I’m thinking about starting a podcast or something called “On The Network” to counter all the idiocy I hear in traditional media about the internet. If I did, here’s the beta version of the 10 principles that would guide it.
The internet is neutral. It is neither good nor bad. People have motivations, the internet does not.
We change the internet more than it changes us. Human motivations may change, but they change very slowly.
People are messy. The technology we invent is messy, too. Deal with it.
The internet is not in opposition to traditional media, it’s just more media. All media works better when it works together.
All reality is virtual. Thought is and has always been virtual. The internet enables us to think together.
Technology is not the opposite of humanity. Inventing and using technology is one of the defining characteristics of being human.
The internet can be used for good or bad, but it is a net positive force in the world, because it connects us to each other.
More information is better than less. Freedom to connect to others is a fundamental human right.
Access to the internet broadens horizons. Hearing other people’s stories makes us more empathetic, smarter.
People make the internet what it is. If you don’t like it, make it better.
ps – The 11th principle is that it’s “internet” not “Internet”. We capitalize technology when it’s new and scary. It’s time to decapitalize it, just like radio, newspaper, and television.
UPDATE: We hit 1,000 followers in 12 hours. So here’s the next step: onthenetwork.tumblr.com. There’ll be more. Stay tuned.
When I was a kid and learned about the political assassinations in the ’60s, I was shocked. I asked my dad, “How could this happen?” He said, “It was a different time.” I interpreted that to mean everyone was crazy back then. However terrible American politics were, at least we weren’t assassinating politicians anymore. I was slightly proud of that.
Today I added that pride to the pile of other childish things I’ve had to let go of. Today our broken, ineffective, poisonous, acrimonious political system became a broken, ineffective, poisonous, acrimonious, murderous political system when Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head during a meeting with the public. Twelve people were wounded or killed, including an Arizona federal court judge, John Roll, and a nine year-old girl.
The suspected shooter is named Jared Lee Loughner and all we know about him so far is that he may have posted some weird You Tube videos. But we do know a few things for certain:
We know that the murder weapon was a 9mm Glock 19 handgun with a 30-round magazine.
We know that, even if Giffords survives the attack, her political career is over.
We know that, as of this writing, six people were murdered today.
We know that Giffords’ name appeared on an image distributed by Sarah Palin, along with a gunsight’s crosshairs over Arizona and the text “It’s time to take a stand.”
Those are the things we know. Here are some things I’d be willing to bet will happen in the next few days and weeks:
Arizona politicians and political pundits will find a way to blame this on immigration and violence from Mexico, even though the suspect is a twenty-something white kid.
The NRA and pro-gun advocates will find a way to imply that all of this could have been avoided if we’d just had less gun regulation, even though it was an atrocity committed with one of their weapons.
Sarah Palin and her supporters will find a way to blame this on Obama instead of taking responsibility for their “don’t retreat, reload” rhetoric.
What happened today won’t change a damn thing, even though it should. In two weeks, it will be completely gone from the mainstream media discourse.
But today is a bad day for all of that. Today is a bad day for political arguments that just go in circles forever. Today should just be a day for grief and shame.
I am ashamed. I’m ashamed it came to this. I’m ashamed to be an American today. I’m ashamed that we all spent so much time pointing and laughing as Palin and her ilk spread like cancer in the body politic. I’m ashamed that it takes something this awful to wake us up, if we wake up at all.
And I grieve for what we’ve lost as a country. I grieve because our elected government worked so hard to give us a landmark healthcare program, and we’re all too selfish and stupid to accept it. Instead of working together to continue to improve the lives of the American people, newly-elected Republicans have made it their mandate to undo the last two years of progress. And now their hateful “take back our country” rhetoric has resulted in a politician getting shot in the head.
Someday, when your kid asks you why they can’t get healthcare when they’re sick, why no one did anything when Palin and her pals dismantled America, and how it could have gotten so bad so fast, I hope you can come up with a better answer than “It was a different time.”
Because I can’t.
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Here’s Giffords talking about being a target on Palin’s crosshairs ad back in March: “When people do that, they’ve gotta realize that there’s consequences.”
One of the side effects of being in the business I’m in is that I hear certain phrases a lot. I’ve learned to let go of the terminology and focus on the meaning, but every once in a while a term’s actual meaning belies a fundamental misunderstanding that deserves to be examined. So let’s talk about the term “social media” for a moment.
When people say “social media,” they usually mean things experienced on computers, specifically blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This stands in contrast to all the other media that is presumably not social, like TV, radio, and print. But here’s the thing: all media is social. The new stuff just moves faster.
Let’s put aside the fact that media is, in actuality, lifeless and cannot be truly social. Humans are social, the stuff we make is a byproduct of that activity.
I ran a newspaper in the early 90s, and everything about it was social. The articles came out of meetings between real people, reported by people in social situations. When the paper was published, it was consumed by people in the community, and their responses were impossible to miss. When we pissed people off, we knew it. This was before mainstream email adoption, so we got actual letters, postcards, and phone calls.
Often that feedback made it into the next issue, which, in turn, created another round of feedback. It was a kind of slow-moving conversation, and it was entirely social.
This is true of all media. Radio has call-in shows, TV has audience feedback mechanisms (reviews, Nielsen’s). These older forms of media aren’t simply consumed and then forgotten – they are digested, discussed, and used to create the next generation of media. It’s social, it’s just slow.
Fast-forward to now. The very same process happens on blogs, Twitter streams, and Facebook walls. The only difference is time. The newspaper conversation happened in sets of biweekly bursts of activity. Now it happens in an intense real-time never-ending stream of updates, replies, and mentions.
I’m not saying this is good or bad, because it doesn’t matter. It’s simply happening. But I’m entirely sure that there’s no going back. I agree with Douglas Coupland, who recently said: “In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness.”
All media is social because human beings are social. The only difference is that it happens much, much, much faster now. We’ve sped up the refresh rate in our mediated conversations so much that the previous version looks like it’s not moving at all.
If we’ve sped up the social experience around media this much in a decade or two, just imagine the amphetamine-fast hyper-social media the next decade will bring.
* The grammarian in me knows that it should be “All Media Are Social” but that just sounds too weird. “Media” has become singular in the same way “data” has.
