The Internet: A little magic -- and loss

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
International Herald Tribune
02-21-2011
The Internet: A little magic -- and loss
Byline: VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Section: The Medium
Type: News

At some point during these past two decades, the Internet left behind its status as a techie experiment. Instead, it quickened into magic.

It has been more than 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the World Wide Web as a shared system of hypertext that would give almost anyone access to the resources of the Internet. Nearly two billion people now surf the Web. They join up around the world from cellphones, fancy tablets, slender laptops and bulky desktops.
The Internet is a huge and spontaneous civilization whose population is greater than China's. It is one of the strangest phenomena mankind has ever seen, and yet it is now difficult to even imagine ordinary life without it. At some point during these past two decades, the Internet left behind its status as a techie experiment, or merely an unprecedentedly vast collaboration between humans and machines. Instead, it quickened into magic. It is worth remembering the Arthur C. Clarke quotation from "Profiles of the Future": "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

By this definition, the Internet is magic. It turns experiences from the material world that used to be ridiculously complicated -- involving licking stamps, say, or winding clocks -- into frictionless, flashing and fantastic abstractions. As Lawrence Lessig puts it, "The digital world has more in common with the world of ideas than with the world of things."

But the digital world also brings dysphoria -- a low-level but constant heartbreak that is one of its most controversial side effects. The magic of the Internet -- the recession of the material world in favor of a world of ideas -- is not working for everyone. In essence, we are missing something very worthwhile and identity- forming from our predigital lives. Is it a handwritten letter? Is it an analog phone call? Is it a quality of celluloid film, a multivolume encyclopedia or a leatherbound datebook? Is it a way of thinking or being or even falling in love?

During the process of converting analog audio to digital, something is lost. MP3 compression, in particular, squeezes out certain sounds believed to be superfluous to the ear. That transformation is called "lossy compression." Something we can't quite put our finger on is lost. Comparable lossiness informs digital film, digital images, digital social life.

And that profound conviction that the Web has taken something from us is an idea that is as old as the Web itself. You can find plenty of this sentiment in alarmist best sellers and in articles and reports about attention spans, as well as the superiority of vinyl to MP3s and paper books to e-books. Today, especially as people modulate their Web use by turning to applications (which keep the Web at a distance), Web users feel more confident in voicing their unhappiness than in the past.

Many who remember life before the Web have tried to placate the more anxious of us by arguing that the Internet is just old hat, a translation or merely a retread of other existing institutions, and nothing more. EBay is a bigger, more eclectic Sotheby's. Amazon is a virtual Barnes & Noble. Craigslist is just like the classifieds in the old New York Herald Tribune. Lately there has been a strenuous and sophistic effort to show that the new social media -- Facebook, especially, but there are certainly others -- are just outsize reworkings of earlier forms of social organization, like the elite clubs of the Ivy League that have enjoyed a mystique since the 1960s.

But whether we admit it or not, the Internet and its artifacts are not just like their cultural precedents. They are not even a rough translation -- or a strong misreading -- of those precedents. The Internet has a logic, a tempo, an idiom, a color scheme, a politics and an emotional sensibility all its own. Tentatively, avidly or kicking and screaming, nearly two billion of us have come to take up residence on the Internet, and we have adjusted to its idiosyncratic ways.

This transformation of everyday life includes moments of magic, and an unavoidable experience of profound loss. Any discussion of the Internet that merely catalogs its wonders and does not acknowledge these two central themes is propaganda, and it no longer does it justice.

Copyright International Herald Tribune Feb 21, 2011