The beginning of the end of the World Wide Web
Technology journalism is littered with clichés, none more commonly used than the idea that a new product or service will kill another. Samsung's latest Galaxy is the iPhone killer we've been waiting for. Could Mondo kill the high street bank? It comes from the novelty of technology; the industry moves so quickly that fortunes are created and destroyed in a matter of weeks. That makes excellent stories for the press but annoying tropes for the rest of us.
Amongst the big bangs of services being created and killed, greater movements happen in the industry as a whole. Some of those movements are big and easy to spot – the launch of the iPhone or the sale of WhatsApp to Facebook – while others are more difficult to see.
One that’s easy to miss is that we’re starting to lose the world wide web.
What does that mean? Don't get me wrong, no service provider is suddenly going to stop serving http requests and right now no organisation of note is going to stop having a website. What I mean is that the way that users interact with people and companies through the internet is starting to change, and that change is subtle but dramatic.
Think back five or ten years. The average web user would be using just a handful of different applications or programs at their disposal: a chat program of some kind (ICQ, AIM, Microsoft Messenger) and a web browser. The two kinds were distinct and served different purposes: chat was for friends and colleagues, the web browser was for everything else. And that everything else meant the creation of websites for any source of information: company opening hours, preferred Pokemon trading strategies, share prices, holiday photographs. Save for the odd exception like AOL's gated community, information was shared through websites, owned by the creator of that website, and available no matter what browser each anonymous user preferred.
Over the past few years, that ideology has started to shift. Though many will still have a website, this is no longer the primary way that information is shared. Information of interest is now mediated by some service or another: company opening hours are listed on Google, Pokemon strategies are discussed on Twitter, share prices are updated in an app, holiday photographs are posted to Instagram. And users love this experience: they no longer have to visit several dozen web pages on the off-chance that there's been an update, instead they can just log into Facebook and see the newest data that's algorithmically judged to be most salient to them at the top of their stream.
Is this a problem? The easy dissemination of information is empowering, but this change is creating three significant losses:
The average user no longer has control of what's presented to them at any given moment. A stream of information controlled by the platform means that anything of note will be displayed to a user with little regard for context. Ensuring that personal and professional interests are kept to different platforms - Facebook versus LinkedIn - might be a good way to this issue, for example, but increasingly information is shared through a few channels which requires a user's full commitment.
The creator of information loses ownership of that information. The limited way that those creators can customise the look and feel of their information is almost irrelevant compared to the fact that they're almost giving away their creative work to the corporations that own those services. Users are fully aware that by signing up to Instagram or Flickr they relinquish certain rights to the platform owners, allowing their images to be used for undisclosed means. Writers on Medium know that the service can claim limited ownership of their writing and illustrations. But those platforms are where the audience is, so the content creators sacrifice their ownership in exchange for audience.
The average user's awareness of what's truly available to them. By hemming the masses into a handful of apps, users miss out on the wide range of amazing and truly free information that exists online. If I have a website that doesn't allow comments or advertising, has no integration with any social network, and presents information in plain text, how will anyone ever find it? More importantly, how will users ever understand that there's a world of useful and interesting information beyond the confines of what their friends, family, colleagues, and favourite brands tweet about?
Ownership on the web has always been hotly contested. What's happening now isn't just a sacrifice of ownership to one or two big platforms, it's a sacrifice in exchange for eyeballs, for potential sharing of advertising revenue. But it's also a sacrifice of openness, of allowing anyone access to a site's source code and to share any part of any document online. It's less about sacrifice and more about control of user psychology.
No more is this in evidence than in emerging economies, those places that are only just starting to get access to connected devices. Here, the distinction between app, web site, internet, and chat room is indistinct. Many users who get free access to Facebook under the internet.org initiative, say that they use Facebook often but never access the internet. To them, Facebook is their entire internet experience, and they can get everything they need from a single platform.
But do they get everything they truly need? They lack the ability to grow their own site or service or application, something that seemed so easy to attempt a few short years ago.
And this is the change we're seeing now. Users might share photos to a faceless platform and receive a few dozen likes in exchange. But few users, if any, will create something that they can truly own and call entirely their own.