Facebook will have 500 million users by the end of this month. Here's an article excerpt that fits perfectly well what I feel about the social sites boom:
The internet might look at times like a new-fangled way to go shopping or look at porn. But just as Gutenberg shifted power over information from the Church to anyone with a printing press, the internet has shifted power over information to anyone with an internet connection. Today, you can publish anything you like, to anyone on earth, for almost nothing. You can whip up a group of people with the same interest as you in a few hours. You can talk to anyone else on Earth, via Skype, for as long as you like, for nothing.
Social networking sites has transformed the way we interact with our friends, too. When I sent that first email I was at university, and my main way of communicating with my friends if their phone was off was to leave a written note – on a piece of paper! – on their door. When I told this to my 10-year-old nephew, he gasped, as if I was describing how we had to hunt and kill our own food and then cook it on an open fire built from damp twigs.
But is it more? Recently, an old friend I hadn't seen for 10 years committed suicide. I instinctively went to her Facebook page, and so, it seemed, had everyone else who knew her, leaving messages of regret and love and loss. I found myself reading over her old status updates. She was clearly trying to communicate pain and isolation – but we all missed it, leaving inane comments and thumbs up and tossed sheep below every plea for help. Could we have known, if we had read it less casually? Or am I projecting backwards?
The contrast between the transitory nature of a Facebook status update and the permanence of death made me wonder if all this social networking is actually a way of keeping people at a distance – a way of having a "friend" but not having any of the commitments and duties of friendship. When the sci-fi novelist William Gibson first put forward the notion of "cyberspace", he described it as a "consensual hallucination", where we pretend we are together, when in reality we are alone. It seemed true that night.
Perhaps the most overwhelming aspect of the web is the sheer tsunami of information it contains. Today, every laptop with an internet connection contains more information than the Great Library of Alexandria. At its peak, that library contained 700,000 books, until the Christian Emperor Theodosius I ordered it burned down in 39(12A)D; today, Google Books has over seven million – and that's before you count everything else online. In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story imagining a "total library" containing all written information. Seventy years later, it exists. It's hard to conceive of how privileged we are as the first generation of human beings who, for almost no cost, can pore through everything previous generations of humans have written down. People travelled for thousands of miles and fought and died to get access to information we have, just a mouse-click away.
But there's a catch. We expect this information to be free – no matter what it costs to produce. This means the beating hearts have been ripped out of the news-paper and record industries. Their products are scattered across the world for free. This is obviously good news for the consumer in the short term – but only while enough other people pick up the tab by buying the dead trees and CDs. As they fall away, there will be a hole left. We will never know all the news stories that won't get written, or the songs that will never be recorded – and there will be many. But what can be done? Attempts to erect pay walls now – as Rupert Murdoch is committed to starting – look like King Canute trying to hold back the flood of cyberspace. Once it can be digitised, it will be copied. On the web, information wants to be free – even if it means less of it will be produced.As I was trying to think through all the ambiguities of the internet, I found myself haunted by a thought. What if you logged on tomorrow and the internet had vanished? In 2007, the Russian government punished Estonia for removing a Soviet war memorial by launching a "cyberwar" – a bombardment of hacking and viruses that brought their computers down for weeks. The country was in chaos. Their banking, government and business all existed online. Without their machines, they were paralysed. What if somebody could do the same everywhere and bring the internet down worldwide?
Would we be relieved to be suddenly freed from the endless pings of pointless emails? Would we find our concentration spans mysteriously widening again? Would we start to look at the people around us with a clear gaze, rather than at a torrent of status updates? Would we see the newspaper and record industries rise again, as people had to pay for their goods once more? Maybe. But I suspect we would we feel oddly alone if the great global conversation with 3.2 billion other people – the conversation that has defined the Noughties – went dead.
Regards,
Popo
