Michael H. Goldhaber

[Note: I recently took part in a conference in New York at the New School University on "The Internet as Playground and Factory," chiefly organized by Trebor Scholz, a professor there. What follows are my reflections afterward.]

As with others, if a bit belatedly, I join in offering kudos to Trebor Scholz and everyone else involved in bringing about and running the conference, handling the complex logistics, volunteering their time, etc. The conference was a success for me in stimulating a lot of thoughts, introducing me to some quite interesting new people, as well as renewing a few old friendships. What I heard from Catherine Driscoll, Gabriella Coleman, Fred Turner and Chris Kelty seemed especially fresh and insightful, and it was probably no accident that the last three spoke in a session delightfully moderated by Ted Byfield. There were more than a few other talks I was sorry to miss. However, based on the majority of the sessions I ended up attending, including the final plenary — and maybe I chose badly — what I heard had also had a negative side, which I think is worth addressing.

The Internet is arguably the largest collective creation of humanity in all of history. In various degrees it has incorporated an ever-growing series of inventions, modes of participation and very widespread involvement in one or another of its forms, from e-mail to blogs to social media to search engines etc, etc. All of this activity I think fits neatly under the broad rubric of work and/or play, to which the conference seemingly was addressed. Yet I think from Trebor’s intro on, the conference on the whole mischaracterized this vast and unparalleled achievement, seeing it as primarily a source of profits for capitalists. The prime evidence, beyond an ideological bias in favor of such views, comes from the fact that corporations officially own many websites and try, sometimes with some success to make money, principally by selling advertising and by offering data they collect as tools for advertisers.

In order to be outraged at this, a number of speakers at the conference take it for granted or loudly proclaim that very bad results can come from this, including the highly nonsensical claim that extracting data on from the actions, say, of Facebook users, amounts to infinite exploitation. This is a total misuse and misunderstanding both of what goes on with advertising and of Marx’s (anyway antiquated) formulations. Marx would have laughed uproariously at this absurdity, I suspect.

Incidentally, the same person who made that bizarre claim misstated Google’s stock policy — falsely asserting that employees do not own shares — and misunderstands Facebook’s terms of service — implying that the company asserts rights to use personal creations in other settings for its own reasons, rather than to permit users to post pretty much where they expect to while still acknowledging their ownership of their own “intellectual property.” In each case, the bias is towards making capitalism re the Internet seem considerably worse than it actually is.

It is not just one person’s shocking incomprehension that is at issue, for a number of other speakers focussed on the practice of collecting data from users as the basis for their intense criticism of the Internet, as well as for proof that it is fundamentally a capitalist tool. Advertising is an annoyance at best, in my view, but the idea that there are some highly vital data about personal preferences that advertisers can grab hold of and somehow influence purchases strikes me as exaggerated, unimportant and of basically trivial impact on individuals. That’s so even assuming, which is often not the case, that these data are at all useful in drawing Internet users’ attention to what is advertised. These ads rarely work, because we are already inundated with too many ads, leading us to ignore them however they are presented. Further, knowing that somebody was interested in a category of item or service as recently as as a few minutes ago may be utterly useless in reaching that person now, because they quite likely already made a relevant purchase and do not want more ( A new suit? A new mortgage? A new plane reservation? —Too late, already chosen or rejected.)

Likewise, we are supposed to be very worried about governments finding out our political convictions or other damaging information. Since when do inquisitions bother with accurate fact collection? Domestic spy agencies from the KGB to the FBI act on the basis of misunderstandings, rumor, innuendo, outright lies, prejudice, corruption, etc. By asserting that “Big Brother is Watching” we only help spread the paranoia that in Orwell’s novel the slogan was designed to create. Detailed and precise data collection has very little to do with it.

