The web and the news where you are
Sunday, April 24, 2016 by four cultures

The thing that annoys me most about the closed web (the web imagined into dominance by Facebook especially) is that it reconfigures the geography of the Internet so that wherever people are, they are always 'on Facebook'. It's a kind of colonialism. No, let me restate that: it is colonialism. It seems as though only last year I was in my own territory, sovereign over my own small patch of the universe. This year, without my having moved an inch, I'm within the expansive territory of Facebook, or I'm nowhere. Look at a map of the world in the Nineteenth Century and it's painfully obvious that the colonial world effectively had no outside to it. Where on the entire globe was not carved up and controlled by the European, Japanese and American colonial powers? Thailand? Today, every online sovereign state is under direct threat from colonisation. One of the things Evan Williams, creator of Medium, doesn't quite understand, it seems, is that in attempting to be an alternative space to Facebook, the use of 'closed web' techniques renders resistance futile. These are the exact principles and methods that give Facebook the advantage. Medium risks becoming the Thailand of the Web. It may succeed in holding out, but that's the best it can expect. For what it's worth, my own view , given Williams' past form, is that the game plan is not to consolidate sovereignty but to sell out to a larger player for a lot of money.

 When the history is told of colonised people, there is a strong sense that they somehow 'disappeared' from their land. They are not in evidence today, so where did they go? They disappeared, vanished, we are told. And this is what Facebook has done to the web. The bloggers have been colonised. They have not been dispossessed of their territory. No one forced them to stop blogging. They simply disappeared - or so the story goes. And furthermore, this disappearance always has the air of inevitability about it, it's a far more immutable law of history than anything Marx ever dreamed up. History demands that the old will be displaced by the new. Of course it does.

The Scottish poet James Robertson wrote a series of 365 short stories, one for every day of the year, and each story had exactly 365 words. One of these is called 'The news where you are'.  It's a masterful satire of the way the British Broadcasting Corporation understands the political geography of the United Kingdom. There's the national TV news - 'the news where we are', as Robertson puts it - and after that, 'the news where you are'. Except on Saturdays, when the scheduling doesn't allow any 'news where you are'. Robertson's satire wryly exposes the view from nowhere imposed by the media. The 'national' news, Robertson implies, happens everywhere in the nation except where everyone lives, which is where the regional and local news happens. All that's needed is to substitute the word 'London' for the word 'national' and it becomes clear how ideological the BBC's concept of national news is. 

What Robertson exposes about the BBC is equally true of social media. As Dave Winer says, we're in an era when sources go direct. The latest example is the US President's statement on the death of Prince, put out on Facebook. But as they report directly on their own experience - the news where you are , the sources are increasingly constrained to place it as 'content' in a silo - the news where Facebook is.  If you doubt this just take a look at the POTUS Facebook page. Where s the President? In the Whitehouse? No. It's laid out clearly:

President Obama is on Facebook. To connect with President Obama, sign up for Facebook today.

The implication is clear: if you're not on Facebook, where are you

My hope with the new web authoring tools is that the open web will develop instead of disappearing. Facebook's recent adoption of RSS as a protocol for instant articles also points to a way forward, a chink in the armour of the closed web. To be on Facebook, but to avoid being on Facebook alone. The President may need to be on Facebook, but sometimes also needs to be in the White House. My ideal would be to write in one location (my own private White House?) and publish auto-magically in several, or many places. To write once and publish everywhere. That's the dream, and yet social media keeps breaking it. But the dream is so powerful that not only has it not yet died, it is continually inspiring new technologies. The closed web is always the second best. 

See also: The medium is the bias [or Why would the Queen use Twitter when she already has the Royal Mail?]

  • Richard, nice start on 1999.io! I agree that I would like all of my writing to be in one place that I control, and then push it to other places as I see fit (see POSSE definition at IndieWebCamp). Hopefully 1999.io can be one of those tools.

  • Good knowledge about Thailand and colonialism, Richard.

    I see two big differences between blogging on the open web and FB. First, FB built a pervasive and effective notification system, which is what gets folks interacting there and why "everybody is there." We don't have that yet with 1999.io or with other blogging tools (maybe some do with POSSE, as Andy points out) which is why blogging on the open web can be a lonely activity. Maybe the "wall" around FB is actually defined by the limits of its notification system.

    The other difference is that FB was built so they could sell ads and make a ton of money for a few people. That's what makes their activity colonialism. Just like the colonial powers of the past, they want to expand the size of their garden in which they can sell those ads. On the open web, folks just want to write about whatever they choose, no profit motive at all for many of us. This is more in line with the original concept of the Internet, but long ago the focus for most of the Internet has become making money.

    I still interact with my best friends on FB, but I don't publish my blog articles there. I'm not concerned about being colonized by them. I just choose not to put my writings there, except in rare cases. Then again, it would really be nice to have a notification system in place among the 1999ers, just like the people in all the silos enjoy. I've commented on the postings of other 1999ers and in some cases, they haven't even noticed that I commented upon their writing. They were not notified.