While I was watching Battle for ideas, I was particularly struck by the second speaker and his statement regarding infrastructure vs. content on the Internet. He said something along the lines of, “Content is of the people and the infrastructure is the only contribution that corporations have to sites.” He used E-bay, Facebook, and designing one’s very own ‘unique’ pair of Nike Shoes or bag of M&Ms as evidence for this, arguing, in essence, that we are free to do what we want online and the protective umbrella of conglomerated ownership are just there to protect us.
Yeah, right.
Last year, as a gift for someone I decided to make him a custom pair of vans sneakers. The prospect of designing them was pretty exciting but when I got to the Vans Website I found that my options were exceedingly limited. For example, you choose, custom “slip on” or custom “old schools.” Upon clicking on the “slip on” section one is confronted with about 20 options for back ground colors of the shoe. You can Mix and match and choose from their 16 pattern options (which are mostly variations of the checker thing that they do). What I am getting at is that the benign infrastructure that the speaker was commenting on does not exist. You always have to play by their rules, and as I commented on A Sim-ple Kind of Life, you have choice so long as its one offered in the multiple choice that the website (or in that case video game) provides.
That is not a public sphere. A public sphere should be as neutral as possible and void of private interest, which become even more of an evident issue when this infrastructure is looked at as another speaker in Battle For Ideas did, that is, not as a commons, bur rather a private commercial space.
It is obvious how much we are advertised to on the internet and no matter how much we try to avoid it, niche marketing has enabled at least, some of that to permeate into our lives. I sign into my facebook and the advertisements I see are for the bands I have listed in my profile. In this case as well the infrastructure is hardly just facilitating social networking, rather, it has an agenda too.
One Comment
I completely agree with you on the limited choices we are currently offered on the web. I just think that the point the speaker was trying to make (or maybe not, but this is the point that I’m trying to make) was that these choices are such a huge step from what we could’ve done just a few years ago. That is to say, we didn’t have any options really. Right now we don’t have a public sphere, but that’s not to say that one day we can’t. Granted, like you said, the internet is too commercial for the most part. However, that might be more the fault of our society. Why bother doing something if it doesn’t make money, right? Oh, capitalism.