1.

Books

Essays

2.0's COMPANY
By James Harkin

Financial Times (UK)
August 11, 2007

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/e28bceba-456c-11dc-b359-0000779fd2ac.html

[Review of Second Lives: A Journey Through Virtual Worlds by Tim Guest (Hutchinson) ₤12.99, 362 pages; The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy by Andrew Keen (Nicholas Brealey) ₤12.99, 228 pages; The Internet Imaginaire by Patrice Flichy (MIT Press) ₤18.95, 255 pages.]

Long, long ago, in the last decade of the last century, there was a flurry of global excitement about something called “the world wide web.” The frenzied interest in all things dotcom had its echo among commissioning editors, who were desperate not to be left behind by the very latest thing. Inevitably, however, by the time those books were written, the inflated bubble of new technology stocks had burst. Most of the best books about the net, as a result, were the story of the dotcom economy, its boom, and its subsequent ignominious collapse.

That, however, was only one iteration on the ongoing saga of the net and its reach into society. And it has now been superseded by something else. During those gloomy years in which the financiers closed the door on it, many of us were quietly switching off our televisions and flocking to our computers to fiddle around with gadgets through which we could talk to and listen to each other instead. In the last five years, there has emerged a matrix of blogs, amateur broadcasters like YouTube, virtual universes such as Second Life, and calling-card emporia such as MySpace and Facebook. No longer content with staring at garish websites on the net, millions of us began to build our own castles on its turf.

A little belatedly, the social consequences of all this new kind of ground-up web activity -- what is commonly called Web 2.0 -- are now being discussed in polite society. The problem for writers is that they are perilously difficult to capture. Surfing the net, after all, is such a solitary experience that it doesn’t lend itself to telling a pacey and exciting story. With the rise of Web 2.0, however, there has been some renewed interest in first-person accounts of what goes on there.

Tim Guest is a young writer who, a few years ago, wrote a compelling memoir, My Life in Orange, about his childhood in an eccentric religious commune. But to console himself after the initial interest in his book had died down, he began to spend vast amounts of time in “virtual universes” such as Second Life, a three-dimensional online world built and owned entirely by its residents, and where users are invited to create “avatars” or virtual personas with which to populate it. His book, Second Lives, is a magic-carpet ride through these virtual universes, punctuated with digressions on various aspects of how these worlds work and interviews with some of those responsible for them.

Guest introduces us, for example, to a group of nine men and women with severe cerebral palsy who, encouraged by one of their care workers, clubbed together to build a character on Second Life and spend as much time there as they can. He also interviews the military boffins who are using multiplayer games on the web to simulate real-world counter-insurgency scenarios in places such as Iraq. He visits a virtual S&M torture dungeon, but the virtual dominatrix so intimidates him he makes his excuses and leaves. He even hangs out with the Mafia on Second Life, until he is invited by the godfather to “virtually whack” another resident as a test of his loyalty.

Then there are the bizarre and unnerving stories he has culled from the global press. These include the report on the South Korean parents who were so hooked on their favorite game, World of Warcraft, that they neglected their child, who suffocated while left alone; and the runaway boy who supported himself by stealing virtual objects from popular games and then selling them on for real money.

There is something about the tone of all this, however, which doesn’t quite ring true. The narrative arc of the story, based around the dilemmas of Guest’s personal life and his ruminations on different aspects of Second Life, feels awkward and artificial, a shoe-horned story rather than one which evolves artfully. Then there is Guest’s line in pop-sociology. “Virtual worlds like ‘Second Life,’” he concludes from his myriad investigations, “have the capacity to entrance us, to make us forget ourselves. Like our imagination, they offer us a chance to recreate -- and thus relate to -- whatever is missing.” The idea that we plunge into games like Second Life to find what we lack in the real world is hardly news to anyone who has a passing acquaintance with the net.

Guest is on firmer ground when he talks about the uncanny parallels between his experience of living in a cult and Second Life: the evangelical enthusiasm of its converts, the way in which it inspires an almost religious devotion and a fierce defensiveness among its adherents. Like cultish religion, he argues, virtual worlds hold up the promise to do or be anything you want. That licence to reinvent yourself, however, comes with a dark side -- which is why a good deal of the activity there has been elbowed in on by virtual hucksters, hookers, and charlatans.

