ReveNews
Defeating Invisible Man Culture
Jeff Molander beat me to the punch on the big trend that I’ve been thinking about alot recently: how the ad industry is moving from frequency to engagement. This is no small trend here, folks, it’s the culmination of the ten-year cycle that it takes an industry to begin to adopt to a new medium. I was never happy with a CPM model of the web (and will be the first to happily dance a jig on that grave.) Don’t celebrate too quickly, though. We’ve got our work cut out for us, and I found myself thinking over and over again about an essay Barry Joseph wrote in 1998 as part of a post-mort on a collaborative experiment we did with PBS in community.
It was a fear of a growing culture on the Web of “invisible voyeurs,” a different culture than what bred the Web from 1994 to then. In the past seven years, many of these fears have proven quite true, but now the advertising industry is interested in a model of value that values … what might have already been largely lost from the Web and has become more difficult over time to carve from whole cloth?
I’m finding inspiration, though, in how many of the things that “work” still about the Web do so almost in defiance of the Invisible Man Culture that Barry described (including blogging communities like Corante and ReveNews.
The Dilemma of Invisible Man Culture - Barry Joseph, 1998
“The message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces.”
– Marshall McLuhan
Idealistic cyberpunks and insincere corporate ads can wax eloquent all they like about the utopian aspects of the Internet. They promise a world free from prejudice, where fascists fear to roam, and democratic discourse thrives.
However, while I believe this all may be possible someday, we are far from it now and moving in a vastly different direction. Instead of connecting diverse people and giving birth to a revival in meaningful dialogue about the important issues of our time, the World Wide Web, the most visible face of the Internet, has grown into a culture of anonymous voyeurism. And while the Internet might have built the car, we’re the ones behind the wheel steering this path. For example:
- While most companies are still struggling to squeeze a profit out of the Internet, those selling pornography are struggling less than most. And with the Internet, we are no longer simply in the realm of still images; we now have sites like JenniCam, in which people pay money to access the live digital camera in this college student’s bedroom. While Playboy’s profits increase, Jenni pays her way through college.
- The practice of “lurking” is considered normal in on-line discussion spaces, in which people observe conversations without contributing, and without the conversants even knowing that they are being observed. Where else can you enter a circle of people, listen to a conversation without introducing yourself, then leave without ever being acknowledged or uttering a word?
- We go to a Web site, anonymously take the information we came for and leave; if access requires our name or any other identifying information we often refuse, annoyed, and search for the information elsewhere, where we can preserve our anonymity. We take and take from the Web and return but little, if anything, and usually only through building and offering up our own personal sites, where others can now treat us just as remotely as we treated them.
Of course the Web often rises above this, but not often enough. How has the Web, which was created for academics to collaborate on projects, become so perverted from its original purposes? Or, more importantly, why have we decided to use it this way? Perhaps it is due to characteristics of the Internet that are often in conflict.
The Internet offers its users the ability to connect with others, one of the most powerful things any technology can do. At the same time, it allows its user to remain anonymous and even misrepresent themselves, creating spaces of safety or exploration. Separately, both characteristics can benefit our lives. But when these strengths are combined, when the Web is expected to bring new people into our lives while keeping our identity secret, they can come into conflict.
If we met off-line, the moment you saw me you would know, or assume to know, my race, gender, age, and a dozen or so more tidbits about my life. Before I have even opened my mouth, you have already begun to evaluate the potentials or our relationship and the safety of the interaction.
But what do you know if you meet me on-line? Other than what you can gleam from my email address or username, not much at all. If you want to learn more about me, you’re dependant on me deciding to tell you, and tell you honestly. But to share more of myself is to take a risk. All people desire connections with others, but at the same time fear that connection, or perhaps just that process of reaching out, becoming vulnerable.
The less that is known about us, the less the apprehension when developing a relationship. We feel more in control of an unknown situation. But the most likely way to get me to open up is to first share more of yourself. We’re stuck in a catch-22. Who’s willing to take the most risk to get close first, and how far are they willing to go? If neither is very willing, we’re stuck in a game of mutually assured reluctance.
H.G. Wells wrote in his book “The Invisible Man” about a man in a similar situation, who had to negotiate on a daily basis how much of himself would be visible and how much to hide. On the Web, each user has to decide how much of themselves they want to risk showing to be able to connect with another user, who is also in the process of negotiating the same set of conditions. The more we show, the more we risk getting hurt. The less we show, the more superficial and less satisfying our interaction.
People want to both establish strong connections but be as safe as the Internet can allow. Pushed to the extremes, what has resulted is a community of people who want to see but not be seen, ultimately seeing nothing. This is the dilemma of the Invisible Man culture.
As a result, the most sacred cow on the Web is our ability to completely control which end of this spectrum we fall and decide what we do from that position. No one is going to tell ME how much of myself to share or limit what I can do, damnit… or so the defiant attitude goes. Few have successfully challenged this anarchist/libertarian philosophy.
