Communication Online: commerce and conniptions

Over the twenty years I attended Eastern Michigan University as an undergraduate, things changed a lot. In 1986, new students like myself were getting in line to select punch cards in order to register for classes; now, of course, all registration is done on line. At the time I started school, mass communication meant television, radio, newspapers, that kind of thing. If you were Joe-on-the-street and wanted to air your views, you had to write a letter to the editor or figure out a way to publish something yourself. It was a time when 'zines proliferated. Ypsilanti had Crucial Update and probably a few others, too. The two guys who did it, both of them writers, artists and publishers, would type up stories, edit by hand in the margins, and Xerox the whole thing for everyone interested in the hardcore punk scene. If you lived in Australia, you had to know someone in Ypsilanti in order to get a copy to read yourself.


The Internet is interesting in part because it's a mass communications medium largely made up of micro-publishers. Online publishing is so inexpensive, and requires so little in the way of resources, it's available to anyone with a computer. This has led to an online universe that includes everything from websites for legitimate business enterprises to the sometimes-vile (and frequently unedited) rantings of the blogosphere's crazed fringe-dwellers. Just as Gutenberg couldn't have predicted the myriad forms printed material would take in the 21st century, even a dozen years ago there was no way to know what the internet would look like today.



I think in general, some of the predictions I remember hearing in the mid-90's turned out to be somewhat alarmist. I remember dire warnings about the stresses of "hyper-connectivity," and concerns that we would devolve into a nation of pale hacks, glued to our screens and collectively forgetting how to behave in public. While there is probably a degree to which such concerns were warranted, I believe that the Internet we've got today is doing more to encourage than discourage human interaction. Like a lot of things, your experience on the Internet is partly because of what's there, and partly what you bring to it, both in terms of expectations and actual content you upload.


What might the Internet look like in another dozen years?


What might be there that isn't there now?


What might be on its way out?