Sho Fukamachi Online

Note: This post was originally a comment on this article at Information Architects Japan. Unforgivably, their website ate my comment – even more so given the supposed expertise in website design by said company. Luckily, suspecting incompetence, I copied it before posting, and now present it below in an edited form.

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THE REVOLUTION IS NOT OVER

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” – Roy Amara (1925-2007)

This is a point-by-point refutation of this article. Text from his article is in blockquotes, my response follows.

The IT-Revolution promised to free and enrich us. To free us from propaganda, to free us from mindless TV, to free us from advertisement torture, and to enrich us by letting machines do all the boring work so we’d have more free time. So, how did it go?

It “promised” no such thing, and is not even a single entity. Human pundits, motivated by greed or the need to provide inspiring sound-bites, may have promised something similar, but the IT “revolution” has no inherit promise. It may well hold the potential to enable some or all of those points, however, as it develops. “How did it go?” is laughably premature, a theme I will expand on below.

Good Internet Revolution

1. We read and write more today than we used to.

We? Who is “we”? I do, yes, and the author of the article might as well. But the vast majority of users do not – and if they do, it is mostly low-quality “chat” which if anything is a replacement of the telephone calls they might have been on prior to having net access.

2. The public opening of digital publication technology (AKA “blogs”) has provided a free speech transport with rocket engines.

Blogs are nothing but home pages with a bit of automation. They remain laughably primitive for the most part, hopelessly inflexible, and mostly look alike (this one included).

But “free speech”? What is that supposed to mean? Zero cost? Indeed, blogs have provided many with the means to say what they think for little or no cost in money or effort, although the vast majority are deservedly obscure. If the meaning was free as in freedom, however, blogs don’t add much to that.

3. News has become more accessible and more transparent.

News about what? Accessible how? Transparency?

Most “news” about the world continues to be sourced from traditional providers, for the simple reason that it costs a lot to provide. Almost all areas in which blogs or other personal publishing efforts could be said to have made a difference are areas in which “news” is easy to gather – be it filtering output from mainstream publications or “insider” reports from a specific industry.

Accessible? Reliable or even well-written news is almost impossible to find outside of traditional sources, single-issue blogs/aggregator services notwithstanding. Traditional news sources have indeed become easier and cheaper to access, however.

I cannot see how the advent of the internet has had any effect on “transparency” of news providers. Indeed, if anything, there are less rules.

4. The Internet is the taser against the shit bags that try to manipulate, embellish, and block information that is inconvenient to them.

Is it? How? Sure, if someone tries to cover something up, say, a politician, there’ll be a few blogs who report the truth, and word might get out. But only for the people who are specifically looking, and half the time it’s untruth that makes it into the blog echo chamber.

And traditional news sources have ever performed this function, regardless. How are internet sources any better?

We have wikileaks and mac rumors sites. People who go to them are already searching for the truth. There were publications before the net which performed similar functions .. and most “exposés” of any quality remain the work of traditional outputs.

I agree though that sites like wikileaks et al and “anonymous tips” are facilitated by the internet and may indeed turn out to be very valuable as the technology and public awareness develops. I’m personally very interested in this phenomenon.

5. We can now literally X-ray politicians before we vote for them.

Uh, that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

However, it’s wrong anyway. I am not aware of any existing site which presents information on politicians and their history in anything like the advanced format I would want.

Bad Internet Revolution

1. But now we have more junk data and less free time.
2. We have more tasks in our inbox and less concentration to complete them.
3. We are bombarded with even more idiotic advertisement (spam)
4. We write (short notices), and read (bee-beep-bee-beep) even more fast-food data.
5. The corporations have become even more shrewd (via viral campaigns, paid comments, and “Social Media Consultants”).
6. We outperform each other blogging, twittering, tumblering, and Facebooking.
7. We mindlessly link our friends to the dumb-ass websites where spammers and stalkers, grudgers and psychos, and old, finally-forgotten nags – dressed and masked as virtual vampires – wait behind some wonderwall.

Is it just me, or are almost every single one of those points a matter of personal choice and time management on behalf of the user? And furthermore, aren’t the sites you mentioned all startups?

A user’s management of his time and attention is up to them, as it has always been. You complain about being overloaded with data – but how is that data even getting to you, if you didn’t request it in the first place? The internet is pull, not push. If you don’t like it, stop requesting it!

To be clear: We are not free. “Fast-food data junkies,” that’s what we are. How did we get into this mess?

Whether you are “free” or not is completely irrelevant. If you choose to be a data junkie, then a data junkie you will be – and can join the TV junkies, talkback radio junkies, and all the other people who can’t manage their time properly. What are you expecting – someone to stop you?

I don’t have a facebook account, I don’t use my twitter account, I don’t have a “tumblelog”, the reason being I can’t see the point of any of them. I do have a blog, which I post on when I feel like it – and if I think I’m writing on it too much, I – get this – stop.

If you find yourself wasting too much time on frivolous services, stop wasting so much time on those frivolous services! What’s the problem?!

Revolutions are vicious circles. Remember, after the French got rid of their sleepy King Louis XVI, they installed the radical Robespierre, followed by the brutal tyrant Napoleon Bonaparte I. Now what happened to us exactly?

It seems what happened to “us” is that we started writing facially ridiculous analogies to French history on our blogs?

Seriously, that analogy is so off the mark it’s not even wrong.

Ironically, people still believe that the Internet belongs to them, some journalists behind the times even complain about “the mob reigning the web.”

No, what’s ironic is that you’re posting that on your own website, and I’m replying on mine.

Truth is, the World Wide Web is in the hands of a few Emperors – namely Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft – that split the territory amongst themselves quite some time ago.

