It is fairly widely accepted that social and culture mediums are frequently accompanied by theorists, who can take a step back from said medium, and attempt to describe, explain, define and occasionally criticise it. Music, perhaps the oldest art form and possibly older than culture itself, has been theorised upon for millennia, with the Greeks doing their bit to analyse tones mathematically. Literature shares a similar historical scrutiny. Film, and a couple of decades later television, both had a slow start in terms of theory, but as their presence and influence broadened and deepened, so too did the work produced by their respective analysts. It is surprising then, at least to me, that theory relating to the Internet is so limited.
Try a few quick google searches for “Internet theory” or “web theory” and you’ll find pretty much nothing. There’s a Boing Boing tag that more a reports on web culture, rather than actually theorising. So why is it that we’re lacking something so key? This is the question I’m going to try and answer, as well as introduce a few concepts that I think will be useful for theoretical analysis of the web moving forwards.
First and foremost, I want to define the difference between the Internet and the world wide web. When I’m discussing webology, I’ll probably end up using the terms pretty much interchangeably as most people do, but they are in fact separate and I will do my best to keep them so. The Internet is the global connection between computers that carries, amongst other things, emails, chat relays, multiplayer video games and, importantly, the world wide web, which comprises all the websites. To use a common explanatory form: all web sites are on the Internet, but not everything on the Internet is a web site. With that out the way, we can continue with trying to understand why webology doesn’t exist yet.
The obvious answer is that it’s kind of hard. The Internet, and more specifically the world wide web, is such an intense torrent of different forms, styles and qualities of content that varies so much that it’s hard to pin down what about any of it, if anything, is essentially “web”. For example, take a blog. The blog differs almost indistinguishably from a newspaper or magazine article, the only real difference is the nature of the author, who can be an individual writing personally rather than writing on behalf of a wider organisation, and possibly the length and frequency of the articles. A Youtube video can be similarly compared to a film or television show, the only difference being the duration. In fact, the vast majority of the web is dedicated to the distribution of content NOT created specifically for the web. This includes films, music, television programs, books, and all art forms developed prior to the Internet. The fact that these art forms are on the web changes nothing about them. This means the web serves a certain transparent function – it presents existing media without affecting or influencing it (this is ignoring the presence of the web within that media, such as The Social Network). This is not always the case, however, and the web does feature a large amount of content created specifically for the web. Just as novels differ from magazines and films differ from television, some of it has been influenced by the medium it was design for. The next reason applies to these things.
The second reason I would suggest is that the web’s nature is not to display itself. What I mean by this is that it’s hard to tell how the web has affected the content presented on it because it doesn’t really take any credit for it. We view the content as simply existing. This is still horribly ambiguous, I know, so let me give some examples. The web has slid seamlessly into modern life – Facebook and Twitter are now fixtures of most adverts; the majority of businesses assume access to the internet from all parties; university and school courses not related to IT, computing or the web in any way requiring familiarity and heavy usage. We almost don’t notice it, we simply use it as a tool, taking what we need from it without giving it much attention. This is the second way in which the web is transparent. It’s possible that for clarity’s sake this second reason should have been the first and the first reason should come second, because in the second reason we’re talking about identifying the web as a cultural or artistic medium in the first place, and in the first reason we’re talking about identifying the parts of it that are separate to things that have come before. But I’m too lazy to go back through and swap the two sections around, so just understand that the web is transparent in two ways: 1) it arrived very quickly and no one properly noticed it as possible to analyse, and 2) even if anyone did it’s hard to identify the parts of it that are unique. These two transparencies should be kept separate in your mental space, because the first is an actual mode of the internet (I’ll come back to that in a moment) as well as being a reason webology doesn’t exist yet, and this kind of transparency is simply the latter. This transparency applies to a different mode (again, I’ll be coming back to this later).
These are, I believe, the two main reasons that the internet is yet to be studied in the same way as other forms of media. With that out of the way, we can start some actual analysis.
In the early stages, I’m going to suggest the use of web ‘modes’ to categorise different websites and make them easier to compare and contrast. The first of these modes is the transparent mode – wherein the web simply provides existing media without altering it. The best example of such a website I can think of is something like PrimeWire (previously known as 1channel). The second mode is what I’ll call the pure mode. The pure mode categorises sites like Google and artistic sites like Awwwards - websites that present content that couldn’t exist without the web. The third mode is the social mode, which (as the name implies) comprises social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The reason there are only these three modes is because there do exist superpositions of these modes. The social mode occurs in some format in almost all websites, even if it’s just a Facebook “Like” button. In fact, most websites are a superposition of two modes or more, with one in particular dominating. So now that we have this very bare bones way of categorising websites, we can go start applying these categories to some popular websites. I’ll start by trying to get pure versions of each mode.
PrimeWire: This perfect transparent mode website. Nothing about this website is content produced for the web, and while there is a minor social element it’s not at all integral to the site’s function and is mostly just for people to leave reviews, and so it’s easily ignorable.
Jack’s Blog: Yeah, I know, super popular, right? This is a pretty clear cut case of the pure mode dominating. All the articles on here are uniquely written for the web and definitely wouldn’t exist without it. Some of the things I post already existed without the internet, but they are not the content, only the subject of the content, which is again produced specifically for the web. There is a comment section, but that’s a very, very minor function of the site as isn’t created for socialising,
LinkedIn: This is the closest thing I can think of to a purely social mode website because the purpose of the website isn’t to share content, just communicate with others about jobs or whatever. Anybody that uses LinkedIn to keep up with friends/family is going to be pretty lonely.
It’s much harder to find websites that are a superposition of only two modes, but most internet forums do a good job of approximating social + transparent or social + pure, depending on the topic of the forum. Transparent + pure is closely approximated Wikipedia, but it still has some social elements which are admittedly pretty minor.
Following on from this article I’m going to try and write three more, shorter, each one defining what typifies good or ‘quality’ implementation of each mode. After that, I’m going to try and talk about the way that individual websites have affected our culture and how and why they are successful. From there, who knows. Hopefully we’ll be able to get more and more specific. It’s the ultra specifics that I’ve seen writings on so far, specifically with regards to dealing with trolls and the success of iTunes (which is more related to the Internet but I still think it falls under webology), and it’s this kind of writing that I’d like to see marked as webology in the near future. I’ll try keep a list somewhere of articles that I think count as webology as and when I find them.