Anyway all such data collection is done only because capitalist firms have found few other ways to make the Internet — and the services through it that people enjoy — pay for themselves. Advertisers and governments are always desperate for new tools, but that doesn’t imply that the tools on offer will be of any great use to them, or even that very much will be paid for such data or for very long. Meanwhile, the Internet keeps functioning in other ways of much greater import. As I have long argued, and find more valid than ever, the Internet is primarily a system for individuals to obtain attention for themselves, even if they do make use of channels provided by corporations. (By the way, Lenin supposedly said, more or less, “the capitalist will be happy to sell you the rope you will use to hang him;” why do I suspect some at the conference would say, ”Don’t buy the rope; the capitalist will make a profit” ?) Using these tools adroitly we may get some form of socialism, or we may simply find that those who do use them have created a new kind of post-capitalist class economy. In the latter case, would-be supporters of socialism would certainly need to understand the new system if they hope to make progress in their preferred direction. For those wearing the heavy blinders that many did at this conference, no such enlightenment would be possible.

As is typical of most academic conferences, a great many of the papers only discuss trivia because that is the route to academic success. This seems particularly true in the sorts of theories put forward under the guise of cultural studies; I found it indicative that after the conference several people think the most exciting thing that occurred was a discussion of in terms of Said’s “Orientalism” as applied to a miscellany including the “Mechanical Turk” and and Chinese ‘World-of-Warcraft gold” hunters. The point is not wrong, and it may reveal a bit of bias, but given that numerous participants in Internet firms hail from or work in various Asian countries and are treated with just about the same respect as anyone else, the charges of Orientalist exoticization seem overwrought and beside the point. This is simply not anything to get excited about except for scoring purely academic points. It says nothing about the value of the Internet, or even about how it might better promote international exchange and understanding.
Along the same lines, another conference participant is fond of asserting that billions of people have been dispossessed by capitalism. As he uses it, this seems more a rhetorical stratagem to criticize capitalism than any indication that he wants to try to see how the Internet might be used to help ameliorate that suffering. In some ways capitalism is to blame for such immiseration, but the situation is complicated. So many would not be suffering were it not that since the advent of industrial capitalism population has grown rapidly as famines and infant mortality have been much reduced, even in the worst-off countries. This due in part to better food distribution, higher crop yields, better hygiene, vaccination, some spread of drugs such as antibiotics, and the like, for which capitalism certainly deserves some credit.

In most social systems historically, there were many who were supernumerary; in the past most such people were killed in infancy, starved to death or had to to take up vows that kept them from reproducing. Less of that happens now, though they still live with much less than others in the same culture, and very often live permanently quite close to starvation. It is a huge and horrendous problem, but not one that should be used for scoring purely rhetorical points. The Internet does hold out great promise in this regard, but that is not a promise that many at the conference seemed much interested in investigating, forwarding or even discussing.

Another comment at the final session, from Jodi Dean, struck me. It is that she had finally been convinced by Christian Fuchs that “communism” cannot be achieved without “computers.” One reason this struck me is that it is such an old idea, dating back to the 1950’s, when the Soviets and others — such as the Western economist Wassily Leontief — in fact devoted considerable efforts to investigating how to use mainframe computers to do better with central planning. But I also found it odd that in the context of this conference Professor Dean would say “computers” rather than “the Internet,” which has much more promise in terms of bringing about some sort of participatory socialism.

Jodi Dean is well-known for promulgating the thought of “communicative capitalism” to describe the Internet,,etc. It’s very easy to claim that whatever change has occurred is just some new sort of capitalism, but this hardly an analytic success, as I see it. Of course any term can be stretched to mean whatever one chooses, but hiding distinctions in this way is not necessarily perspicuous. To be sure, Dean is far from alone in engaging in such broad use of terms like capitalism and capital. “Human resource” people widely speak of “human capital,” though it hard to see how a human a can be capital (for herself), and certainly not simply by being educated as they imply. Likewise, Pierre Bourdieu was fond of such terms as “cultural capital,” which again is certainly not capital in the Marxian sense, and does not suppose the same sort of exploitation as plain old capital. Many on the left, such as David Harvey, and many not at all on the left take most changes in the life around them to be proof of the continued strength of capitalism, when an entirely different possibility is utterly neglected. Inflating a formerly precise term in this fashion should be avoided if one wishes to speak with any sort of intellectual or analytic precision, certainly in a conference such as this one. But that is not widely done.

