The Internet is generally said to have been born in 1969, with ARPAnet. Or in 1977 when Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf introduced TCP (the transmission control protocol). Take your pick. Either way, the Internet (everyone just called it 'the net' back then)was in increasing use among software developers, research institutions and well-heeled hobbyists for quite some years before Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web in 1990/91. Better grab some coffee, this is going to take us a few minutes.The World Wide Web was very much an ad-hoc and semi-anarchic collaborative medium back in those days. Some people used the CERN developed source code for the earliest web-servers. Others hammered out their own code. People began to work on HTML parsers and presentation managers/browsers. The Web at the time outside the core group of researchers and technical hobbyists was sparse, and stylistic variations led to assorted incompatibilities, and what one might charitably call 'uneven experience'.
The World Wide Web was a hit, however, and pulled people online not only for it, but for existing parallel technologies, like IRC, and the popular virtual worlds of the period. And that's approximately where the outcry began, in approximately 1994. One lesser Internet demagogue of the period summed it up like this: "It's like having a million people barge into your lounge-room, pushing and shoving each-other, knocking over the ashtrays and all shouting at once, and...most of all, complaining about your decor and furniture."
People and their eyeballs had come to the World Wide Web, and marketers and advertisers go where the product is. (Don't make the error of mistaking yourself for the consumer. You are the product that the marketers are selling to retail channels, in many cases. The content is just the bait on the hook) A million people came to the World Wide Web, and businesses and marketing and media outlets came with them, like big cats stalking a herd across the Serengeti.
There was a lot of spitting and swearing at the rush of business and marketing into the World Wide Web. Stop me if you've heard this one. Bitter outrage over Sun's "We put the dot in dot com". Marketers thought that was genius. The big names and their marketing agencies all scrambled to take credit for the work of the people who had made the internet, and - well, let's face it, those people just weren't happy. They were the existing 'residents' of the World Wide Web, and they remembered quieter more creative times. Businesses barged in with very little idea about what they were doing, web-sites that only worked under some relatively arcane circumstances, and many tried to use the Web as a glossy brochure.
By that stage, the age of spam had already begun, proliferating with advertising banners. The Web had hit the mainstream. Where am I going with this? You know where I'm going. Second Life, now in it's third year has hit the million (of course it's not really one million people. You know that, and I know that, but the thing is the marketers and businesses coming in, on the whole, don't want to know that). A million is an easy number. Explain it any way you like until they understand, but when they turn around to talk to the next person at their company, they'll say 'one million', without qualification.
In October 2006, with SL in it's third year Urizenus Sklar wrote A Gallery of Lies for the Second Life Herald - a piece that very much echoes the pioneer and techie (the residents) discontent with the evolution of the World Wide Web, back in 1995. Change the SL references to the World Wide Web, and it's an eerie echo. History repeating itself, you might say.
To some degree, a different plant in a different soil, SL has grown in some very similar ways to the early Web. The question is...will it continue on the same track, and stumble over all the same potholes and bumps in the road? Well, a large part of that depends on just how dumb we all are. That's you and me and the marketers and everyone else.
You see, we have learned. We watched businesses fumbling about with their web-sites, like a tricky bra-clasp on a prom-date. We've watched them born and we've watched them die. We've watched them intrude on us, and in some cases we've welcomed them, and in others we have hurled them back. We've voted with our keyboards, our mice, and our wallets (although quite rarely with our actual - you know - votes) and forced some sort of shape on the Web, even as the driving dollars behind it forced a shape on it too - at the moment producing something that is not quite what any of us wants, but is plenty good enough for 100 million websites, and plenty more people browsing :)
Thing is, though, business and marketers have learned too. "The goal of science is to build better mousetraps. The goal of nature is to build better mice." And remember, many of what you might think of them are us. The girl who rented land from you yesterday. The newbie who fell out of the sky, and then needed help applying the tattoo he'd gotten from a freebie box. Are the the folks who pump your gas and sell you Cheerios, or are they marketers and strategists for corporations?
Some of the marketing agencies and businesses will deal with Second Life at arm's length, still fumbling one handed with your bra, trying to get it off while you sigh and look through the foggy windshield at the moon. Others, well - your friend since Beta may work for a large marketing agency that's looking for ways to leverage Second Life. Personally, I think I'd rather have the latter than the former. A virtual world's sense of 'presence' certainly helps to function as an effective leveler for everyone who comes to experience and study that world. We're all better informed, at least insofar as we want to be. We can only hope that we'll see fewer of the same mistakes repeated.
1. The main difference, of course, is that the world wide web was controlled by more than one company (especially back in the pre-2000 era, which is the last time that the web was genuinely interesting, before the powers that be realised that they had better curtail some of this freedom of information interchange before the proles started communicating too effectively with each other).
Whilst Sun and Microsoft may have grabbed bigger chunks of the action, the web back then was controlled by large numbers of small organisations each with its own rules, and thats what made it flexible, interesting and workable.
What we have with SL is control by one company, LL, a company who, lets face facts, doesn't learn by its mistakes, largely because it generally fails to admit that it has made mistakes, and cannot seem to decide whether it is a profit making business, a research institution, or some sort of virtual social engineering experiment.
Yes, of course, SL is very different in concept from anything else "out there" at present. But I really struggle with the idea of it growing achieving its real worth as long as we adopt the "well its probably good enough" approach.
Posted at 5:39AM on Nov 6th 2006 by Stan Pomeray