I was a relatively early user of the internet which I first encountered at university in 1991 or so when it was strange geeky curiosity. Memories are vague now but I remember doing some textual pings of an early White House website (long before the name was appropriated by one of the first cybersquatting porn sites) and the subsequent appearance of Gopher and then Mosaic.
As time went by I kept the interest up, much to the amusement of my IT colleagues at work who couldn’t understand why a mere legal officer like myself could have an interest in an obscurity with little obvious business use. In fact I remember well getting a slap on the wrists for sending a message by the unreliable medium of email rather than have one of our typing staff produce a letter for me (it turned out that the recipient, a project manager at a then major IT company, didn’t check his emails much).
I do not write this to big up my credentials or to lay claim to some expertise that I do not have. To this day I am not especially tech-savvy in a gadgety sort of way. Rather it is to establish that I have been round the block a bit.
One effect of being around the net for a bit is that I have not lost the early ideals and netiquette that I absorbed then; the second is, I hope, some sense of perspective on how things have developed and, for what it’s worth, I can’t say that I am completely content.
It would be trite – and wrong – to grump about where the internet is now compared to where it could have been, at least in so many words. It would be idle to list the ways in which the world has changed in the two decades since pinging text messages around the world was a novelty. And yet…
I mentioned that my sensibilities were formed in an earlier age and to this day some of my eccentricities in this respect may seem quaint to a younger generation. I routinely block all cookies unless I absolutely need them for identity purposes; I keep ad-block up to date and if a site is impertinent enough to tell me to turn it off then that site is forever anathema (!) Although I understand the economics I detest online advertising and block it as much as I can. And so far I’ve done ok in my grumpy way. But a tipping point is now upon me and it is manifesting itself via my old friend Google.
Getting nostalgic again, I first heard tell of the new-fangled Google search engine in the late nineties – almost certainly in the Guardian’s Science and Technology supplement but maybe in New Scientist. It became then and has been since my default search engine along with most of the rest of the world (until that time I think I had used Alta Vista) although I occasionally use Ixquick of which I am also fond.
As you might expect I got narked when ad-words came along but I tolerate them as I also do ads on gmail (although adblock helps control these too). I also learned to tune them out and ignore them. But I think that something has now noticeably changed and it has everything to do, I think, with Search Engine Optimisation. As an aside I think search engine optimisation is analogous to working out ways of defeating spam-filters but maybe that’s one best left for another day.
Increasingly, it seems to me that Google noticeably serves up to me the results which creators want me to find as opposed to those which I actually want to find. This is particularly irksome when I am looking for information and the returns are from mediators who want to sell me that information (equally irksome is being served a string of sites which have done no more than copy and paste from Wikipedia and contain no original content at all).
This is shifting my relationship with Google and other search engines and I’m starting to think about my whole relationship with the online world.
Over my years of blogging (which I have been doing since 2002) and in an unpublished journal I have frequently returned to the notion of what a chap called Chris Jary referred to as “the quest for the whole Ian” in 1999/2000 – an attempt to keep the day to day realities of my life in line with my concept of myself – an ethical theme in other words. Some of this came through, for example, in my notes from last year’s holiday.
Bringing these together is leading me to wonder how I can rethink my online interactions without actually dropping off the grid which I do not, in any event, want to do.
I don’t want to sound high-minded about this. I am convinced that in fact there is no general grasp of just how huge a change the emergence of a pervasively interconnected world makes possible. That is something which is informing some of my thoughts related to work and is also influential on my thoughts about my personal life.
The fact remains though that I view with increasing distaste the way much of the surface of the internet is going. Partly this is the dominance of commercial interests in that surface net and partly it is the behaviour of my fellow citizens. I think that it is great that we can comment on newspaper articles for example, but don’t much bother to read comments because of the cess-pit of abusive, spiteful, ignorant vapidity into which they have descended.
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