All this highlights for me that what some cleave to as “theory” does not seem deserving of that name. I started out my professional life as a theoretical physicist, and as I changed fields still referred to myself as a social theorist. I love theory, if it is good theory — of many sorts from astronomical to zoological, from political to literary theory. By good theory I mean a search for new understanding , often through new concepts of what the world is, how it works, how it can work, and what it should be. Such theorizing has to be self-examining, subject to doubt and critique, always a bit tentative, and certainly constantly tested for its coherence and meaningfulness against new ranges of experience, as well as in comparison with other theories. It should of course strive to be rational, but it can never and probably should never be that purely. To get anywhere, not all hypotheses can be put in question at the same time, yet nothing should be beyond examination. Theory must always be seeking to add new kinds of observations and predictions, examining how it comports or contrasts with other theories, whether it can be improved in its logic and strength of conclusions, where it is on possibly shaky grounds , in what ways it can be useful rather than merely descriptive or pejorative, when it is prematurely reductionist, when it can no longer easily be extended, when there are aspects of the world it has has overlooked, etc.

Good theory must always be — to use a favorite post-modernist term — transgressive —as well as audacious, surprising and offering up new concepts, which lead to new percepts. But even the best theory, by the time it is articulated and typeset, is surely wrong in some significant aspects. It always must be subject to critique, modification, enlargement, and eventual abandonment. Any textual formulation of it is by no means Holy Writ. It is not to be quoted with an air of devotion, or as if by itself it stands for or can prove anything.

For too many people at the conference, I found, too much is taken for granted; too much is asserted without compelling argument; existing texts are treated as if sacrosanct and unarguably correct, as if they were bits of the Bible and we were fundamentalists; and metaphoric or analogical points are taken for logic or careful analysis. (Though thought — as Derrida among others has indicated — can never fully escape metaphor, that is no reason not to seek to do so.) Again, too much that is said seems to be intended as nothing other than academic preening. That leads to highly mistaken assumptions, focussing on trivia, unwarranted smugness, and other irksome behavior. It makes intrinsically intelligent people come off as fools or jerks.

Three things are widely held to be true in the western world today: first, that we live in a more or less strictly capitalist society; second, that, except possibly for some sort of socialism, nothing other than capitalism is possible; and third, that capitalism is much to be preferred to socialism. (What socialism is generally taken to mean — especially in the US, but increasingly elsewhere — is usually some variant of Stalinism. With this definition, if the first two hypotheses are taken as correct, a good argument can indeed be made for the third.) Many or even most participants at this conference reject only the third hypothesis, pointing to or taking for granted the evils of capitalism, while also leaving unstated and little thought how a humane socialism would work. But how do we know that our system is primarily capitalist? Certainly not just by assertion. Nor by metaphor. And equally not by superficial observation of capitalist forms and notions, for the question has to be what other forms might be present at a less explicit level. In other words, without new concepts we cannot clearly perceive what is around us.
But having made the conceptual break with capitalism, perhaps most participants find it too hard to take a further step; perhaps many of you already feel yourselves too far out on a limb. Or, as I suspect, an adherence to Marxism is enough to secure a comfortable academic niche, so why even think of questioning it? One can publish endless papers finding some way to criticize, say, the Internet as inherently and irrevocably capitalist, without having to have any thoughts of doing anything about it. (One speaker even sneeringly joked that he was going to use Facebook to organize a march on Washington in favor of single-payer health care. Many smaller but effective organizing projects have in fact been accomplished through Facebook, but the built-in sneer evidently better preserves his academic pretenses.)

That’s not how to do good theory. The humanist tradition quite honorably has taken up exact quotation, and a desire to get back to the text, in the case of poetry —in the largest sense — or in studying what a particular author thought or said. Such activities are commendable, but they should not be mistaken for theory, any more than a portion of a painting or snatches of a symphony would be . Not even a mathematical formula, not even “E equals m c- squared,” can rest in that light.

