Icky poo poo wires make me feel dirty in my digital crotch
It’s been a long, strange month since I last posted here, and now I have 37 drafts to catch up with. If you haven’t heard, I’m now a resident of the Republic of Saint Kitts and Nevis, located in the Eastern Caribbean. My girlfriend is attending vet school at Ross University, which means we’ll likely be living on St Kitts until August 2012. I spent two or three weeks in a mad rush preparing for the move, and the last two weeks adjusting to life in a different (less “developed”) country.
I probably won’t be able to post very often at first. We have really poor Internet connectivity at our apartment (it’s out half the time, and when it’s on the speed is usually around 0.3 MB/s), so it not only takes longer to post but it’s also risky business (since WordPress doesn’t auto-save well when Internet is slow. Just after typing this sentence, my Internet went out — and I’m at the Ross campus!). And also, I’m still in the “struggle through each day” phase of starting a new life.
To get back into the groove, I figured I would offer a retort to an essay by Virginia Heffernan from the most recent New York Times Sunday Magazine, entitled “The Death of the Open Web.” It seemed relevant to me because the Times plans to put up a paywall for regular users in 2011. The essay basically argues that more people are starting to prefer a limited Web experience — like that offered by apps on the iPhone — because it’s cleaner and easier than the open Web.
At first it seems that the author is lamenting this change. That’s even stated clearly in the article’s conclusion. But between the lines she indubitably sends the message that the “gated communities” of the web’s “suburbia” will, in the coming years, be infinitely preferable to the “urban chaos” of free websites. The author states in various ways that the World Wide Web is “haphazardly planned. Its public spaces are mobbed, and signs of urban decay abound in broken links and abandoned projects.”
But now, with the purchase of an iPhone or an iPad, there’s a way out, an orderly suburb that lets you sample the Web’s opportunities without having to mix with the riffraff. This suburb is defined by apps from the glittering App Store: neat, cute homes far from the Web city center, out in pristine Applecrest Estates. In the migration of dissenters from the “open” Web to pricey and secluded apps, we’re witnessing urban decentralization, suburbanization and the online equivalent of white flight.
First of all, this is a blatantly racist statement that equates the open web with places where “minorities” live (i.e., where they are corralled into), sneakily sending the message that you should move far, far away… wherever the digital country clubs are located — that is, if you intend to be an advanced member of Web society. (It also implies that white flight was justified in the real world.) Second, the Web has NEVER BEEN CENTRALIZED OR ORGANIZED!!! The fact that it cannot be ordered into a traditional hierarchy is its greatest attribute!
They are presenting a myth for people who have only ever used AOL, MySpace, or Facebook. The myth strengthens their goal: the normalization of paid web content:
All these things make spaces feel “safe” — not only from viruses, instability, unwanted light and sound, unrequested porn, sponsored links and pop-up ads, but also from crude design, wayward and unregistered commenters and the eccentric voices and images that make the Web constantly surprising, challenging and enlightening.
When a wall goes up, the space you have to pay to visit must, to justify the price, be nicer than the free ones.
After convincing the audience that paid content is normal, the author hopes to show them that highly processed Web apps heighten the online experience.
The far more significant development, however, is that many people are on their way to quitting the open Web entirely. That’s what the 50 million or so users of the iPhone and iPad are in position to do. By choosing machines that come to life only when tricked out with apps from the App Store, users of Apple’s radical mobile devices increasingly commit themselves to a more remote and inevitably antagonistic relationship with the Web.
Nevermind that smartphones running Google’s Android OS — an open-source platform and direct antithesis to the top-down control employed by Apple — have begun to outsell iPhones! The author fails to mention that, while continuing to manipulate you into thinking she actually likes the open Web. She presses on with more metaphors and a subliminal punch to the openness of Web 2.0.
Perception, after all, is everything: many apps are to the Web as bottled water is to tap — an inventive and proprietary new way of decanting, packaging and pricing something that could once be had free.
Apps sparkle like sapphires and emeralds for people bored by the junky nondesign of monster sites like Yahoo, Google, Craigslist, eBay, YouTube and PayPal.
To finish things off, she reminds the reader to think about his or her own ego when deciding how to approach the Internet.
Even to the most committed populist there’s something rejuvenating about being away from an address bar and ads and links and prompts — those constant reminders that the Web is an overcrowded and often maddening metropolis and that you’re not special there.
Since late 2008 I’ve been a big fan of NYT’s Sunday Magazine, but now I’m not so sure. From now own I pledge allegiance to no media company. This media industry growing efforts to get us to pay for content will fail. For every company that tries to make us pay, five others will pop up with more interesting insights, videos, and even applications that cost nothing.
I can say right now that Supraterranean will never put up a paywall. We may show advertisements, and we’ll have to ask for donations — but if you ever catch us requiring payment to use the site, please send us repeated hate mail until the idiocy stops.
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