Speed Interview with Geert Lovink
By Ernesto Assante, for the Italian newspaper La Repubblica newspaper.
October, 26 2006
EA: Internet has changed a lot in the last few years. Are these changes, in your opinion, positive or negative?
GL: My motto is, the more the happier. What we have witnessed over the past years is a silent revolution, the move away from the USA, Europe, Japan and a few rich nations to places like China, India, Brazil and even Nigeria. The rise of net culture in Asia is unprecedented. We, from the former West, cannot read these languages and therefore think everything remains as it used to be. We have passed the 1 billion user mark and I am acutely aware that only 16.7 percent of the word population (according to some statistics) have access. It is going to be a daunting task to connect the next billion–but a very interesting one. This ‘massification’ of Internet culture will be beyond good or evil, in that it will bring education to many while simultaneously be platform for a variety of ‘inconvenient’ fundamentalisms. Paradoxically, both control and freedom will be fostered, and this will lead to interesting clashes, way beyond the rational consensus cult that has so far dominated the Internet in terms of governance.
EA: Video seems to be the latest trend. Is that a natural evolution of the Web? Is something that can transform the Web in a TV, or something that, in the long run, could kill television as we know it?
GL: Remember that radio, once proclaimed dead, is going from one renaissance to the next. Internet will not kill the TV star. Television might even spread faster worldwide compared to what I described above. There is little to worry for the TV industry in the near future. The amount of people with high speed Internet access is still relatively low. I would propose to stop thinking of different media platform being competitive. It is tempting to think like that, I know. These platforms are separate in some cases and work together in other. They are personal as well, depending on ones mood, and bounce off each other like never before. There is a parasitic reciprocity happening here. In the end we spent more and more on media in general, and with a certain delay this will also be the case for the outgoing Italians. What all media want is to claim our time, and that’s the key scarce resource.
EA: Users are far more central in Web 2.0 than before. This is the buzz of the moment. Do you think is true?
GL: Since the brief exception of the late nineties, when an arrogant young business class moved in to make a quick buck with their dotcom schemes, users have always been central. Before 1993 one could say that users did not really exist. All users were programmers. Blogs picked up where things stood in the mid nineties. Knowledge about user online behavior only came up in the late nineties, when marketing people moved in. Simultaneously designers started to discuss the ‘usability’ of a website, meaning the ease with which ordinary citizen could navigate through a site. The user ideal of our Web 2.0 age is dominated by the idea that users are social being that love to contribute to online services for no cost, while the Google shareholder earn all the money. The mobilization of free labor is sold as ‘user-driven’ content, and I am certain that one day people will look through this business trick by Google and others.
EA: YouTube and MySpace are the latest new media. Should we see them as the revenge of old media?
GL: Revenge is perhaps not the right term. These so-called social networking sites have come up in the shadow of the mainstream media and are now rapidly being integrated into the larger media landscape. We could read the take over of Murdoch and Google of MySpace and YouTube all too easily as a commercial sell-out of such networks. But let’s be cautious. It is still uncertain how these companies are going to get revenues from such sites. We should also keep in mind that users these days have remarkably little loyalty to social networking sites. Once the Googles and Murdochs start exploiting those online environments for commercial purposes the crowds will, or swarms as the trend watchers like to call them, will move on. Within months tens of millions of users will have left MySpace and pop up elsewhere.
EA: Internet is not the paradise. What is, in your opinion, today?
GL: That phrase is the Italian translation of my book title from 2003 called My First Recession. Of course we cannot make any utopian claims anymore. The Internet is no longer some weird entity outside of society. It probably always has been part of our messy reality. I would imagine paradise as something else all together, not a computer network–but maybe that’s me. What the title points at is a loss of innocence and that can only be good. And this realistic and pragmatic view doesn’t make the Internet experiences less exciting. But there is a normalization happening, no doubt. It is becoming normal in our busy everyday lives to be there, and not there at the same time. Young people, with extraordinary good skills in multitasking can deal with this no problem and perhaps wouldn’t understanding what we’re raving about here. My generation is typically one of transition. We notice the fall. For kids is all just there to be used.
EA: What will we see in the near future? More video, more technologies in the hands of users, more content user-generated, more multinational industries trying to capture our eyeballs?
GL: Try to get used to more and more, please. That’s the logic of our consumer society. There will be more of everything. Even more Internet-free holidays: Mediterranean beach resources with guaranteed no mobile phone reception signal. That’s the trend and a unique opportunity for those who want to offer some really innovative exclusivity.
EA: Will there be an Internet 3.0 or we will have something completely new?
GL: Yes, there will still be Internet and TCP/IP as a protocol for data transfer for the next years to come. What we will see vanishing is the dominant IBM-type PC on an office desk as the default way to communicate. US-American researchers and scientists in this field, even the most hyped-up evangelists still sit behind those pompous desktop machines. At best they use laptops. What Internet visionaries from the West find most hard to imagine is that people in fact do not like these big ugly plastic boxes, tied to tables. Internet culture is still struggling to get rid of it office image. People like to walk around while they talk, text and make pictures. We rightly so despise the office and can’t wait to escape from those deadly boring environments—and that perhaps the completely new thing that you asked for.