All this is true of scientific theories, but it is even more vital to consider when dealing with theories that refer to the state or the future of humanity, for through its own actions the human word is in endless flux. What were indisputable “laws” cease to be, what was the state of affairs has changed. Marx himself wrote in 1851, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Whatever he exactly meant by that then, it has value for us only if reinterpreted to apply to now. Marx’s own work and that of everyone who came after him — in whatever tradition — is today part of a similar “nightmare.” To live now, we must be fully awake to now, not letting the clanking chains of our dreamt ghosts entrap us in fears and formulations of the dead past., not the past of the1860’s, nor the 1960’s, nor even more recent times.

We can expect our ever-greater immersion in the web and the Internet to alter our psyches —and so, our world. [These thoughts were engendered by my nearly simultaneous reading of Jaques Lacan’s Ecrits and the book, “The Hyperlinked Society” that I mentioned in earlier posts Michel Bauwens had asked me to read, as well as an article by Clive Thompson that I alluded to earlier. Each book/article was only vaguely suggestive at best, so don’t blame any for this.]

Almost a quarter century ago, Sherry Turkle presciently described the personal computer in the title of her book “the Second Self.” This was before the graphical user interface and before the web, when  most computers still had green or black screens in which text appeared in one typeface. Those early personal computers responded to and seemingly added to the manipulations  or programming attempts of their users — especially the children that were Turkle’s focus, in such a way that they seemed to be an extension of self, yet not quite the same as oneself.

The second-self notion is now even more apt, except that the connection between device and (first) self is even tighter than that.  Like mirrors, one’s computer — along with PDAs, smart phones, etc. — is a projection and reflection of oneself, a kind of necessary auxiliary to one’s own memory, personality and intentions. Certainly today, all sorts of one’s preferences and personality are reflected back to one.

Taking in Our “Objects”

As psychoanalysts understand, those we pay attention to end up becoming part of us, what they call our objects. Everyone has some internalized image or model of primary caregivers, the first people to whom we paid attention, the ones to whom we generally paid most attention in our most formative years, and also those to whom we primarily looked for attention. But we also introject in this way everyone we pay attention to, whether in direct conversation, in the classroom, by reading, on the stage or movie or TV screen or whatever.  Since each person’s world is formed by her own patterns of attention paying and desires for attention, the self as a psychological phenomenon is largely composed of the taking in and partial integration of all these moments.

Unconsciously at least, there is no sharp division between yourself and your “objects.” Your parents and everyone else you pay significant attention to shape you to some degree, and in ways you cannot easily be aware of. You  take in attitudes, emotional stances, ideas, ways of speaking and moving, and much else. You react also, and those reactions of loyalty, love, anger, fear, disgust, need,  hate — and, as a result of the latter ones, guilt — also form you.

Now comes the computer, (along with smart phones, PDAs, and such) which greatly integrates both your own sense of self, through mastery of various computer skills, through your own attempts at expressions, through lists such as address lists of who is important to you, and in the case of the Web, your bookmarks, hyperlinks, your connections through e-mail, blogs, comments, multiplayer games, virtual worlds such as Second Life, lists, social networks, etc. You are tied through attention and partial attention to and from a wide range of others. As Clive Thompson points out this now means that through such services as Facebook newsfeeds, Twitter (and, I would add, e-mail, listservs, text messaging and cell-phoning) you are quite constantly in a mode of attention paying with many ”objects.”

What happens here, fairly clearly is that the boundaries of self change. You draw in others, and you too are drawn in. What was your introjected object, the set of conscious and repressed impressions of those close to you, is extended now through the immediacy of what is stored in your hard drives or on the Internet. What is inside your own mind and what is in your computer becomes less and less clear sharply separated, less and less permanently one or the other. Likewise,the boundaries between your own computer and the entire Internet keep becoming more and more permeable, so that the difference between your world and yourself, between your objects and yourself becomes less and less evident.

Dwelling

An analogy to bear in mind is home (and sometimes workplace as well). One of the main reasons it is important not to be homeless is that home is a place full of resonances of our attachments to others, from those who live with us there, to the evidence of the attention we have paid and of those who have paid attention to us, in photos, in books, in all manner of artifacts we associate with one person or another. Home is also, ideally a place of refuge and insulation in which to sort through and revisit the various interactions we have had in the wider world. It is also a place to which those who seek our attention, want to pay attention to us,  or — most often— both, know how to at least attempt to reach us. So your home also represents or extends yourself, or that of all the selves who share this space with you — usually your family.