Andrew Keen, a British internet entrepreneur and Silicon Valley veteran, is a less sensitive soul than Guest, and not squeamish about portraying the seamy side of life on the web. Keen would like to be the P.J. O’Rourke of Web 2.0. His style is knockabout polemic, and he has plenty of ammunition for his tirade. Its many millions of inhabitants, he fulminates, are nothing more than clueless “monkeys” who -- because of an unconscionable failure of judgment on the part of élites -- have been left to administer the zoo.

One popular video on the video-sharing site YouTube, he notes without further comment, featured a man in a bunny suit harassing and attacking people on the streets: it was watched more than three million times in two weeks. Other YouTube hits include footage of a woman instructing her audience on how to eat a Jaffa Cake; a video of dancing stuffed monkeys; and a clip of a dog chasing its own tail -- which, though Keen doesn’t say so, might prove an excellent metaphor for the YouTube experience itself.

We have become self-broadcasters, Keen complains, “with all the shameless self-admiration of the mythical Narcissus. As traditional mainstream media is replaced by a personalized one, the Internet has become a mirror to ourselves. Rather than using it to seek news, information or culture, we use it to actually BE the news, the information, the culture.”

Keen is particularly astute on the banality of the Silicon Valley utopians and their rather flaky ideologies, some way between rampant techno-evangelism and religious mysticism. He is also rightly withering about the idea that all these rivers of “user-generated content” are somehow, and in themselves, good for democracy. He overstates the point substantially -- at times he seems to suggest that the established media, and the advertising vehicles which have long sustained them, are somehow owed a living irrespective of the march of technology. But his brisk little book is an entertaining and a necessary corrective to all the confected hype which surrounds Web 2.0.

One reason why his and Guest’s book both seem to lack depth and substance, however, is that they fail to shed much light on either the architecture of Web 2.0 -- what makes it such a compelling place to hang out -- or why we keep coming back to it for more. Another is that the net is always so thoroughly contemporary that it tends to defy any attempt to categorize it and tell a comprehensive story. With everything there so restlessly on the move, book-length treatments often look thin, impressionistic and lacking in any narrative progression.

There is, however, a fascinating and rich story to be told about the internet if only you take the trouble to investigate. Patrice Flichy’s book, The Internet Imaginaire, is a good example of what might be achieved. A French sociologist, Flichy thinks about the web not as a consumer of its wares or as a polemicist but in terms of the shifting ideas, collective visions, and political tropes which have surrounded it from its infancy. His book lacks finesse, and the clunky sociological jargon can make it tortuous to read, but plough through it and there is plenty to think about.

His first useful insight is that the high hopes and dark prophecies which surround new technologies are nothing new. From the VCR through cable television, the microcomputer and the world wide web, people have long convinced themselves that the newest communication gizmos were going to oust everything that went before, “that self-media would replace mass media, that all individuals would be able to express themselves without the usual intermediaries and, finally, that new communities would bring together individuals in different parts of the world.”

The idea of the net, Flichy points out, was first championed by the military in the 1950s and 1960s. In the subsequent two decades, the baton slowly passed to North American academics, technology geeks and hippies, all of whom gave it their own ideological coloring and mission. Academics used the net to share information. Community activists sought to use it to reinvent local communities. Hippies and veteran radicals wanted to use it to bypass political hierarchies and get their counter-cultural message out.

Then there was the libertarian right, who saw in the web a chance to bypass state snooping and to foment a new kind of techno-individualism; and the post-Marxists, who persuaded themselves that the personal computer and a connection to the net had finally put the means of DIY production in the hands of the workers where political revolution had failed. These and other examples all suggest that the web has always been an idea as well as a technology -- and that idea has always arrived in ideological clothes, hitched to political colors. As both Guest and Keen also suggest in their different ways, it has often, too, come soaked in new-age mysticism and the suggestion that everything in the world could do with being connected via wireless connections, fibre-optic cables and copper wires.

First published in French in 2001, but only recently translated into English, what makes The Internet Imaginaire all the more fascinating is that it was written before the latest explosion of interest in Web 2.0. When Flichy wrote rather scornfully of the mystical notion that computer networks could somehow be used to construct a “collective intelligence,” he could hardly have known that this idea, known as “the wisdom of crowds” and allegedly manifested in the algorithms of Google and in the pages of Wikipedia, would subsequently become almost uncontroversial. The architecture and the landscape of the net has changed immeasurably since Flichy wrote his book, but his historical perspective, the painstaking depth of his research and the sobriety of his conclusions are more pressingly relevant than ever.