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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
What might have been due diligence for a corporate exec was already a way of life for tens of millions of people. Motavalli contrasts the New York media honchos' cluelessness with the insight of AOL's Ted Leonsis that, online, it's "user experience" that counts. For AOL the key experience was getting new users online painlessly: It has always offered the simplest, most idiot-proof onramp to the Internet. AOL solved a vexing problem for millions of people; that, more than any "content strategy" or insight into online behavior, secured its dominance.
But once those people got online, they almost immediately started behaving in unpredictable ways. They didn't wait for a media corporation to tell them what to do; they began writing pages and posting comments and building sites and contributing reviews and arguing and inventing identities. This unplanned behavior was made possible because of design decisions made by the engineers who established the Internet long before the media world ever heard of it. As Doc Searls summarizes these principles, "Nobody owns it; everyone can use it; anyone can improve it."
This activity continues unabated, oblivious to the Web industry's flameout. "We -- the great mass of Web users -- knew that there was more to the story than how the money was being made and, later, lost," David Weinberger writes in "Small Pieces Loosely Joined." Weinberger -- one of the writers behind "The Cluetrain Manifesto" -- tries to analyze the rest of the story: How the peculiar, unique traits of the Net are shaping a new kind of human discourse.
The argument is abstract -- and, in places, abstruse -- but at its heart is a simple insight: That most of what's on the Web is there because someone is interested in it, cares about it passionately enough to put it in front of the rest of the world. And, Weinberger proposes, it's precisely because the Web is powered by our interests, "the world's collective passion," that it is so distracting, so conducive to quick hops and interruptions. He doesn't see this as necessarily bad: "Perhaps the Web isn't shortening our attention span. Perhaps the world is just getting more interesting."
That glass-half-full view may be a little too rosy, but it's a provocative challenge to conventional wisdom. Similarly, Weinberger views the Web's perennial technical problems and "under construction" imperfections as a healthy antidote to sterile professionalism and a key to the Web's phenomenal fertility: "The designers weighed perfection against growth and creativity, and perfection lost. The Web is broken on purpose ... Remove the controls and we'll have to put up with a lot of broken links and awful information, but in return we'll get a vibrant new world, accessible to everyone and constantly in the throes of self-invention."
Weinberger's Web is not just a giant marketplace or an "information resource" -- it's a social commons on which the interests of a mass of individuals are splayed in universally accessible detail and trumpeted in an effectively infinite array of personal voices. That concept is almost unfathomable to media pros whose business is "aggregating eyeballs" to sell to advertisers.
Everyone understands that the Web will not, as its most wild-eyed prophets might once have imagined, somehow preempt or eclipse the media of eyeballs and ads. TV is still there. Magazines aren't going away. AOL Time Warner is still a vast company whose biggest profits come from "old" media.
But if media companies are going to continue to participate in the Web world -- and they are -- then they could learn a lot from Weinberger's analysis. How does the tradition of professionally created journalism and entertainment fit into the dynamics of a wide-open Web? No one has a definitive answer to that question, and that includes us here at Salon. But "Sit around and wait for the Web to just go away" is one answer, still popular in some media circles, that we should rule out.
Motavalli, lamenting the post-bubble state of the industry, asks the quintessential media-insider question about the Web: "There are billions of Web sites, but how many of them matter?"
Excuse me -- matter? To whom, exactly? To the Manhattan lunch crowd? To the Beltway lobbyist? To the person searching Google for "Anna Nicole Smith" -- or "expansion joints"?
What Weinberger reminds us is that every Web site, every Internet posting matters to the person who created it -- and maybe to that person's circle of site visitors, whether they number 10 million or just 10. Sure, some 11-year-old's book review on Amazon may be full of grammatical errors. OK, the world may not need any more Britney Spears fan sites. But lord, here's the quark machine some imaginative scientists built in 1997! Here's the complete lyrics of Bob Dylan! And here's everything you ever wanted to know about repairing your old Volkswagen!
Individually, these contributions may be crude, untrustworthy, unnoteworthy. Collectively, they represent the largest and most widely accessible pool of information and entertainment in human history. And it's still growing.
In this context, statements like "Web content is dead" or "AOL Time Warner will dominate" aren't so much wrong as irrelevant. Web content is everywhere. No one can dominate the Internet. And the Web belongs to its users. That's not the end of a story, it's the beginning.
