Browser Don’t Surf: The Web’s Not Dead… Yet.
Remember when people used to “surf the web”? Now it is said that typical daily browsing behavior consists of five websites. William Gibson’s age-old summary of web experience, “I went a lot of places, and I never went back” has become, “I go a few places, and I stay there all the time.” We don’t surf as much as we sit back and watch the waves. I started this post several months ago when I noticed that the lively conversations that used to happen on my website had all but ceased (and eventually ceased altogether). Though the number of visitors continued to increase, the comments had moved elsewhere. A link to a post here on Facebook garners comments galore on Facebook, but none on the actual post. I doubt that I’m alone in experiencing this phenomenon.
I Tweeted (that still sounds silly, doesn’t it?) sometime last year “Facebook 2009 = AOL 1999.” I was being snarky at the time, but there are good reasons that the analogy holds. As Dave Allen of North pointed out recently, search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine management (SEM) are shams for users. For those that don’t know, SEO and SEM are strategies for gaming Google’s search algorithms, thereby attaining higher page-rank in search results. That’s great if the optimized site actually has what you’re looking for, but unfortunately this is becoming less and less the case (Dave was looking for some bamboo poles from a local source for his backyard in Portland. I challenge you to find one using Google).
Enter closed communities like AOL and Facebook: These social networks help filter the glut by bringing the human element back into the process. So-called “social search” or “social filtering” helps when Google fails. So, even as Facebook has become the new “training wheels” of the Web (as AOL was before it), it also serves as a new organizing principle for all of the stuff out there.
Once I read the Wired cover story on the death of the web, I knew this idea had to be revisited. The claim that the web is dead is more than a ploy to sell magazines and less than a statement of truth. Yes, we’ve used the terms “web” and “internet” interchangeably (even jokingly combining them in the portmanteau “interwebs”) when they’re not the same thing, but don’t get it twisted: The web is not dead. It’s changing, growing, reorganizing, yes. But it’s far from dead.
Organizing principles are just filters; they include, they exclude, they make sense of would-be chaos. Good examples include books, solar systems, and city grids. As an organizing principle, the web is lacking at best, but it’s not lacking enough to wither and die just yet. Sure, the “app-led” (i.e., Appled) future, with its smart phones, iPhones, iPads, and other gadgets is forming closed silos using the internet’s backbone, but you aren’t likely to be sitting at your desk using anything other than the web for a while to come yet.
That brings us back to the shift from outlying sites (like this one) to filtering sites (like Facebook). As long as web search is run by algorithms that can be gamed (thereby rendering them all but useless), then the closed silos will stack — on and off the web proper. Where will that leave sites like mine? I don’t know, but no one is interested in The Roy Christopher App just yet.
Further Posting:
Roy,
I think we need a day off the web. I think we need real “face-time” in the analog world [as you and me just had.] I think social media is a farce when studies show that we actually interact with only seven people on average on Facebook, regardless of the number of “friends” we have.
I think “social media” is just media. I think brands jumping wholesale into Facebook is not “joining the conversation” it’s hogging the conversation to make a sale. I think people are realizing this very quickly and the social media bubble is on course to pop [in the analog world house prices always go up, right?,] simply because we are being worn down to the nub by hardcore sales tactics.
I think, as I have for a long time, that technology only shortens the distance between us. I think brands understand this and they are using Facebook as a shortcut to a so-called “community.” I think that we all know by now that you can’t create a “community.”
I think the web, as we used to know it, is dead. We should rename it the world wide webrand.
The Internet meanwhile, as you rightly say is the backbone and it’s the facilitator, the transmitter, and even, as Al Gore pronounced it – the Information Super Highway. Long live the Internetz..
Oh, Dave… You really wanted those bamboo poles, didn’t you?
I agree with you in your web cynicism (as you well know because we spent our recent face-time spreading it to every bar in Portland), but I think we need to be careful. We need to temper our old-man cynicism with some youthful openness, after all you still have Pampelmoose, and I still have this site. Anyone who’s been online as long as we have knows shit done changed, but we should be careful not to sound like our favorite band just signed to a major and now everyone loves them (I know this is not what you were saying, but you know what I mean).
On the other side of that, Chris Anderson claims in the Wired piece that individuals are still striving on the web. Well, they are and they aren’t. They’re striving on Facebook, on Twitter, and via links on bOING-bOING, but the only individuals striving are the silo owners (e.g., Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Williams, et al.). The domain-name-ownership-as-hanging-shingle aspect might not be dead, but it’s wounded really bad.
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[...] that people click on a lot of links from my site. I think it’s a bygone era. I said it in one piece: “We don’t surf the web so much as we just sit back and watch the waves.” People [...]
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I am currently an Assistant Instructor corrupting the youth at The University of Texas at Austin, where I am also pursuing a Ph.D. in Communication Studies. My main interests are figurative language use and the social impacts of technology. My main goal as a writer is to entertain and as a scientist is to find novelty. I’m more of the former than the latter and more of a fan than a critic. This site is where all of these things play out. It’s where I think aloud about all of the above.
I’m an aging BMX/skateboard 'zine kid. That’s where I learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. The pages and staples have long since given way to links and scrollbars, but the rest is basically the same. I still ride bikes, and I still skateboard. I do still commit quite a bit to actual pages, too. Read on »