The most visible challenge, the one posed by Congress in its first Communications Decency Act, tried to limit where people could go and what they could say. The response from the on-line world was sharp and immediate. And, for now, successful. We organized and we won. When we go on-line, we want what we want and often refuse to make any commitments to anyone to get it. If expectations or obligations are held out, we leave the site or cry censorship, fascism, and right-wing extremism.
While such extreme responses are undoubtedly necessary at times, where does such a knee-jerk, unrelenting defensiveness leave us? Without a culture that expects more from its members than the permissive Invisible Man Culture, how can we expect to build strong on-line relationships? How can we actually get close enough to anyone to actually hope to make a difference? Without different perspectives and interests that bring our own into question, what are we experiencing other than a mirror image of ourselves, reflected onto the Web? What could be a challenging, communal space becomes a separate, hermetically-sealed world for each user.
People are genuinely interested in having meaningful conversations and developing relationships on-line - and certainly many succeed. But the Invisible Man Culture challenges such attempts from all sides, intruding upon, creating an obstacle to, or undermining virtual interactions that cut against its grain.
So, what can anyone actually do about this situation? How can the dilemma of the Invisible Man Culture be resolved?
Many respond to the Internet’s increasing influence on society by mistakenly focusing on the content of the Web, as can be observed in the battles raging at the local level across the country regarding site filtering in public libraries. People trouble over the effects of allowing both adults and children access over public terminals to sites like playboy.com and JenniCam. While an interesting issue to explore, the answer is irrelevant.
Marshall McLuhan, the dead media theoretician whose allegorical musings can serve as a Rosetta stone to our current struggles with the emerging digital age, instructs us that those who looked at the content of media were missing the point. “Content,” he said, “is the juicy piece of meat that distracts the watchdogs of the mind,” the watchdogs on the look out for the influence underlying the content, the ones that are actually effecting social trends. What we see on JenniCam is simply not important, whether it be a woman in a state of undress or simply an empty room; what is important is the act of watching. In other words, it is not what we find on the Web that is important, but how the way we interact with the Web influences how we interact with others.
Still, it would be a difficult, if not futile, struggle to change the inherent nature of the Web. And, in fact, I am not sure we would want to even if we could; in moderation, there’s nothing wrong with the level of distance the Internet allows us and the opportunities that emerge through the safety created. But, taking McLuhan’s advice, how do we become more aware of how the Internet is changing our relationships with one another? More to the point, how do we slow down the technological trends that increase our social isolation?
It would seem we need to explore alternative structures for interacting on-line which contradict the Invisible Man culture while still honoring the medium’s strengths. This approach focuses not directly on the content, but on the structures that determine how people can relate on-line and what sort of content is generated from the relationships developed.
But before we can challenge this structure, we have to first determine what that structure actually is and how it serves to reproduce the Invisible Man culture wherever it can be found. Looking at your average Web discussion, regardless of the format, we tend to find the following characteristics and expectations (or lack of them):
- There is no limit to the number of participants.
- Members can join the discussion after it has begun and leave before it has ended, resulting in a unique period of time for each member’s participation.
- A participant can remain completely anonymous.
- A participant need have no responsibility for the discussion nor his/her contribution to it.
As a result, many on-line discussions become so populated that it can become difficult for its members to feel significant to the group, which encourages “drive-by postings” written in haste, without a sense of responsibility for the effects of the attention-grabbing contribution. Within these forums, many try to create substantial dialogues, and some do succeed, but only while dodging flames and dealing with the anarchic/libertarian rules of law within some indeterminate community in which people are continually joining and leaving.
So what might one propose as an alternative to this approach? What would you come up with?
We began by focusing on our core belief that one of a Web site’s greatest assets is it users, let alone its greatest source of content. A site that values this relationship can seek to create an environment on-line that advocates for and assists the users to develop on-line relationships and generate content out of what occurs amongst them.
This arises from our assumption that Web users can be both consumers and creators; most people are both interesting and interested in one another; given the appropriate tone and direction, most people can be articulate and initiate contact with one another; and the Web can make this connecting process more visible, concrete, and safer than is possible off-line.
We eventually decided to explore an approach which focused on organizing small groups, with a set number of conversants, who would agree to participate for a defined period of time. All of the members would be introduced to one another, so the face of the community would be visible from the start, and each would be held accountable for their comments and interactions with the others, first by us but eventually by their fellow participants.
On their own, these details might not seem remarkable or up to the challenge of a grand experiment. But when considered in the context of the Web and its Invisible Man culture, what they present to the users is quite radical indeed. Instead of reproducing the Invisible Man culture, it would challenge its assumptions and create… something else. What exactly, we didn’t know. But we were itching to find out.
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