To a considerable degree, one’s neighborhood and larger community are an external extension of this, an area where selves merge and boundaries are somewhat fuzzy. Roughly speaking, the farther from home you go, the sharper the boundaries between self and others. On the Internet, however, distance as such is irrelevant. Even such boundaries as exist we easily move across when we so desire. We are more and more part of a single super-self, at the same time attempting, at least if old enough, to maintain our individuality through exclusion of real attention to certain others, in fact most others. In sizing and shaping our world to our own internal rhythms, we enlarge and entangle ourselves, until self and effective world become nearly one.

The Superself in Action

People today constantly check to  see whether anyone is remembering them at the moment, paying them attention through trying to contact them, while in so doing these others are to receive attention at the same time. The computer or smartphone is an extension of oneself, far more, say than an old-fashioned telephone or an actual mailbox, and the other appears within this “second self” this extension of self, this hyper mirror, or, one could say this portable parent, the partially introjected mother. The other appears then, already introjected, already swallowed, as it were into the complex interiority one now feels. Further moving in this direction are the social networking sites, the virtual worlds one might inhabit,the blogs one regularly receives or reads, the comment lists to the blogs, etc. If the laptop or desktop or smart phone is in effect within the boundaries of oneself, then paying attention becomes an increasingly internal kind of act.

I have previously described the act of paying attention as aligning with the mind (or even the bodily movements or emotions ) of the attention receiver. This alignment is now even more apparent, occurring as it does within the extended confines of one’s own minds. Attention becomes a relationship with one’s own objects, even though there is a mutuality which also allows these objects to represent real others.

Onwards

As I suggested before, with its constantly added affordances, the Internet draws more and more of us in, and draws each of  us in further and further, tying us more and more directly to the others who in some way connect to us, in some way gain our attention and vice versa. Our social networking pages, such as Facebook, for instance,  come to resemble a partial census of our internalized objects, both reminding us of them when we check out our own pages, and revealing part of our superself to others who care to check. Those who do will overlap their own superself, so that the Net becomes an ever tighter set of pseudo-synapses that ultimately join us all.

New political loyalties as well as other convictions about how the world must change will grow out of this, and already are doing so. The Obama campaign and the widening commitment to oppose global warming are examples. Increasingly, I suspect, a new kind of psyche emerges from all this, and with it a new way of interacting with, and in fact defining, the world.

A superself in some ways is the essence of a god, the shared, communal transcendent sense of what is good, right, mete, just, and at the same time unstatable, mystical. So in all likelihood, the Internet will not only be the basis of a new economy but the holy space of a new, empowering and powerful religion that will draw more and more of us in.

American and probably world financial institutions continued to reel today as an outcome of the credit collapse that began with the sub-prime mortgage mess. Because primary and secondary mortgages and other forms of personal and institutional debt were completely essential for whatever economic strength the old economy has shown since 2001, it seems probable to me that the latest failures are just a harbinger of worse money-economy times to come. However this plays out in detail, it is very likely that the new Attention Economy will grow in importance, and possibly irrevocably take the lead over the old economy, in more and more visible ways.

The facts remain that

1. the money economy is fundamentally an industrial-market economy, based on the production and sale of standardized goods, which

2. due to growing productivity continues to require a decreasing fraction of the world’s potential workforce.

Since 2001, the US economy kept going fitfully, through creating further inequality, through purely financial maneuvering, such as by hedge funds, through consumers’ making ends meet by cashing in on higher home prices through second mortgages, through added construction both residential and commercial, and through a growing luxury market to tend to the newly rich and superrich. That was clearly destined to come undone at some point, and now the point has been reached.
The lack of safeguards in investments, speculation and debt creation allowed the 2001-07 “growth”, and without it the old economy would have gotten anemic that much sooner.

