Why I love the internet

somethingchanged:

Economist Tyler Cowen writes:

In a typical day, I might write two tweets, peruse 15 blogs […] and watch James Brown dance on YouTube. If it’s a really fun day, I’ll read more blogs, scour the Web for movie reviews, browse eBay, Google myself, and spend more time on Twitter. None of this costs me a penny, and yet I am producing plenty - namely, my own interest and amusement. More and more, “production” - that word my fellow economists have worked over for generations - has become interior to the human mind rather than set on a factory floor. A tweet may not look like much, but its value lies in the mental dimension. You use Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other Web services to construct a complex meld of stories, images, and feelings in your mind. No single bit seems weighty on its own, but the resulting blend is rich in joy, emotion, and suspense. This is a new form of drama, and it plays out inside us - with technological assistance - rather than on a public stage. Online, you can literally create your own economy. By that, I mean you can build an ordered set of opportunities for prosperity and pleasure, analogous to a traditional economy but held in your head.

I’ve got lots of different talks to do over the next few weeks about “social media,” and I can’t bear the thought of collating stats about the growth of social networks or talking about trends. So what do you think about this approach?

In this afternoon’s first draft I’ve simply divided what I love about the internet (the “ordered set of opportunities for prosperity and pleasure”) into six bits, based around the main feelings or experiences you can get online. I suggest they are:

• Being fascinated, engrossed, delighted
• Research/Analyse/Fan
• Play/create/remix
• Express yourself/build identity/curate your personality
• Make friends/connect
• Have your say/Achieve Change

Be fascinated, engrossed, delighted

The internet is home to a variety of beautiful, high quality, engrossing content that you could passively sit in front of and absorb for hours - for free.

Soytuaire.labuat.com: it’s so beautiful you could just sit there and watch it. But move your mouse around and see what happens. The Turn: engage with the music of Fredo Viola. Deadline: a video made with Post Its. Pills: an animation by Patrick Moberg. Tribes of New York: watch delightful interviews with NYC’s citizens. Also in New York: Fifty People, One Question. MUTO: a wall-painted animation by BLU. A Wolf Loves Pork.

Research/Analyse/Fan

One of the best feelings you can feel online is the freedom that comes with sitting down in front of your computer and thinking, “what do I want to find out today?”

This site collects the daily routines of famous people. At Eye on Springfield, screencaps from seasons 1 - 9 of The Simpsons are painstakingly collected and annotated with the jokes. Here is a catalogue of similarities between Christian Bale and Kermit. If you love pencils, Pencil talk has been exploring the art and science of pencils since 2005.

Go to Wikipedia and learn about Bartitsu or the Boston Molasses Disaster. On Youtube there are 700,000 tutorials telling how to learn guitar, curl your hair or breakdance. Or you can learn anything at Wiki How.

Online any whim for any information can be gratified. And if you’re an expert in anything you can find an audience for your obsession.

Play/create/remix

For me this video sums up playing on the internet. It’s a lipdub, cheap, quick, easy, collaborative, authentic, fun to join-together-and-make, and fun to watch.

These people have recreated the Super Mario theme using a remote control car and bottles. Slaughterhouse 90210 mashes quotes from literature with screengrabs from popular TV shows. Do you like Gary Larson’s cartoons? These people do, and they’re often even funnier in these Farside reenactments shared on Flickr. In BFlat is a collaborative project. Play one video. Play all of them. Play them in any order you want.

Here, the movie Star Wars has been split up into tiny sections. At Star Wars Uncut you can choose a 15 minute clip, reenact it, and upload it. “When we’re all done, we’ll stitch it all together and watch the magic happen.”

On Etsy hundreds of thousands of sellers from 150 countries worldwide put up for sale handmade goods they’ve created - like this tiny knitted meerkat in a Star Trek uniform.

A dancing bear invades webcam chatrooms. Hilarity ensues.

Look at this Three Wolf Tshirt. You probably wouldn’t buy or wear it. Now read the 100+ reviews.

Pros: Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women
Cons: Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the ‘guns’), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark.

For about a week, almost everyone on the internet made fun of this shirt together. If you ever see people laughing at and sharing something you don’t understand, it’s probably a meme. And they’re some of the most fun you can have on the internet.

Express yourself/build identity/curate your personality

The internet makes it simple to do our favourite thing: talk and think about ourselves. You can stand out or fit in, showcase your identity and change it as easily as updating your Facebook photo.

Jonah Lehrer writes,

At any given moment, our mind is overstuffed with disparate sensations and fleeting thoughts; our different hemispheres want different things and distinct blobs of brain pump out distinct emotions. Why, then, do we feel like a unified person? Why do I feel like “Jonah” and not like a collection of random and stray neural emanations? Because we tell ourselves a story. Just as a novelist creates a narrative, we create a sense of being. The self, in this sense, is our work of art, a fiction created by the mind in order to make sense of its own fragments.

Every social site has an About Me section where you choose how to describe yourself. On my blog I say “I’m Jessica, I work in advertising in Sydney.” Other people are cat lovers, introverts, cupcake-bakers, cyclists, mad, happy, poets, artists: you can describe yourself however you like, and list what you love (Arcade Fire, the Beatles, Britney Spears, Virginia Woolf, Twilight) as evidence of who you are.

