What do we use the Internet for? We can build a tidy list of actual and possible uses, though this is a notoriously time-sensitive list, as new uses pop up with amazing (or alarming) frequency. The Internet can be used to communicate from person to person, through text-based means such as email or ‘chat' forums such as MSN; using audio, either via voice over IP phones (such as Skype) or through sound files (recorded messages); through audiovisual means, such as via webcams. It can be used to send and receive information in a number of formats, including text, still and moving images, and sound. It can be used to buy and sell things, to find new friends or lovers, to find out about practically anything, to tell other people about yourself and your world... Already, as you can see, this list is getting pretty busy. And users have become very sophisticated in the way they use all the Internet has to offer, spinning new uses out all the time. Some of these uses are preset or configured into the Internet or its offshoots, but others are more or less unintended. Email was initially seen as little more than an add-on to the main work of the Internet, which was sharing access to computers to make more efficient use of their processing power; yet, email has become an almost ubiquitous communications medium - too ubiquitous, if tales of email overload and email addiction are anything to go by.
Many of us now feel disconnected and ill at ease if we can't log on at least once a day and check our messages, but go back 20 years and our jobs and lives ticked over quite capably without email. Nevertheless, uses like email have become so stitched in to the fabric of everyday life for millions of users, making it commonplace to the point of banality. But there is also a history to the uses of the Internet and the World Wide Web; or, rather, a set of histories: some are histories of power, others talk of resistance. From its early days in the military and scientific communities, the diffusion of the Internet has always been caught between these two trajectories; one towards greater openness and freedom, the other towards greater control and dominance. In the mid-1990s, for example, there was lots of talk about how the Internet was (1) freeing users from their ‘real-life' identities and bodies, enabling them to remake themselves, for example on text-based interactive sites such as MUDs (‘multi-user-dungeons, Domain or Dimension'), and (2) enabling new types of ‘virtual community' to form, linking people with shared identities or interests, people who could now find a global, networked commonality. Both arguments generated a lot of heat, as proponents suggested a new world was in the making, enabled by technology, while critics saw instead a withdrawal from ‘real life' and a fracturing of society into endless tiny special interest groups.
This wave of debate was followed in the late 1990s by a period when many commentators feared that cyberspace was about to be taken over, colonized by corporate capitalism. The success of the Internet and the World Wide Web did cause a virtual land-grab, manifest in both the so-called ‘dot.com boom', when a new generation of Internet entrepreneurs began to start up businesses trading online, and by the increasing presence of old-style corporations on the Internet - especially computer corporations such as Microsoft and media conglomerates such as the Murdoch Group. What's more, the migration online of previously offline activities such as shopping was seen by some critics as at once evacuating ‘real life' (now people could shop from their homes), and as making cyberspace into a vast shopping mall, its users into passive shoppers.
Of course, the dot.com bubble burst, slowing the rush to fill up cyberspace with shops and businesses; there was a (welcome) pause in the capital colonization of the Internet. Then something else began to happen. Some online businesses carried doggedly on, weathered the dot.com crash, kept their faith and began to see their gamble pay off - Amazon (founded in 1994 but allegedly running at a considerable financial deficit for a good few years) is a classic case in point. Internet shopping has reshaped the high street and the shopping experience of many of us, for better or for worse. But alongside this, ‘new' forms of trading online appeared, lessening the ‘malling' of the Internet by also making it into a virtual jumble sale or swap-meet. Sites like eBay, founded in 1995, rose to prominence, and at times notoriety, as places where anything and everything could be bought and sold, and a paperclip could be traded for a house. Such has been the success of sites like eBay that more straightforward commercial sites like Amazon have added eBay-like offshoots (in the form of Amazon Marketplace, but also by carrying themed ‘lists' compiled by Amazonians, linked back to Amazon product). At the same time, a new generation of innovators was looking for killer applications for extant and emerging technologies. In 1999, a site called Napster was created by Shawn Fanning to enable his fellow students to share music recorded as audio files stored on their PC hard drives. Such informal sharing was labelled peer-to-peer (P2P) to indicate the lack of commercial involvement. Napster quickly caught on, and was equally quickly attacked by the music industry for infringement of copyright. The site shut down, to later reopen as a ‘legal' subscription file-sharing site. Yet Napster and other sites like it had already changed for ever the way recorded music is distributed, kick-starting music downloading and setting the scene for the iconic iPod and the attendant new cultures of music acquisition, distribution and sharing - Napster had picked up on a long-running ethical debate running through the Internet: who owns information? Why not share things for free? At the same time, sites like Napster weren't only interested in swapping songs; they also connected people, through their shared love of particular musics. Trading sites like eBay, too, began to take on this broader social function, sometimes referred to there as ‘friending'.
The passive web surfer, who for a while resembled a shopping zombie, had turned into someone new: someone who was not just after a bargain, or some free tunes to download, but who wanted to build social spaces around these activities. Which brings us to the latest buzz around the Internet: the rise (or return) of social networking online. Activities such as blogging sites like MySpace and Facebook have been heralded as transforming what we ‘do' in cyberspace, in crafting new forms of social interaction mediated by the Internet and the World Wide Web, but not contained within. Now, Gauntlett archly remarks about debates around blogging that ‘the most striking thing about these recent debates is that it's all so ... 1996!' - and he's right. Debates from the mid-1990s about virtual community are strangely absent from the current social media hype - a hype epitomized when Time magazine used a mirrored cover to display its person of the year for 2006. That person is ... you. Or, rather, the ‘you' that is currently ‘revolutionizing' the Internet by producing streams of ‘user-generated content', such as blogs, wikis, vlogs, moblogs, and so on. These platforms are together forming a new ‘creative commons', a shared space of self-expression and social interaction that radically alters what it means to write (and read), who can produce (and consume) web content, creating a parallel universe, the blogosphere, where - crucially for our discussion here - flows of media content are disrupted, redirected, upset and, to use a phrase from within these emerging scenes, mashed up.
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