The New, New Net Vision - Time For A Change

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Although the Net has many dimensions.... it is a communication tool, an interactive experience, a repository of information and a teaching device which holds the promise of reaching out to the young and the disadvantaged as well as the educated and elite... the quintessential experience on the Web is the formation of communities of common interests connected by a thread or web in space. That thread is the ability to communicate, instantly, with anyone in the world with an email address.

In the April 5, 2000 Upside Today site, Aaron Goldberg gives his opinion in "He's Not Going There Anymore", that visiting new sites has "become drudgery because there's no new "value" or compelling reason to go there."

Goldberg contends that even by flooding the airwaves with advertising and giving away as much margin as possible, even huge cash prizes, neither approach is working. His conclusion: " Face it, the online audience is tired. They're tired of ads, they're tired of email coupons, they're tired of banners, they're tired of bait and switch, they're tired of semi-cleverly personalized communication. "

Goldberg's final conclusion is that it's time to think about new ways of building traffic. His suggestions have to do with training or education of a particular audience segment and building community. So, if one remembers where the Net began, this is a kind of back to the future concept, but one which has a lot of merit. It is also one way the Net might have evolved on it's own had it not taken on a sort of radioactive halo of instant wealth, making overnight tycoons of young men who'd put in a few months work from a cluttered dorm room.

When the Net was a sleepy little global village where scientists and researchers hung out and exchanged esoteric data, no one really felt the earth move when this or that technical innovation took place. Now, however , the Internet is a $500 billion market. When old line giants like Time Warner can be swallowed whole by AOL, when companies like Amazon.com can roar out of nowhere to dominate the industry and dwarf many of the Fortune 500, we are definitely no longer in Kansas, Dorothy. And for the moment, the lion's share of the energy and investment on the Net are going to back ecommerce in one form or another and in the effort to be sure the Net is ubiquitous, that you can access the Net from your cell phone, or in your car, or on your wrist watch as Dick Tracy or Batman might do. You can already carry your own satellite in a briefcase so you can broadcast your own Net content from the middle of a desert or a rainforest. No need to be out of touch.

Of course, markets tell us where they want to go, not the other way around, but will the ecommerce phase continue to be the dominant mode? Will the ability to buy and sell on the Net continue to enthrall us, or will it gradually become like the corner grocery store, convenient, maybe even glamorous, but only one component of what the Net allows us to do?

Marshall McLuhan, the ground breaking writer and teacher who electrified audiences in the sixties with his vision of a "global village" formed by mass communication, foresaw that the characteristics of an electronic medium such as television, much more than its content, would attract the user and shape his experience. McLuhan summed up his views in his book "The Medium is the Message". Some mediums, particularly in the beginning stages, are so captivating that their power to transmit words, pictures, emotions, energy, transcends even the content which they are transmitting. This might be called the recognition factor: we recognize the power in the potential of a new medium. When radio was born, or motion pictures, then the talkies, and finally television, we were all mesmerized. Their day to day content--commercials, or serials or adventures or comedy --was not as transfixing as knowing they had the power to keep us all spell bound by overwhelming emotions at moments of national peril, tragedy or triumph. Such moments were the death of John F. Kennedy and man's landing on the Moon.

It is this power to focus the world's attention and to expand and deepen our experience by making us part of a transforming event, which captures the imagination of man with the media. The Internet, however, adds an entirely new dimension in that it frees us from our dependence on a broadcaster and allows us the possibility for communication among ourselves, not through the lens of broadcasters or film or TV directors, or screened by the editorial boards and policies of newspapers, but each of us, on our own, may now decide to reach out and touch any one in any nation in the world instantly.

Because this new medium of the Internet is so powerful and so filled with promise, particularly the promise of community building, it is vital to understand the implications of having access to the most powerful communications network in history, to learn its dynamics and understand what is at stake in its future.

Although the Net has many dimensions.... it is a communication tool, an interactive experience, a repository of information and a teaching device which holds the promise of reaching out to the young and the disadvantaged as well as the educated and elite... the quintessential experience on the Web is the formation of communities of common interests connected by a thread or web in space. That thread is the ability to communicate, instantly, with anyone in the world with an email address. Physical proximity is no longer required for someone to become close and part of your world. Your neighbor in cyberspace may be the woman in Australia writing a study on your specialized field.

It is this sense of community, this special capability of global networking, which is unique to cyberspace and makes it a special and distinct kind of experience. It is true that you can telephone Italy or Nairobi . But it is also true that you are not likely to find yourself chatting with a half dozen or dozen total strangers, one from Naples, another from Nairobi, one from Singapore, another from Sweden. There is a sense of connection and immediacy in being able to reach out to the most remote corner of the globe in an instant. This capability of the Net to break down masses of people into communities of interest is a critical factor. Companies, like Kodak, which depend on fostering knowledge and transforming it into actual achievement, have found that knowledge is best achieved by communities of interest with concentrated , shared learning and a focus on action to achieve a particular goal. When communities choose to share their knowledge and strategies, " to use more of what (we ) know, to create opportunities for private knowledge to be made public and tacit knowledge to be made explicit", when powerful learning forums begin to evolve, both formal and informal, then we will perhaps discover the full power and richness of the Net's capabilities.

So, we agree, it is time for new models to attract people to Web sites. Even before man sold and bartered, he reached out to connect and learn. In the end, the Net may provide the means for man to return to his roots and form communities, this time on a global basis.