The Internet has increased options for lateral communication and reduced the need for mediators; creating different types of relationships, and increasing possibilities for major social change.
The Internet has grown so rapidly and become indispensable so quickly that it can be hard to remember that it is still a fairly new medium. Most Americans use the Internet daily for personal and increasingly for business purposes. Children are growing up with online activities as a second nature. Even in rural and lower income communities, opportunities for Internet usage are spreading.
According to an analysis by eMarketer, in 2010 the average US customer spent 11 hours per day interacting with major media, and a ComScore survey found that in January 2012 the average US Internet user spent 36 hours online during the month. These figures reflect the growing importance of digital media to Americans’ daily lives. A Pew report sought to decide whether increasing Internet usage would make individuals more or less intelligent. About 42% of the respondents felt that individuals would be affected negatively with a “thirst for gratification and quick fixes”, while 55% felt that Internet users were “learning more and they are adept at finding answers to deep questions, in part because they can search effectively and access collective intelligence via the Internet.”
Social media is having a huge influence on changes in the way people communicate today. The explosion of options include blogs in which any person can choose to write about any topic, and collect followers who are interested in what they have to say, and microblogs like the immensely popular Twitter, in which users can write any thoughts they wish to share within a 140 character limit. Wikis such as Wikipedia are information sites in which the content is posted and updated by the users, rather than any given organization. Multimedia sites like YouTube are also hugely popular; in this case any individual can choose to post videos on just about any topic they choose, to be shared with any user in the world. Finally, social networks such as Facebook have provided completely new options for people to socialize, by creating individual profiles that can be used as a digital scrapbook, photo album, journal, and communications portal. Users can send each other public messages, private messages, or instant messages, and can even group their “friends” into different levels depending upon the amount of information the user wants to share with that person. Companies, schools, charities, and other organizations have joined in by creating pages that users can “like” or “recommend”.
Another major change has been in the way news is communicated to users. The advent of 24 hour news programs, first on television and now on any number of web sites online, has changed in some ways the very content of news programs. As there may not be sufficient “hard” news of interest to fill all of these media sites 24 hours a day, there is repetition, fluff, and increasingly commentary disguised as news. Some people feel that news outlets may be conspiring to highlight certain stories that get played over and over, while giving little time to competing stories that certain corporations or political organizations want to bury, in this way swaying public opinion. Sometimes in order to gain a full understanding of events, it is necessary to obtain news from a number of sources.
Perhaps one of the most important results of the communications options available via the Internet and increasingly mobile devices that have Internet capabilities, is the increasing use of lateral communication. Benjamin Barber discusses the affect new media is having on democracy, in that “the Net offers a useful alternative to elite mass communication in that it permits ordinary citizens to communicate directly around the world without the mediation of elites.” Barber states:
Integrated systems of computers and the world wide web are ‘point-to-point’ technologies that promise direct lateral communication among all participants and thus offer an unmediated horizontal access (“immediacy”), and entail the elimination of overseers and middlemen, of facilitators and editors, of and hierarchical, busy-body gatekeepers. The virtue of immediacy is that it facilitates equality and egalitarian forms of horizontal communication. Representative democracy favors vertical communication between “elites and masses,” but strong democracy (as I argued in my book of that name fifteen years ago) prefers lateral communication among citizens, who take precedence over leaders and representatives.
New media on the Internet have increasingly been used to bring groups of like-minded people together, sometimes resulting in major social changes. Members of the Occupy Wall Street and similar groups have used emails, instant messages, social media, and multimedia sites to communicate plans and to disseminate photographs and videos taken using their mobile technology to group members and the public, in some cases avoiding police in order to continue their action, or getting evidence of their struggles to the public in spite of traditional media being prohibited from the area.
In the past year, even more dramatic examples of the power of communicating via the Internet were seen in what has been called the “Arab Spring”; protests that took place in countries such as Egypt and Lybia in which the citizens successfully demonstrated and committed civil resistance to oppressive regimes. In spite of governmental attempts to censor the Internet and keep organized media from filming the protests, social media was successfully used to organize protesters and get their stories out to the watching world.
Even fifteen years ago, few imagined the great changes that were ahead. Then, when communicating with relatives overseas, or when traveling overseas and trying to keep in touch with people at home, travelers were required to make expensive phone calls, often with difficulty if calling from a “third world” country. Slowly, Internet cafes became available around the world, often even in small villages, though often the service was spotty. Now we can take our mobile telephones with Internet access and call home from camel-back in India.
There is much concern over proposed legislation such as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP) which were introduced as methods of reducing theft of intellectual property, but it was widely feared that the legislation would instead result in loss of free speech and innovation, and censorship as powerful organizations could arbitrarily have websites blocked with no recourse. In a powerful protest of these types of legislation, on January 18, 2012 many websites such as Wikipedia engaged in a service blackout, while other sites such as Google placed a banner inviting individuals to sign a petition against the legislation. Senator Ron Wyden wrote an open letter on the World Wide Web to “Innovators, Speakers, Thinkers, and Agents for Change” discussing his reservations about the legislation and applauding the action. Wyden stated,
The Internet has become an integral part of everyday life precisely because it has been an open-to-all land of opportunity where entrepreneurs, thinkers and innovators are free to try, fail, and then try again. The Internet has changed the way we communicate with each other, the way we learn about the world and the way we conduct business. It has done this by eliminating the tollgates, middlemen, and other barriers to entry…. It has created a world where ideas, products and creative expression have an opportunity regardless of who offers them or where they originate.
I think that Ron Wyden’s letter itself is a prime example of one of the new ways we are communicating using the Internet.
Sojourn 