Interview with Geert Lovink by Stefania Garassini (Milan) for the daily newspaper Avvenire. Also see short txt here, in Italian.
SG: Do you think that people are now experiencing a kind of “saturation” from social networks and so web 2.0 is about to crash or become something else? Since your first analyses in “Zero comments”, what main changes have you noticed in this field?
GL: If trends and products are being launched and implemented at the speed of light we should not be surprised that customers are getting tired at the same pace as they were sucked into it. I do not believe in ‘information overload’ but I know boredom exists. We live in age of indifference. Small differentiations are still being produced but they no longer generate enough significance to be noticed. I wrote Zero Comments, which includes the essay Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse in 2006. Five years later we’ve reached the height of the social media hype, which in itself is a culmination of earlier Web 2.0 premises such as user-generated content and the social value of information. Data processing and storage has become cheap and meaningless. Internet use only becomes meaningful (read: “value added”) through actual human exchanges about such virtual items. Latour’s non-human entities such as bots might perform interesting acts of beauty but economically speaking they do not (yet) contribute. What counts is what actual users do. Think of clicks, the creation of tags and categories, responses, links and likes. All these contributions are hanging like a cloud around dead content items such as Flickr and Instagram photos, YouTube videos, Facebook status updates and (re)tweets on Twitter.
SG: From your point of view what are the main risks in the use of blogs and social networks?
GL: There are no risks, let’s not go there: thinking is dangerous. If you leave out small kids and what they could encounter out there on the internet while clicking at random we are not running any risk. This is the wrong approach. Writing means reflection and the danger we might get second thoughts. Come on, we are not driving a car without a license or work with hazardous chemicals. The question should rather be: what forms of social life do these social media enable, limit and what is not addressed? Why this emphasis on friends and small groups? Is it really all that interesting to communicate only with a small group of people? Do we really need those networked enclosures? Can we also think of alternative network architectures that promote other values such as collaboration, discussion and strange encounters instead of this narrow, pastoral emphasis on the dark sides. Cars cause accidents, you can get drunk from alcohol and your brain might deform from watching too much TV and computer screens. And do not forget to switch off your smart phone at night! Don’t you think that critics and theorists have more interesting things to say? I am glad if work is over and I can do something else but I am really not going to promote to read ‘real’ books, smoke ‘real’ cigars, eat authentic Italian pasta and drink local wine. It is great to celebrate the Good Life, but let’s stop this wave of moral panic, this policing and controlling of our digital intake. Either your offline life is exciting, and then you can’t wait to switch off the damned machines, or it is not, and then you’ve got better things to do out there, in your mailboxes, on your social sites, fooling around in your databases. This cult of warning sucks. Life is dangerous, and so are computers. And if you’re an addict, go and see your doctor but do not blame it on Lego, cognac or the weather. Get a life.
SG: The use of social networks has changed the way in which we approach the Internet, always willing to say something about us, to interact. What’s next in this evolution?
GL: It is not the task of the critic or the theorist to predict the future. Having said that, the situation remains turbulent. It is not hard to see the currents and you can do that too: rise of smart phones, tablets and internet of things, the decline of the PC market, growing control of nation states and large corporations and the demise of the decentralized, distributed nature of the networks. These trends have been with us for years. Start-ups come and go. Since the late 1990s we got used to that. But the ups and downs of hype trends do not give us much insight in what’s going on. What surprises me is how many investors, banks and entrepreneurs can get away with criminal behavior, despite the fact what happened in 2000/2001, then 2008 and now what happened to Facebook. I wonder how many in the new media branch really follow what’s going with the current IPO scandal.
SG: In the book you analyze the role of YouTube. How do you see the future of this site in relationships to the big players in the audiovisual market?
GL: YouTube is small player when it comes to the future of television. User generated content channel are cute and interesting but marginal. You Italians know very well that we cannot discuss the future of broadcast TV in global and technological terms only. We need to take into account that certain media are object of national interests and will be controlled by national elites, their corporations and the state. Satellite TV for instance hasn’t changed that. The same can be said of the internet in this respect. The temporary overall closure of the internet in Egypt in 20011 is a good example. Talking about television you need to look at the big picture of national infrastructures and the merger between digital TV signal, internet and telephone through one single fiber optical cable, brought right into the home, doesn’t promise much in terms of an increase of freedom. Maybe it will be better for us citizens to separate these digital streams again and buy them from the best provider in that particular market segment. YouTube embodies the ‘right’ of internet users to put their own videos online (and comment on them, link to them, like them etc.). It would be a pity if we confuse this right, or rather privilege, with professional standards of television, cable and satellite giants to produce high quality news reporting and entertainment. Why should we want to try to bring them all on one level? I understand that it becomes easier to produce good-looking HD standard video imagery for everyone but that’s not what I am looking for. What should be produced is unique, one-off material, compelling stories. The universal recordability of all events and situations however changes everything. It doesn’t mean we want to see everything. The opposite: it means that we are becoming indifferent for the truth of moving image.