But now, unstable debt instruments piled one on top of the other have led to a disaster that will extend far beyond the financial sector. Pension funds and mutual funds will mostly have dismal or negative returns, which will in themselves affect buying power for many retirees. Businesses will be unable to obtain loans they need to even maintain current efforts. Layoffs and declining work weeks will spread to many sectors. Construction — both residential and commercial — will be curtailed for some time to come. Housing prices will continue to fall as new would-be buyers will find it hard to obtain even prime mortgages. Tax revenues will decline, leading, very likely to government layoffs. And further cuts will arise because of these curtailments in consumer wealth.

More people without work, and finding it difficult, for instance, to afford college or medical care and the like will further involve themselves with the Attention Economy, especially online. As I mentioned in the previous post, the Internet draws in in new modes of attention- seeking and paying, and these in turn draw in more people more tightly to this instantiation of the Attention Economy.. Sooner or later, probably, the monetary economy will revive to a degree, but the growth meanwhile of the Attention Economy will make it less central and less necessary.

Given all this, what can government do, and what kind of program should Obama be putting forth if he hopes to win now? ( I am not yet sure how much government can do, or how much Obama is likely to propose or actually do, but I am pretty sure a McCain triumph would be by far the worse possibility.)
Here are some obvious steps:
1. Take steps to increase and universalize access to the Internet, by a combination of regulation, tax policy and direct subsidy. See to it that affordable and usable two-way Internet connections, including wi-fi, high speed, etc. spread access to all. Encourage easy to use versions of hardware and software, so more can be online. Increase transparency and responsiveness of government agencies at all levels to Internet communications, and make sure what is done online by government is archived permanently. Modify intellectual property laws to allow easier sharing of good ideas and expressions.

2. Devise formulas to modify tariff agreements so that too cheap foreign labor is discouraged in favor of policies that promote decent pay. Also improve environmental standards and working conditions for foreign factories, etc. If done right, these new requirements should aid ordinary people on both sides.

3. Press for a wide range of energy- and resource-saving inventions and practices, and see that they are put into effect. Develop renewable energy methods and devices, and try to sell these abroad, offering them at reduced cost to the neediest countries.

4. Put out-of-work construction workers to work rebuilding some infra-structure such as certain bridges, and making other infrastructure, such as airports and roads more energy conserving.
Vastly increasing educational opportunities in ways that genuinely fit possible careers to to talents and proclivities. That would include new medical and nursing schools.

5. New regulation for financial sector that is robust enough to prevent the equivalent of the curent boom-bubble-bust cycle and ove -generous rewards to bankers who are and financial officers doing little but taking money out one pocket and putting it in another (sometimes known as theft)

…More later…..

The Hyperlinked Society, the book I’ve referred to before, is a  book which shares the common faults of printed versions of conferences. Though the very word “conference” suggests the possibility of a rich dialogue among participants, the printed version tends to suggest no attention paid to each other. Here, for instance, there are two chapters on maps and the Web — the second much better than the first — each covering much the same topics, but not noticeably referring to the other.

What makes all this more problematic than it might be is that the stated subject is poorly chosen. Hyperlinks are ways to move attention from one web page to another. They are vital for the web crawlers or spiders that allow search engines to work, and without them the web as it was about 20 years ago would never have come into being. But what about everything besides hyperlinks that go along with them? Compare this topic with having a conference on the effect of screw threads on society. It would be hard to imagine modern life without the use of screws, bolts, threaded pipes, and threaded jar caps, but, still, singling out this one invention used in so many different ways would not really get you too far. Watches and plumbing both relied on screw threads, but that connection is not very revealing about how watches or plumbing affected modern society.

Likewise, from the very first, the hyperlink was merely one link in the chain of inventions that have made the Web significant. Hyperlinks would not have been of much use had they not been preceded by the personal computer, the graphical user interface, the computer mouse, packet switching and the Internet backbone. Since Tim Berners-Lee came up with the Web framework, tens of thousands more software innovations have come pouring forth. These include browsers, bookmarks, bookmark bars, cookies, java, mp3’s, file sharing, php, SQL, pdf’s, web portals, blogging software, easy to use listservs, community sites (Craigslist), on-line auctions, a whole series of search engine algorithms, e-Bay, Amazon, Yahoo! and Google, WordPress, quicktime, social media, multiplayer games, Wikipedia and wikis in general, SecondLife, VOIP, cloud computing, etc. Plus the negatives such as computer viruses, worms, spam, phishing, etc. And all sorts of hardware innovations in connections to the Internet at both ends, such as cable modems, wi-fi, smart phones, digital cameras, search-engine server farms, and so considerably on. Some of this depended on the hyperlink, and some did not. Singling out this one invention leads only to murk.

