The Internet is Breaking

For most of my forty-odd years as a university professor, I spent my time thinking about, teaching about, reading about, and writing about the media. It was a fascinating world in that it was always changing, always evolving into something new. I used to wonder how my colleagues in say, English, for example, avoided going crazy teaching courses like The English Language Novel in the 19th Century. I mean, aside from exploring evidence of the influence of novels from the 19th century on contemporary prose, it seemed a lot like doing the same thing over and over. Which would, I suppose, leave you a lot of time to work on your own novel which many of my colleagues in that department had stashed on their hard drive somewhere.

Anyhow “the media” had a far different problem, at least in the last couple of decades since the internet went public in the mid-1990s. It changes all the time. I used to start my lectures by saying, “OK, let’s talk about what changes we have seen in the media over the last couple of days.” And I always had something to talk about.  During the last couple of years of my teaching career I had been struggling with trying to find a model that would allow my students to understand just why and how those changes came about. And so in about 2018 my colleague Ed Funkhouser (who is out there on The Wall with you - Hi Ed!) wrote a textbook - digital access only, naturally - called The Process: Understanding Technology and the Media.  In that work we propose a model of eight steps of media evolution, steps charting the course of the development of all communication media, from the first evidence of proto-writing to the Internet. Cool huh? We think so - blush, blush.

Anyhow the 8 steps, in order go like this:

1. Need. Some  entity, individual person, group or organization feels compelled to communicate with another entity.
2. The Creators. The folks in the "back room," carvers, painters, bicycle builders, engineers, programmers, examine what is available in their time and place and cobble the available pieces together into what becomes
3. The medium. Print, film, radio, TV, etc.
4. The gatekeepers. Every medium moves through the hands of gatekeepers, the pharaoh, pontiff, church, lawyers, what have you, who decide what media are "allowed" in the culture and who gets to use them. Those decisions get codified into
5. The law. Which is what it sounds like.
6. The entrepreneurs.  After learning what the restrictions and laws surrounding the new medium are, the entrepreneurs figure out how to package the new medium in to a profitable product and bring it to
7. The marketplace where sales people of various stripes try to convince us that we really must have it.
8. We open our pocketbooks to purchase the new gizmo and begin to use it, which invariably leads us back to #1. e.g. "Hey this radio thing is cool - I wish it had pictures." And bing bang we work through the following 7 steps to television.

If we apply this model to understand how the Internet came about we learn how it might be fracturing along some important lines. First this huge entity came into being, like all other media from step 1 Need. But this wasn't a huge societal, organizational, governmental need. It was the need of one guy: Tim Berners-Lee, or Sir Tim as those of us close to him call him. [Lying here, Sir Tim doesn't know me from Adam, but a fellow can dream right?] Berners-Lee has had so much written about him it is hard to separate fact from fiction - it is truly worth a google search. But what is fairly well agreed upon is that what we call the internet first came to light in 1989 when he was working for CERN. His job required him to create hundreds and hundreds of files pertaining to his work. He, like all of us, became frustrated with the repeating questions of "What did I call that file" and "Where did I put it?" 

Unlike us, who just stomp out and get coffee or something stronger, Bernes-Lee solved the problem by devising a system of giving the files unique names so he could search for them on his computer more easily. The system had two major parts; Hypertext Mark-up Language - which gave each file a unique name, and a Universal Resource Location which let his computer know where he had put the file.

One day, or so the legend goes, he typed the name of a file into his computer and the file popped up. But he soon realized the file wasn't on his computer, it was on the computer of a colleague in another location to whom he had sent a copy of the file. A truly unique moment, for which among his other accomplishments, he was knighted in 2004 and in 2013 received the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, sort of the Nobel prize for Engineering. Because, if you haven't guessed by now, Hypertext Markup Language became more widely known as HTML and the Universal Resource Location as URL; two tags that, although we rarely actually type them out these days, are tools that we use dozens, if not hundreds, of times every day to  work our way around the internet.

So things sailed along through the model pretty smoothly with the creators of proto-internet remaining the professional geeks in universities and government labs refining these cool tools that allowed them to communicate easily with each other. But then in 1994 the government, aka gatekeepers, decided that the medium, aka the internet, was now robust enough to open the doors to all of us, and the world-wide-web was born.  And things got a little crazy.

