Well, obviously I am online. But “being online” now seems to mean being on socially-networked platforms.
Don’t you think that the surface of the Internet feels super flat right now?
I don’t just mean the graphical qualities of software UX that feel flat and minimalist – although they do. But the whole internet. Over the last decade our online interactions have converged on a handful of portals. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Netflix, and YouTube or wherever you spend your time. Inside of each of these spaces content is served up with zero effort on your part. Displayed upon a flat surface of dark glass that you scroll or swipe at, like an infant batting away an aeroplane spoon. Much of whats surfaced feels shallow too.
What this says to me is that perhaps I crossed some rubicon a while back and didn’t notice. Because not only do I not use most of these sites, but also…
Well, look. Television is whatever you’re served up when you turn the box on. This is just what a broadcast medium looks like. It’s just that “the internet” started broadcasting stuff by unfunded hobbyists first. Like if tv had started with the equivalent of public access cable first, and monolithic networks arrived later. (I’m glossing a bit there, but it’s near enough) The internet grew up, got a job and started talking about mortgages at dinner parties while its old friends are still sitting in the pub wondering what the fuck happened to their mate.
Lots of people don’t watch broadcast tv. They buy obscure dvds (or even videotapes, Sarah), they read books, they go through archives, watch films at cinemas large and small, subscribe to magazines and podcasts (that you actually have to type the URL of into their podcatcher app) to keep them current.
Inanity of online culture? One of the most popular tv shows in Britain is a network television show about watching people watching network television shows.
Do we care? We do not. We don’t have to watch it, and we don’t.
And this is where the rubber meets the road in our present movement. If you dislike how things are unfolding with the platforms and social media. Or are sick of the all pervasive flatness that everything radiates. Or annoyed about the inanity of content and culture online. We need to move towards depth. We need to embrace hypertext and hypermedia.
Jay argues above for hypertext media as the thing forgotten, and summons up the CD-ROM as a deep stack of linked materials on a theme that asked for and rewarded exploration. I remember there were a bunch of apps that did the same thing – I vaguely remember once having a meeting with one of those information-app creators, and I at some point owned a huge iPad app about The Waste Land that was jammed with well-made video, audio and essays (that nonetheless did not make me love that poem more).
But using one of those requires time, focus and intent. And most people like Gogglebox. What’re you going to do?
Relax. You’ll tie yourself in knots about how bad and flat and plain mainstream media is.
There’s a term of privilege: the flaneur. Somewhat easier to be a flaneur on the internet than, say, as a Muslim woman on the streets of Paris. The flaneur is very much a monied white male thing. But you find this at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry for the word:
The flâneur concept is not limited to someone committing the physical act of a peripatetic stroll in the Baudelairian sense, but can also include a “complete philosophical way of living and thinking”, and a process of navigating erudition as described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb‘s essay “Why I Do All This Walking, or How Systems Become Fragile”.[31] Taleb further set this term with a positive connotation referring to anyone pursuing open, flexible plans, in opposition to the negative “touristification”, which he defines as the pursuit of an overly orderly plan.
This appeals to me precisely because it tends to affirm winging it, which is my default. Not a good planner. I find the best things when I’m off on a wander and I can’t see walls or hedges.
This was the actual title of a tv show from my childhood:
If you treat all those internet platforms as television, then you can turn them off and go for a walk on the internet instead. Structured hypertext products are still walled gardens, they’re just themed gardens, like a physic garden. The thing about walled gardens is that most people like them. They’re easy.
Jay has a point about the big platforms generally deprecating a lot of hypertext functions, as they lead people out of the walled gardens. But people like walled gardens. Even if they’re full of toxic plants, stinking blooms and corpse flowers. And besides: you have no more hope of imposing a new way of doing things on the internet than of preventing the BBC from commissioning any new programme with Michael McIntyre in it.
Leave ’em to it. Network tv isn’t all of broadcast culture, just as the big platforms aren’t all of internet culture, and all that shit is still hyperlinked. Leave the platforms to it. Go for a walk and report your notes.
(Not fully baked, possibly didn’t even have a point, working something out for myself)
