A Social History of the Internet

Ethan Zuckerman has just posted a powerful and compelling essay on his reasons for (co-)founding Global Vocies. It is more a social history of the Internet than an "about us" post. In it he suggests that the utopian ideals and values that were held last century (okay, last century sounds dramatic but remember this is internet time!) has failed to scale as the internet became more broadly available. This is because this utopian vision didn't factor in the rich and complex nature of the history, culture, langauge, religion and experience that is deeply ingrained in societies across the globe.

I remember reading Barlow and Stallman during the late nineties and the cultural underpinnings resonated deeply within me. I remember when I co-founded #islam on ZAnet IRC server in 1997 I used to constatly get messaged with "a/s/l" which was the classic opening line which asked what is your "age, sex and location"? I used to constantly respond saying "This is the internet - those things are irrelevant here. Here you are judged only by your ideas..."

Ten years on it is clear that just being connected to a global network doesn't make a/s/l (well, at least the "l") less significant. Facebook, MySpace and the profileration of local social sites has proven that people want to connect at a very local level. What the global network does offer is the ability to amplifiy local voices and serve to make the world a smaller place.

Ethan elequoently sums up his essay saying

The dreams articulated by pioneers like Barlow, Rheingold and others are a proud legacy of the Internet. But we need to ask whether they saw the Internet bringing people together into a single, unitary net culture, or whether they saw that the Internet could be a space that allowed people from all different cultures to meet on common ground. The former is a fun club to belong to, where we can trade All Your Base jokes and cat macros. But the latter is powerful, political, and potentially transformative. It’s something worth fighting for.