Shanghai Yummy

In Spring of 1993, I was introduced to a program called NCSA Mosaic by a very good friend of mine. At that point, I had had an Internet e-mail address for almost three years. In the years since, I’ve worked, played, socialized, kept in touch with friends, made new ones, and more, all on the net. It’s with little false modesty that I say that the Internet has made a significant impact on my life, and that I have witnessed its growth from the domain of the intelligentsia into the popular culture. A lot has transpired in the world in the nearly ten years that have passed. A lot has changed. But a lot hasn’t. It is of the disappointments that I write tonight.

Before I proceed, though, the reader must set themselves into the proper mindset. How do you think of the Internet? A global information network? A melting pot where you can meet people from all over the world? A quick way to find what you’re looking for? Perhaps you see it as a means to drive commerce? It is, of course, all of these and more. I challenge you think of the Internet as a means to empower the individual. The single greatest step in de-centralizing the engines of commerce, politics, and society.

If you think about it, the Internet could have brought society into a new age of efficiency and empowerment of the individual over the institutions of the Old Economy and the Old Establishment. Take, for my first example, the creation, distribution, and subsequent enjoyment of recorded music. Ask anyone who buys music from the major recording labels and almost all of them will complain that they are paying too much. However, if you ask most artists signed to these labels, a lot of them will complain about lack of creative freedom, restrictive contracts, and, believe it or not, how little they actually make from selling albums. It’s a pretty well documented fact that the record labels take most of the money that you’re paying for that CD. Factor in the inefficient means of distribution (printing, shipping, warehousing, stocking, retail outlets) and you can see how your hard earned dollar spent on that recording isn’t really becoming much of a hard earned dollar for your favorite artist. The Internet could have taken out all of that inefficiency in one fell swoop. Empowered artists could have made their music available to the masses directly, and they could have been paid directly by the fans. Why is the RIAA is persecuting mp3 distribution networks and the people who set them up and use them? On the surface, they would argue that distributing mp3s is akin to theft. On the surface, that is what they argue because that is what the law allows them to argue. The recording industry is one of the slowest, poorest adopters of Internet technologies, because the fact is, they fear the Internet. The recording industry is built on the old establishment of centralized control and distribution. The Internet, by its very nature, bucks against this model. Remember, music is not a compact disc. The true essence of music is the creative information. The distribution of this information is extraordinarily well suited to a stateless medium such as the Internet. The question is, why doesn’t the industry make better use of this beautiful medium, for which they have to make very little technological investment in developing? Not because they are afraid people will give copies of the music to their friends, fundamentally. That is what they’d have you believe. But the real reason is that once they start using the Internet as a distribution medium, it becomes an incrementally smaller leap to make the transition to cutting out the record label from the distribution process entirely. In short, the industry would lose control over the medium, and without control of the medium, they have little with which to leverage their control of the creative process. They will become obsolete. With any amount of vision, artists and consumers could have already made this a reality two years ago. Instead, our collective lack of foresight and action have allowed the industry to impose the stagnation that they need to survive.

The Internet, with all its potential, is still only as effective as the individuals that use it. Back in 1995, I began to get most of my news on the Internet. Initially, this was mostly through cnn.com, but in the past couple of years, I’ve broadened my Internet news gathering to many other sources, as they have become available on the web. The new news.google.com portal is certainly a great help with this, but I think most Americans do not make use of the Internet as a means to learn more about the issues that shape the world around them. This is a crying shame, if you ask me. Instead, as CNN proudly proclaims, most Americans simply trust CNN. This kind of complacency breeds the ignorance which much of the rest of the world pins on the stereotypical American. Remember that no news source is unbiased. Nobody should trust any single news source. I read cnn.com and watch CNN, but only as a starting point in my explorations of the issues of the day. There are many sides to every issue, and it is important to explore as many as possible when trying to develop an understanding of the issue. Because we live in an interdependent world, this means getting international perspectives. Reading The New York Times and CNN simply isn’t enough. But neither is reading the Financial Times and the Straits Times. The power of the Internet is that we don’t have to get our information from the established media. While they have certainly tried to assert their control of news and information over the new medium of the Internet, the decentralized nature of the Internet allows you to pursue other avenues for your news and information. The thing is, the media corporations are trying to make your Internet experience just like your television or newspaper experience. That is, you take whatever it is they give you. If you allow this to happen, you will have failed to capitalize on the potential of the Internet. It’s not as easy to make proactive use of the Internet as it is to sit and watch TV. The Internet is still based on the fundamentally “pull” method of gathering information, that is, you must actively seek and obtain the information. On the one hand, this is very powerful because you only have to receive the information that you are looking for. On the other hand, sometimes finding that information can be challenging, and furthermore, a complacent individual might never go beyond the AOL Time Warner version of everything on the net. It is the responsibility of every individual to fight complacency and seek out the deeper meaning of the issues.

So I leave you tonight with that challenge. Make more of the Internet than the establishment wants you to. Think of it as more than porn, pop-ups, and packaged truth. Think of the Internet as it was meant to be: your portal into the future, and your tool to shape that future.

PGP Signed Entry