Week 10: Civilizational architecture

This week’s reading: Burnett & Marshall, Chapters 2-4

This week’s reading discussed some of the identity and civilizational issues surrounding the Web. Though the discussion bore only tangential relevance to information architecture, IA is an important cog in the massive machine of the Internet, and as members of this “cybernetic” system, it behooves us as architects to understand how our society uses this machine – and how the machine is changing society.

The great strength of Web Theory thus far is its ability to recognize and examine facets of the Internet that are so obvious to its users that we’ve long since stopped noticing them. One can’t critically think about a social force one takes for granted. I was struck especially by the discussion of the “network society” – a succinct and precise description of a system where “geographical connections that are no longer grounded in physical communities but are connected through the flows of information weaken the patterns of the formerly spatially constructed communities and societies” (p. 41). I grew up in Florida, but I also grew up on the Internet – and you can see which stomping ground shaped my social life more when you know that my best friends live in New York, San Francisco, Charlotte, and Edmonton, not in Fort Myers.

The authors of Web Theory, moreover, are right to predict that the many-to-many communication facilitated by the Internet means that I have “weak tie” social links to a great diversity of acquaintances who I might never know in real life. My Web acquaintances span races and classes, and include homosexuals, bisexuals, and transgendered people, Muslims, Mormons, and Wiccans, world citizens from Austria to Australia, vegetarians, furries, and at least one person who knows vastly more than I do about any topic you can name. Correspondingly, I don’t feel the exclusive loyalty to my home community, alma mater, or local sports teams that my parents did (though I’ll cop to being a St. Petersburg Times fanboy). I’ve largely replaced identification based on where I live or where I grew up with identification based on my interests and identity.

And as for identity, I found Burnett and Marshall’s treatment of negative and positive effects of the Internet on the lives of its users to be amusing and full of truths. The “opposing” viewpoints they presented reminded me of nothing so much as the parable of the blind men and the elephant from a previous reading. It’s quite true, as Kraut in particular suggests, that some people use the Internet in a way that interferes with local social circles – and also true, as he speculates, that this use can cause feelings of alienation and anonymity. But it’s also true, as Pew found, that the Internet can strengthen our connections with friends and family. If Nie and Erbing find that Internet use results in “spending less time with or on the phone with family and friends” (p. 66), this could be because, as Pew says, Net users “have used e-mail to enrich their important relationships” (p. 67).

It’s tempting for Net businesses to seek ways to capitalize on the ability of the new generation of users to form communities that exist outside of physical geography. Indeed, many have done so with varying success; Facebook’s valuation as of July appeared to stand somewhere between $12 billion and $24 billion. Certainly information architects trying to make their case to skeptical executives should be able, in some contexts, to argue in terms of Internet users’ propensity for constructing and broadcasting their identities using Web tools, as well as some users’ desire to be citizens of an Internet community. I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with information architects arguing in those terms, or that a company errs morally when it encourages brand loyalty and community-building among its customers. Like many immersive media, however, the Internet certainly can have an addictive and anti-social effect on those who use it uncritically, and online communities like those of World of Warcraft and 4chan play a contributory part in these cases. A solution to this real problem is outside the immediate scope of the reading, but the more we can understand about the nature of the online medium, the better equipped we will be to understand our ethical responsibilities as producers and consumers of Internet content.