You can take a photo of something that happens in your life every day for a year: 365 Days - even if it’s intensely personal like this highschooler’s. You can curate photos of yourself and your friends that express who you are.

On Facebook, people wrote 25 Random Things About Me notes that ranged from very personal to hilarious. At We Feel Fine, Jonathon Harris has built a program that searches for blog posts about how people feel. You can tell the world what you love, hate, believe (see real time Tweets that have these words in them on Twistori.) On your blog you can tell the world your views on who should be kicked off So You Think You Can Dance or how the Government should tackle the global financial crisis.

Oliver Burkeman writes,

The truth - that we need to stand out and to fit in - has been codified, in recent years, as “optimal distinctiveness theory”. We crave the sweet spot between being too exceptional or too normal, and we’re constantly adjusting our behaviour. When we feel suffocated by sameness, we’ll strive to make our mark, but if we feel too lonely in our differentness, we’ll rush to conform.

You can share your daily outfits and sense of style on lookbook.nu, your hairstyle for the day, what makeup you’re wearing, what songs you’re listening to, how far you ran on your morning jog or new additions to your comic collection.

Online you can craft your digital presence like a teenager painstakingly putting up posters on his bedroom walls.

Make friends/connect

But the internet is not just selfishly showcasing your own identity. It’s about connecting with other people. There’s the kind of connection we get through not feeling alone.

As Emily F. Popek writes,

No longer does the aspiring teenage punk rocker, confined to a dreary and un-hip rural or suburban existence, have to feel isolated and alone. Sure, his classmates may think the Gaslight Anthem is a Frank Sinatra song, but he can easily find the band’s music, clothing and, more importantly, the peers he craves with the help of the Internet.

There’s the type of connection you get through support, which the internet is great at facilitating. On the Australian Vogue Forum, there are nearly 300 posts in a thread called, “Anybody lost their jobs yet?” where users talk about the impact on their lives of the global finanacial crisis.

There’s the connection we get through sharing experiences with others. A few weeks ago there was a beautiful sunset in Sydney. I snapped a picture to put on my blog and went to Twitter to write about what I saw. Then I noticed lots of the people I follow had done the same. So many people were remarking on it the hashtag #sydneysunset was used. You can see some of the pictures uploaded here. It turned a solitary observation about natural beauty into a group celebration.

Some websites are built around the idea of bringing people together, like AirBnB, Couchsurfing or MeetUp. But successful websites like Vimeo, Flickr and Tumblr also generate strong communities of likeminded people who self-organise “meet ups” to hang out with other users in real life. In fact you can make friends on any website where people are brought together by shared interests or experience, as outlined in Mike Arauz’s Spectrum of Online friendship diagram. And the ambient awareness and intimacy fostered by social networking updates can help maintain those friendships.

Have your say/Achieve Change

Online you can feel powerful: working alone to make a small difference or working with others to achieve change.

Barack Obama raised more than $500 million online through 6.5 million donations. 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. He gathered 13 million email addresses. On his site, 2 million supporters’ profiles were created. 200,000 offline events were planned and more than 35,000 volunteer groups were created. He had 5 million supporters on other social networks. These people can all deservedly feel like they played a role in his victory, all using the power of the internet.

Kickstarter allows you to try and raise money for your creative pursuits. Kiva connects donors with people who need microfinancing. Twitter helped highlight protests in Iran. Act.ly lets any Twitterer start or sign a petition. The Guardian opened up MPs expenses to public scrutiny and harnessed the power of the crowd to analyse them. The ComePlay website allows Australians to help get the World Cup football hosted here in 2018-2022. The Uniform Project is one woman’s idea to raise money for education in India as well as an experiment in sustainability.

What does this all mean?

As Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger wrote in the Cluetrain Manifesto,

The internet is the most liberating of all mass media developed to date.  It is participatory, like swapping stories around a campfire or attending a renaissance fair. It provides the greatest array of entertainment and information, on any subject, with any degree of formality, on demand. It is not meant solely to push content, in one direction, to a captive audience, the way movies or traditional network television did.

Unlike some, I don’t argue that the advent of the internet means advertising is dead.

But I do think that companies can’t simply buy attention on the internet. Banner ads that just get in your way, commercial emails you’re tricked into receiving, even clever newer generation ads that use your data to be more targeted or relevant are still interruptions we crossly brush aside.

By age 20, young people born after 1982 will have spent 20,000 hours online– the same amount of time a professional piano player would have spent practising. So we immediately see through gimickry like “viral” videos that are riddled with product placement, communities where companies don’t act like humans or allow us to be human either, or microsites where we’re expected to wait for Flash to buffer while we could be making our own videos with our friends. These are all trying to take trap or lure us into paying attention, but we can see straight through it.

Companies have to try and tap into the excitement - or at least the autonomy, positivity and limitless opportunity - that most of us feel when we sit down in front of the internet. Is what they produce genuinely fascinating, detailed enough for fans to stick their teeth into, flexible enough for us to play with and co-create? Does it allow us to bolster our image or develop our personalities? Can we connect with others through using it, or have our say in its development? That’s how they can genuinely earn our attention and engagement.

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So do you think this is a good way to talk to people about “social media” and the real internet, as we who love it experience it? Is the structure logical? Does the preachy ending make me sound like a dick? Can you think of other categories I have missed out, or better examples (particularly of companies who are engaging very well online)? If you do, please email me or submit a comment or link.