The media, despite lovely slogans like "freedom of the press!" and "the pen is mightier than the sword!" has always been primarily about money and advertising, and the Internet provided opportunities for both in previously unimaginable degree. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s I used to do a lecture about the "cartel" - BND-TV which was an acronym for Bertlemann, Newscorp, Disney, TimeWarner and Viacom; five companies that, at the time, controlled somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of all the news and information outlets in the country. They fought viciously with each other to provide products that would allow them to steal each other's audiences, advertisers, and profits.  They are all mostly around in some form or another, often as pieces within their former competitors. [Do a search for Columbia Journalism Review/ Who Owns What for some eye-opening data. https://beta.cjr.org/resources] 

But they are all dwarfed by the new kids on the block - companies birthed by the 1994 opening of the Internet, the new cartel - Apple, Amazon and Google, with Microsoft sliding in and out. How big are the new kids on the block? Probably shifts day to day, but I read yesterday that Tim Cook was before Congress trying to explain why the App Store's weekly take of 1 billion dollars was not excessive. But that is not really why I think the Internet is breaking. The COVID pandemic drove millions of us to our keyboards to shop, to go to the doctors, etc. and the Big Three little 4 - AAGm - did that pretty well. But they often demanded that we use their unique system of hardware and software, and we were supposed to figure out how to work each of their systems. In short, the big three little 4 forgot they were supposed to be communication companies. Companies that allow each of us to communicate with each other easily - that was the original need that drove MaBell and her competitors forward.

The geeks in the backroom often forget that they are supposed to be communication specialists, not computer engineers. I lived through that bias during the early years of my 4 decade stay at NC State. When computers began to shoulder some of the communication tasks at the university. The system was designed by, and seemingly only for, engineers. You had to work on a computer running the UNIX operating system to access the university system. You may remember the scene from Jurassic Park when the young girl, attempting to corral the raging dinos, sat down in front of a computer and exclaimed, "I know how to work this! This a UNIX box!" And she busily typed away. At State it took years of conflict before PCs running the Windows operating system were allowed on the system, even longer until the "arty" Mac system cleared the isolationist hurdles.

AAGm is currently raising similar exclusionary barriers but more subtly than was the case in the old software wars. But the negative impact on "we the people" is no less frustrating. You see, rather than becoming different kinds of companies, each honed for a different task, AAGm all became slightly different companies designed to do the all the same tasks. That is a bit of an exaggeration. The companies do look a bit different "under the hood" but we, as ordinary people, rarely experience the those differences. For us, each company appears to be trying to do the same thing - communicate with people and places.

And they do that, but unfortunately in doing so they have reverted to the old software wars. Just answer one question: How many passwords do you have? Now break the question out a bit. How many Apple IDs do you have? I, unfortunately, have two. My current one attached to my Goggle gmail account and another still existing one attached to my old University email address. I was chagrined to learn that I could have even more. Makes it difficult to answer the prompt: "What is your Apple ID?" What is the password to your Goggle account? May be different from your gmail account. Or you may have to access your Goggle account to get to your gmail ID. What is your Amazon password? And if you are an Amazon Prime member what is your five digit Amazon Prime pin number? And once you have jumped all these hurdles to get to say, your doctor, what is your MyChart user name and password? And no your "password saver" software is not the answer because AAGm, and the various entities you reach through them, are prone to requiring you to change your "easy to hack password."

"Please enter the last password you can remember for this site. Now enter a new password that you have not used on any site in the past decade. It should be 37 characters long, using special characters, both upper and lower case, and should not contain the names of anyone in your immediate family, pet names or birthdays, or proper nouns in this or any other recognizable language except Klingon."

Now do you understand why I drink? My particular issue is getting this blog to you. I wrote in a previous post that I feel really lucky to have just about everyone I care about on the SchragWall list. But having you on the list is not really a guarantee that you actually get the post. I use Blogger and gmail, both Google products, so I try to keep it as simple as I can on my end. But the blog is really is a sort of "broadcasting model." I create a post and "broadcast" it out to y'all. However, you may have changed your email address, or your provider may have implemented a "new and improved version which does not talk to "Blogger/gmail." You may have been busy and sent it to your "read later" mailbox that you last accessed sometime before New Years." I do not use any kind of tracking software that would tell me if you received the post and opened it. If I wanted to work for the CIA I would have applied long ago. Nor do I frequent some other international tracking organization. Because the Wall is actually international. To date it goes to, in alpha order:

Argentina

China

Canada

Italy

Kazakhstan

USA

And I really have no idea if any of those ex-pats or internationals are receiving the post with any regularity - unless they respond on the page or send me an email directly to robert.schrag@gmail.com.  Some are on Facebook, some use a Facebook App, WhatsApp, some use Signal, some may use something else. Oh, and by the way, if you use Internet Explorer [AKA Internet Exploder during the software wars] you need to change since Microsoft has announced it will terminate the app next summer. I have no idea how they plan to transition current users.

I remember and old commercial by Lee Iacocca when he was CEO of Chrysler Automotive. In essence he said, "If your commuter stops working they tell you to turn it off and turn it back on again. We don't do things that way at Chrysler!" 

I am afraid we are approaching those Bad Old Days on the Internet. The never-ending search to be the biggest kid, the newest kid, the richest CEO appears to be creating an Internet Tower of Babble held together by greed, conspiracy mongers, hysteria, and fake news. I know that is true because I read it on Qanon.

But seriously, I am concerned that unbridled competition amongst some very selfish, very greedy, totally unregulated companies and individuals will endanger my ability to reach you. That saddens me.