was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic." She continued, "What happened was modern day 'white flight.'"
In other words, despite some declarations that MySpace has gone the way of GeoCities, it isn't really dead. Not yet, anyway. But because MySpace, like the vast majority of social-networking sites and blogs, exists in corporate-owned space, it is vulnerable to being shut down if it is perceived as no longer having a profitable or attractive user base. Given that we are stuck with much of our digital commons existing on corporate-controlled sites, what then happens when the corporation decides to close its doors? If these are our new commons, what does it say that we abandon spaces once they are clearly marked as unsophisticated?
The best parallel here, I think, is that of Facebook as Crocker Park, a living space designed to mimic the natural growth of organic, "authentic" communities. Of course, in the case of Crocker Park, the disconnect between the signifier and signified is quite clear; you'd have to be blind to see Crocker Park as anything but a planned community. But, with Facebook, the distinctions are less clear. After all, even the most minute top-down changes have been met with activism on the part of Facebook's users. Somehow, the people who use Facebook have convinced themselves that they own the space they inhabit. Clearly, this is not the case.
Perhaps the future should include a kind of "co-op" social networking site, where the managers are but trusted servants, not owner/operators, and the control rests with the users.
What's more, the analogy, while not perfect, to white flight, is a little startling and deserves I think, serious thought on the part of the educated and privileged (read: me) who use it. I don't think I'll be leaving Facebook anytime soon. But it's certainly something to think about next time I go on a MySpace is stupid rant.
Second Point. Connelly continues:
Consider the case of Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University. Ludlow ran a newspaper for the virtual community The Sims Online and was kicked out of the community by the owner, Electronic Arts, for publishing accounts of theft, prostitution, and money laundering that (virtually) occurred there. Because it happened in a corporate-controlled online space, his speech wasn't protected. As Ludlow told an interviewer, "The platform owners have responsibilities to care for those communities and see that they are not harmed."
Bollier agrees. "At the point where the business model becomes tethered to a happy community, you have to reach an agreement about how you are going to interact. If you piss people off too much, they are just going to flee the site." When GeoCities was purchased by Yahoo in January 1999, the new corporate overlord immediately began to clash with users. That June, Yahoo changed the terms of service for the site, claiming the right to full ownership of anything users posted to their pages. By December, Yahoo announced it would disband the popular community-leader program. The changes should sound familiar to anyone who has followed recent tempests over privately controlled social-networking sites. Facebook made a similar change to its terms of service this past February, causing uproar among users already annoyed with a redesign and a short-lived feature that broadcast users' purchasing habits. Under pressure, Facebook reversed the decision within weeks.
Two important points to draw out here. (A) There's a reason totalitarian governments must propagandize more blatantly and with a larger scope than democratically elected ones: their "right to rule" depends on the happiness and complacency of their citizenry far more than those governments who's right to rule is mearly transferred from their citizenry.
In other words: Facebook and similar corporate-owned sites are responsive to change. But, it's important to remember that if you push to hard they can exile you or simply shut the entire service down.
(B) there is less--not more stability--with corporate-run services. And, while I'm a huge fan of Google and Mac, I should remember that they are not truly beholden to the principles they claim to represent. Indeed, they are shadowey and without true accountability. This is sad for me, because, while Google's "Don't be Evil" motto is good. They could very easily be evil, and the only thing stopping them is their good hearts--not exactly a surefire bet.
Third Point. Connelly:
Yahoo has now set an official date for the closing of GeoCities--October 26, 2009--but the question of how we protect and archive the history of our interaction in the digital commons is still unanswered. As the Internet continues to evolve, we will be forced to decide which left-behind digital communities to preserve. "There is a very real chance of this digital culture just disappearing from our lives, and there's not really any formal mechanisms in place to store or aggregate this knowledge, which is really a shame," says Marwick. "There need to be more public efforts to store and archive."
In a keynote address at a 2001 conference on preserving digital media, science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling observed, "Bits have no archival medium. We haven't invented one yet. If you print something on acid-free paper with stable ink, and you put it in a dry, dark closet, you can read it in 200 years. We have no way to archive bits that we know will be readable in even 50 years."
He added, "Tape demagnetizes. CDs delaminate. Networks go down."
It's easy to forget this. After all, my contacts are on Google. I am increasingly reliant on GoogleDocs and other online-only services that allow me to store information. But will become of this information. It's all a bit too ephemeral for my tastes. Especially in a world where we use "free" services, it's important to remember that we have no oversight power to ensure and protect the information we there post. I think the lessons of Amazon's Orwellian removal of 1984 from Kindles are particularly applicable here.
Connely's article is really good.
And, if you're intrigued, go, read.
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