Rewire by Ethan Zuckerman; Untangling the Web by Aleks Krotoski – review Jul 21st 2013, 07:00
The internet is a great tool for cosmopolitanism – so why is it making us so insular?
Open a street map of a city – any city – and what you see is a diagram of all the possible routes that one could take in traversing or exploring it. But superimpose on the street map the actual traffic flows that are observed and you see quite a different city: a city of flows. And the flows show how the city is actually used, as distinct from how it could be used.
This is a useful metaphor for thinking about the internet and digital technology generally. In itself, the technology has vast – some think limitless – possibilities. So narratives like those of Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen in their recent book tend to sketch out all the things that networked technology could enable us to do. But what we will actually wind up doing with it is, at any point in time, largely unknown.
In that sense, Ethan Zuckerman's book provides a welcome antidote to the current narrative of technological determinism. His central thesis is that while the internet does, in principle, enable everyone to become a true cosmopolitan, in practice it does nothing of the kind. Cosmopolitanism does not just involve being tolerant of those who are different from us. As the Ghanaian American philosopher Anthony Appiah puts it, true cosmopolitanism "challenges us to embrace what is rich, productive and creative about this difference". Much of the early part of Rewire is taken up with demonstrating the extent to which the internet, and our use of it, fails that test.
"We shape our tools," said Marshall McLuhan, "and afterwards they shape us." The truth of this adage is corroborated every time most of us use the net. We've built – and use – information tools (such as search and social networking systems) that embody our biases towards things that affect, or are relevant to, those who are nearest and dearest to us. They give us the information we think we want, but not necessarily the information that we might need.
This gap between potential and actuality is everywhere evident. In principle, we in the west could be much better informed about Islamic societies, for example. In practice, despite all the connectivity at our disposal, we are probably as ignorant as we were in the bad old days of mainstream media. In fact, Zuckerman argues, in some ways we might have been better then, because serious mainstream media outlets once saw it as their professional duty to curate the flow of the day's news. In other words, there were editorial gatekeepers who saw it as their responsibility to determine a "news agenda" of what was important and what was not.
But sometime in the mid-90s, as the internet went mainstream, we switched from curation to search at the same time as we moved from directionless surfing to purposeful search. As a result, the gatekeepers of big media gradually became less powerful, which in some respects was a positive development because it eroded the power of large multimedia conglomerates. But it also had the unanticipated consequence of increasing the power of the tools that enable us to search for information and news – and, indirectly, the power of the corporations that provide those tools.
Ethan Zuckerman is a true cosmopolitan in Appiah's sense. He now lives and works at MIT, but his outstanding blog is called My Heart's in Accra, a reference to his longstanding commitment to Africa. He is also a co-founder of Global Voices, a web service dedicated to the realisation of the net's potential to enable anyone's voice to be heard.
Rewire provides a welcome contrast to the current Panglossian narrative about the transformative power of networked technology, and a perceptive diagnosis of what's wrong. Where it runs out of steam slightly is when he gets to contemplating potential solutions, of which he identifies three: transparent translation; "bridge figures" – bloggers who translate and contextualise ideas from one culture to another; and what he calls "engineered serendipity", which is basically technology for enabling us to escape from filter bubbles. In due course, the technology will deliver transparent translation; cloning of Ethan Zuckerman would provide a supply of suitable bridge figures, but for the time being we will have to make do with pale imitations. Engineering serendipity, however, is a tougher proposition.
Which is where Aleks Krotoski might be able to help. She is a perceptive observer of our information ecosystem, and last year she was doing the conference rounds with a wonderful Heath Robinson device called the Serendipity Engine, which was two parts art installation and one part teaching tool. Her new book, Untangling the Web, is a collection of 17 thoughtful essays on the impact of comprehensive networking on our lives. These essays cover the spectrum of stuff we need to think about – from the obvious ones (such as privacy, identity, the concept of online "friendship" and the psychological and social impact of the net) to topics to which we don't pay enough attention (such as the ways in which online anonymity empowers those who are physically disabled or disfigured, and what medics sneeringly call "cyberchondria" – the ways in which the net can increase health anxieties).
Although she's a glamorous media "star" (having fronted a memorable TV series about the evolution of the internet), people underestimate Krotoski at their peril. She's a rare combination of academic (she has a PhD in psychology), geek, reporter and fluent essayist. Her chapter on the concept of friendship online is a good example of this combination in action: on the one hand, she's read the work of Robin Dunbar, Claude Fischer and Everett Rogers; but she's also alert to what she experiences as "emotional anaemia" – "the sense that what you're getting from your online social group is emotion-lite. In other words, you might not feel the online love from the people you should, because your nearest and dearest may be drowned out in the ocean of sociability."
Which, in a way, brings us back to Zuckerman's insight about the difference between what networked technology could, in principle, do and what it actually does. As the Rolling Stones might put it: you can't always get what you need, but you usually get what you want. And it's not necessarily good for you.
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