Tighter and Stronger

Attention is basically not mentioned in the conference report, even though changing the direction of our attention is what selecting a hyperlink most universally does. It is much more fundamental to see the Web in terms of attention than in terms of the technical device of hyperlinks. As each new invention of software or any other form of expression is added via the Web, the resources that can be used or rearranged for future additions grow, and the more people will find some way to channel their attention through it, leading to still more inventions, which, not so incidentally, are modes of attention getting in their own right. As is also not said, as this goes on, the effect is that new modes of attention getting and attention paying are added. No matter what personal tastes, styles, predilections, attitudes, and forms of comfort someone has, some aspect of the Web is likely to be able to fit with them, to provide channels of attention highly suited to all that. And the fit will continue to get better and better. (Even those now not linked at all, with no computers or modems, for instance, will be pulled in through new hardware initiatives and inventions as well as more complelling software of all sorts.An interesting example of how the attraction increases and changes with new resources such as Facebook and Twitter and continuous updating of minor news of each person involved is offered in “I’m so Totally, Digitally Close to You,” by Clive Thompson in the NY Times.)

These reflections suggest a key prediction, not found in the book, of course. The Internet, which encompasses the Web and more, and its attendant devices and software together are like a single giant and growing Black Hole, pulling us all in faster and faster, and ending up much more attractive than all else. And just as light is not released by an ordinary black hole, attention is more and more tightly held through this all, where instant or very fast responses are the standard. (More than ever, traveling far away in space, say to Mars, would put one out of the loop, and probably unacceptably so. While the real worlds of the Internet expand to include all sorts of “virtual worlds,” the reality of the planets fades in importance. When we travel inward to virtual worlds, we find many others there; by comparison the planets are barren, devoid of anyone who can pay us attention, and far less evocative.)

But What About the “Real World”?

David Weinberger, at the end of his piece in the book, comments on people who fear that Web users will ignore “the ‘real’ world,” and then he adds a footnote to point out that he puts quotes around “real” because there is “only one world.” His point of course is that there is nothing unreal about the Web. I wouldn’t say it is much use to assert, for these purposes, that there is only one world, for each person has a certain horizon of attention the uniquely defines what, practically speaking is this person’s world. Seeing the Internet as black hole means that the parts of it that each person connects to more and more tightly is an increasing part of that person’s reality.

The word “real,” as in “get real” is of course often used pejoratively, to imply someone is not dealing with “reality.” Reality in that formulation can mean “economic reality — i.e. the old money economy — or simply material reality, as in, say, tables, chairs and breakfast cereal. But in fact reality for each person not only continually changes but is refracted an reflected through the minds of other people. The growing Internet is increasingly the channel of that refraction and reflection, that re-pointing of attention to what now becomes most real.

“Real,” then suggests a contrast with “unreal,” but the latter can mean ideal or abstract, as in mathematical truths, or wishful thoughts, hallucinations, paranoid fears, or simply works in progress, (not yet “realized”) or simply the so-called virtual worlds instantiated by such “games” as SecondLife. If each person has in effect her own world defined by the reaches of her attention, it will contain some elements of all of these, but the parts that can be viewed as real are the parts that cannot be changed purely by that person’s wishes or emotional changes without the intervention of others, but can be changed when others agree. Within the new black hole of the web, even mathematics (or religious truths) ceases to be purely an unchangeable ideal but rather depends on agreement among a circle of others. Some supposed “real world” entities, such as prices, lose a clear claim to reality, while other entities, like global warming, which cannot be individually perceived, increase in reality, because they emerge in a new consensus. We —or rather, some of us— are more and more in touch with aspects of the old “concrete reality” that we would be kept from were it not for the Net.

How that effects our psyches I will say more of in the next installment.