Well, I can’t deny that Google holds an extremely powerful position at the search gateway. However, the relevance of MS and Yahoo has been fading for a long time.

But “split the territory up”? Huh? They compete on many common grounds. But the internet is not “territory”, unless you’re talking about IP and domain allocation, and I doubt the “big three” combined hold even a thousandth of that.

Nowadays, building up a web service and making money outside the Territory of the Three Web Caesars is considerably more difficult than just starting a “real” shop.

A ridiculous statement with literally millions of counterexamples.

Large organisations have extremely powerful momentum and network effects, both on and offline. You say it would be easier to start a real shop – what are you smoking? The type of success you’re judging all those startups by is equivalent in the retail world of, say, toppling Mitsukoshii or Family Mart. Good luck with your hole in the wall putting them out of business anytime soon.

Start Up Fata Morgana

If you look at the success story of startups that made it (like Youtube for instance), you’ll realize that the dream of the cool website, that simply offers good information while finding users and making money, is a Fata Morgana that drives thousands of young enthusiasts into death of thirst. You need connections and loads of money to make it in the world of the three titans.

The success of Youtube proves that making a new website is a bad idea? Yeah, USD$1.65 billion worth of bad idea.

There are plenty of “startup” websites, and most of them do fail. But if a website is actually cool, and does actually have good information, then usually I would say they succeed, eventually, although how much money they make can be a volume game.

What’s an example of a cool website with good information that’s gone under? Chances are it wasn’t cool at all, the information was not good, most likely both, and was rejected for those reasons.

Having connections and money helps, of course, as it does in any field you care to name. I would actually say that on the internet the playing field is dramatically levelled such that anyone who really does have a good site, and a steady stream of actual good information, will almost certainly be discovered and become popular. The problem is that most sites fail dismally to provide either.

Good information, or “content” as they call it, is, and always has been, expensive to produce. Expensive for you to write yourself in terms of time and opportunity cost, or expensive for you to compensate others to do for you – good writers are very expensive. What did you expect? That the internet would provide that content to you for free?

We know one thing for sure. The Revolution is over; the people have nothing to say in the Napoleonic era of the web.

Such a ludicrous statement I can’t even be bothered mocking it.

So what did the Revolution bring us in the end?

Uh, your website upon which you’re writing this? Your audience? Your company’s entire raison d’être?

[cut more about the french revolution]

We the people now have the option to become data connessieurs (we didn’t have that before the IT revolution!). The offer of delicious information nowadays is huge indeed. All one must do is choose. And that means reduce: trim your E-mail accounts down to one. Chop the Facebook annoyance. Peel your Linked-in account. Fry your Twitter profile. Freeze your cellphone. Bon appétit!

Right, so it seems you did know the solution to your time management problem after all. If some service is costing you more in time and attention than the value you’re getting from it, then stop using it. It’s not rocket science.

But I think the subtext here is something different – “the internet has failed, we should stop using it” – and that’s rubbish.

The revolution of a common data network has not even properly begun. Common protocols are only just being invented, let alone used. Almost no appliances or other objects have any connectivity. The vast majority of discussion is by instant message or primitive forums. There are no good newsfinder services, although recent inroads show promise. There are no common clearinghouses for news, no common geographic systems, no easy way to interface with the ones that exist. Video and even audio streaming remains an expensive niche. Collaboration software is in its infancy, but early versions show promise (wikipedia). There is no common tagging or ISBN-style library system for internet works. There is no easy way to use a remote filesystem from a desktop computer, or act as a server. There are very few standard data formats. There is no easy way to find ad hoc statistics, or transform the data even if you can find it. There are no good automatic translation systems. I could go on, and on, and on.

And you say the revolution is over?! I’m not even going to say it’s the end of the beginning! It’s still the beginning of the beginning! It’s the foreword!

The main thing I detect in this essay is disillusionment and/or sour grapes, which seems a little strange coming from someone whose line of work is supposed to be internet-related consulting. There are plenty of people working to make the internet better – if you want to overthrow the corporations, why not help them instead of declaring a fait accompli defeat?

Anyone can whine uselessly about the state of things, maybe because it’s hardly any work and there’s no risk besides your reputation – and you’ll always find some fellow downtrodden battlers to chime in with sympathy. But it’s the wrong path to take in the long run.

I don’t see any grand experiments the author has tried and failed. What have Information Architects done to help progress the state of information online? This site? All I see is a lightly modified WordPress install. A company selling its expertise of “information architecture”’s idea of the perfect information architecture is, uh, WordPress. Right.

Not trying to criticise personally here but if you want to declare defeat you need to at least be in the fight, and I don’t see any evidence of that. If you’ve got some war stories, tell them. If you’ve got some theories on how to build better data structures – I’m all ears. But this defeatist junk? Keep it to yourself please, lest you lose the few remaining visitors you still have from when you wrote interesting articles worth considering.

Oh, and one more thing. On your front page right now? EIGHT articles about your web trend map, your superficially interesting map of all those corporate properties you’re railing against here, but which you have made way too big a deal about, one effort-free superficial “remix” of (corporate) apple’s iPhone, and this article. Is that your recipe for global success?

My blog sucks but it’s got a lot more about Information Architecture on its front page right now than Information Architects Japan.

UPDATE:

The cowards can’t even bring themselves to unmoderate my comment. This from an “internet company”. They delete outright my first (highly critical, copied above) comment – and then moderated my comment complaining about that?

What kind of 12 year old is running this company?

Let me quote some article I read recently:

4. The Internet is the taser against the shit bags that try to manipulate, embellish, and block information that is inconvenient to them.

Who’s the taser, and who’s the shit bag blocking inconvenient information, now?