NathanielJames.org

The internet and the web are always changing.  Every current and aspiring internet user has a stake in this constant evolution.

These technologies are also endlessly complicated, and sophisticated understanding of the technology will always be unevenly distributed.  In other words, most people are not engineers.

How, then, are the users of the web, the non-engineer multitudes that make the web vibrant and powerful, to evaluate whether or not they like how the Web is changing?  This is a familiar question for everyone who works to educate and empower internet users.

In today’s New York Times Magazine, Virginia Heffernan wrote a piece in her column, “The Medium,” entitled “The Death of the Open Web.”

Strong words, to be sure.  In it, she compares the Open Web to the Great American City and likens the development of new walled gardens like Facebook, but especially Apple’s App Store, to the rise of Suburbia.

Like the great modern American cities, the Web was founded on equal parts opportunism and idealism. Over the years, nerds, students, creeps, outlaws, rebels, moms, fans, church mice, good-time Charlies, middle managers, senior citizens, starlets, presidents and corporate predators all made their home on the Web. In spite of a growing consensus about the dangers of Web vertigo and the importance of curation, there were surprisingly few “walled gardens” online — like the one Facebook purports to (but does not really) represent.

She goes on:

But a kind of virtual redlining is now under way. The Webtropolis is being stratified… All these things make spaces feel “safe” — not only from viruses, instability, unwanted light and sound, unrequested porn, sponsored links and pop-up ads, but also from crude design, wayward and unregistered commenters and the eccentric ­voices and images that make the Web constantly surprising, challenging and enlightening…

The far more significant development, however, is that many people are on their way to quitting the open Web entirely. That’s what the 50 million or so users of the iPhone and iPad are in position to do. By choosing machines that come to life only when tricked out with apps from the App Store, users of Apple’s radical mobile devices increasingly commit themselves to a more remote and inevitably antagonistic relationship with the Web. Apple rigorously vets every app and takes 30 percent of all sales; the free content and energy of the Web does not meet the refined standards set by the App Store.

It’s a fair and important point.  I have an iPhone.  It and it’s new cousin, the iPad, are sleek and offer many fast tracks to information on the Web.  Yet, the list of arbitrary rejections from their platform continues to confuse and frustrate entrepreneurs, geeks, and internet freedom advocates alike.

A quick scan of dozens of critical comments to her piece reveal a pattern: detractors with a little (or maybe a lot) of tech-savvy are out to get Heffernan because her comments are inaccurate and biased.

Aside from the the hollowness of crying bias at an opinion piece, these skeptics are often technically correct.  To claim that iPhone/iPad use is equivalent to “quitting the open Web entirely,” is squarely hyperbolic.  iPhone users clearly use Apps and surf the web (if only on Apple’s Safari browser – another choice denied the user).

I applaud Hefferman’s piece, but for its explanatory powers, rather than its factual precision.

The world is a complicated place, and every single one of us relies on metaphors to simplify the world and make it navigable.  In Metaphors we Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that metaphorical thinking is both far more common than we realize and completely necessary to us as we are bombarded by a world of infinitely complex stimuli.

Arguments are wars – “It was a battle of wits.”  Life is a journey – “I have finally arrived,” or “I just feel so lost.”

We take metaphors for granted, which gives them their power to clarify and define the world.  They are also gross simplifications, but very useful ones.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote a powerful allegory in 145 words called On Exactitude in Science, in which a generation of perfectionist cartographers created a map, “which coincided point for point” with their native country, a map that literally covered its own territory.  It was perfect in its complete representation and also perfectly useless.  As tools, maps work because of what they leave out, giving you just the lay of the land and not the land itself.  If it were otherwise, they wouldn’t fit in your glove compartment.

So it is for anyone who cares about the future of the web and who also knows that if we are to make any progress, the web as a shared, public resource that we all build together must be understood better by every user.  Every user needs the lay of the land, and until the day that we are all engineers, we will have to rely on metaphors, like Ms Heffernan’s.

People understand the difference between cities and suburbs.  Cities are vibrant, entrepreneurial, often marked by anonymity and spontaneity, diverse, and sometimes a little scary.  Cities are open.  Suburbs are perceived to be safe.  They are planned. They have gated communities.  They are also artless, and many people find them anti-democratic and unsustainable.  They are closed.

Swap out the words “open web” for city and “closed web” for suburbs, and you get something that makes some sense.  It’s neither perfect nor precise, but if it makes a little sense for someone who is looking desperately to understand the constant changes brought on by the internet, then I’m definitely ok with that.

Technical discourse (“How is the web changing?”) requires technical precision.  Social discourse (“Should we support how the web is changing?”) requires a broader literary palate and deserves broader audiences.  As we strive to describe the web (or anything more complicated than a PB&J sandwich, for that matter), we will always dance clumsily on the line between rhetoric and reality.   However, I believe we must learn to use the former to help each other get a handle on the latter.

———–

UPDATE: I am re-posting this piece in order to test the http://planet.drumbeat.org/ blog aggregator.