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Web as Utopia

[This is what I remember saying to a session yesterday at the Eastern Sociological Society meeting.]

I was an academic philosophy professor up until about 17 years ago and I've spent the intervening time doing my best to learn how to think sloppily. What I'm about to say is an example. And, by the way, I conflate the "Web" and the "Internet" because that's what the vast majority of users do.

I'm not defining a utopia as a perfect place. Rather, it is a place with a particular nature. Humans also have a nature. That's probably a terrible thing to say at a sociology meeting, but I mean simply that — whether it's socially conditioned or not — there are characteristics that make us humans. So, just go along with me for now. A utopia is a place whose properties enable us to perfect our human nature.

Now, I don't mean that we become perfect in a utopia. That's not possible. We're humans. We're imperfect. That's why we're not gods. Besides, imperfection is the only thing that makes life interesting. Perfection is homogenizing, at least according to the tradition. Imperfection is where all the fun and interest is. It's a bit like the fact that the price of free will is the existence of evil in the world: the price of the world being interesting is that we are imperfect creatures.

So, what I want to argue is that the characteristics of a utopia that enable us to imperfectly perfect our imperfect human nature are properties the Web has.

First, utopias are always new starts, a fresh page. The Web is definitely new and a fresh page.

Second, a utopia is a place and so is the Web. In fact it's a world. It is not a medium. A medium is something we send messages through, and while we can do that with the Web, I believe — and the fact that I believe it should definitely be enough to establish it as a fact ;) — that the excitement about the Web hasn't happened because it's a messaging medium. Rather, our language says that we move through the Web. We, not our messages. This is very weird. While the Web consists of pages, we go to them, enter them and leave them. We don't do that with real world pages or documents. We experience the Web as a navigable space.

This Web place has certain characteristics.

1. It's persistent.That's one reason we experience it as a place. Sure, sites go up and down, but there is a basic persistence to it, unlike other instantaneous media such as telephones and ham radio.

2. It's conversational. It's not really primarily about companies marketing crap to us. The excitement of the Web has something to do with the fact that we're connecting with one another by the most basic social act: talking.

3. It's hyperlinked. The Web wouldn't be a web if the pages weren't linked. But every hyperlink is an expression of interest. I link to your page because I think my visitors might find your page enlightening or amusingly wrong. The real world is shaped by a geography of rocks and water. The Web geography is shaped by links of human interest and conversation.

Compare this to the real world. We're born into the real world. None of us asked to be born. Even if God gave us the world as a gift, it's still the given, the datum. And fundamentally this world is indifferent to us. We get buried in it, our atoms dissolve, and the worms are happy and the atoms don't care. We make of this world what we will, but it's damn hard. You can't move the mountains and it takes a lot to make the desert bloom. It fundamentally isn't our world.

But the Web is a world that we're making for ourselves. And we're doing so by connecting to one another in conversation and by linking to one another out of human passion and caring.