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Jeff Jarvis is an emeritus professor at City University of New York. His latest book is The Web We Weave: Why We Must Reclaim the Internet from Moguls, Misanthropes, and Moral Panic, from which this essay has been partly adapted.
I come to defend the internet – not its corporations, but its freedoms – because somebody has to.
Yes, the internet is accused of many sins – though in truth, most of those faults are our own. For the internet is a human enterprise.
Some say the internet makes us hate. No, we brought our centuries of biases and fears online with us.
Others say the internet has killed truth. But take for example the recent right-wing blood libel about the good people of Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs. This sprang from the sick minds of malign politicians and bad actors, not algorithms or artificial intelligence.
The internet is accused of “surveillance capitalism,” of tracking us for the sake of advertising greed. Remembering your interest in a pair of boots to show you an ad for them is hardly surveillance. Surveillance is what we fear from looming authoritarian regimes armed with weapons more powerful than browser cookies.
The internet is said to corrupt our youth. But research tells us that to attribute the distress of young people today to their phones is a facile distraction from deeper problems: academic and social pressure, climate degradation, economic frailty and, in the United States, school shootings and the Supreme Court robbing women of control over their bodies.
Are we addicted to our phones? Well, society has been accused of addiction to everything from radio to television to video games. In 1880, The Hour magazine fretted: “Millions of young girls and thousands of young boys are novelized into idiocy. Novel-readers are like opium smokers: the more they have it the more they want of it, and the publishers, delighted at this state of affairs, go on corrupting public taste and understanding and making fortunes out of this corruption.”
We have been here before, yet always forget. The media fuels moral panic about new technologies and competitors without ever acknowledging its own conflicts of interest. The result, too often, is policy and laws that can affect the freedoms of everyone.
So let us pause for just a moment and give thanks for the internet, aware of how privileged we are to live in its age with the benefits it brings. We should begin by acknowledging how the internet has helped us weather the COVID pandemic, allowing so many to continue working, learning, staying in touch with family and friends, and ordering life’s necessities online. Without it, economies would have collapsed.
And that’s far from all the internet enables:
A culture of information. I know: The internet is said to be a web of misinformation, disinformation, “fake news,” conspiracies and lies. In some places, that’s true. But recall what seeking information was like before the internet: Wanting a fact, one was left hauling down a massive, dusty and immediately out-of-date printed encyclopedia, likely ending up frustrated by its dearth, or driving to a library, or calling the overworked librarian (some folks called the local newspaper) – or more likely just giving up and expressing an opinion anyway.
Now we expect facts, background and explanations to be available instantly. And – unless confronting some crazy uncle’s conspiracy theory – we expect those we debate to at least try to get their facts straight, or we will do it for them. In seconds, we can look up the side effects of drugs, the history of a law, the price of a car, recipes for flourless chocolate cake: anything. Curiosities can be satisfied as never before.
Consider, too, the human miracle that is Wikipedia, maligned by some teachers and librarians at the start but now – thanks to its carefully wrought systems of checks and balances to allow expert and amateur volunteers to collaborate and correct each other – it is a useful and usually credible source of information about more than six million topics in English. Encyclopaedia Britannica’s last print volume, released in 2010, carried only 40,000 articles. Note well that the online encyclopedists of Wikipedia are far more reliable with facts than AI tools such as ChatGPT.
A culture of conversation. Once again, you might think me crazy, given that public discourse online is so often said to be a rank cesspool of hatred and trolling. I can’t know what your social feeds are like, but mine are, all in all, useful, pleasant, entertaining and informative (though I realize it is easier for me to say that because I am a white man, a tenured professor, and a journalist accustomed to living in public). I am grateful for the opportunity to talk with people of many interests and experiences anywhere in the world.
The internet allows anyone connected to it to speak at last without the printing press or broadcast tower, able to break free of the presumptions, power and pigeonholing of the press and public-opinion pollsters. While the nuance of true public discourse is lost in polls and reporting on them, the internet allows individuals to speak on their own terms, in their own terms. Today, as a public, we are relearning how to hold a conversation with ourselves. We are frankly doing a bad job of it, often letting long-pent-up frustration get the better of us, being drawn into trolls’ webs of anger and deceit, and falling for the seductive headlines of old media and algorithms of new media, both of which value our attention more than our consideration. The hosts of our current conversation, meanwhile, are doing a terrible job of protecting us from malign actors and manipulation. We can do better. Some days, we do.
A culture of creativity. Until the internet, every artist, anyone with talent to share, had to brave a gauntlet of gatekeepers to have their creations seen: approval by agents, editors, publishers, producers and curators who doled out to a favoured few the scarce supply of publications’ space, stage time, broadcast airtime and gallery walls they controlled. The internet ends that scarcity. On YouTube and TikTok, Instagram and Etsy, on blogs or Medium, through Patreon and Kickstarter, anyone can now create anything to share with the world, often using new tools and technologies that bring the skills of design, illustration and filmmaking to more people – all the more so as generative AI helps people express themselves in ways they could not before. Is some of this creativity crap? Most of it? Sure; always thus. But it cannot be denied that as more people are able to create and share, more talent will emerge from broader perspectives, producing a greater wealth and diversity of art, creativity and culture of value than ever was possible before. Our challenge is to find the best of it.
Of course, there is no guarantee of success, but the measure of success has changed as well. In the blockbuster economy that fuelled mass media, the definition of “big enough” was huge. Now big enough is in the eye of the performer. Spotify’s former chief economist, Will Page, reports that since the streaming platform’s founding in 2009, the number of British songwriters has exploded by 146 per cent to 160,000 and the number of recording artists almost doubled to 139,000. Major music labels still exist, and they release 1.2 million tracks a year, but DIY artists release 9.5 million. In 2000, Mr. Page says, the industry’s taxonomy of genres was limited to a dozen and a half; now Spotify tracks more than 5,000.
A culture of joy. Every day the internet brings me joy. On TikTok, I sometimes watch a brilliant young musician and director of music at Pembroke College, Cambridge, named Anna Lapwood, who shares her love of her instrument, the organ, as she records rehearsals in the dead of night at the Royal Albert Hall. She inspires young people to study music and has earned recording contracts and magazine covers. I watch Biko’s Manna, a remarkable trio of siblings in Johannesburg, aged 8 to 16, who sing beautifully, with joy. I chortle at the cynical grumblings of the anonymous, monotone, grumpy guy at Chef Reactions who just can’t believe some of the stupid things TikTokers cook. If you want to accuse me of being addicted to TikTok, fine. I am addicted to joy. It beats the hell out of letting cable news doomscroll the world for me.
A culture of commerce. Some say capitalism is already the ruin of the internet, motivating companies to extract and exploit value from us to build their monolithic, monopolistic corporations. Yes. But the net also allows the little guy to set up shop and fund, design, manufacture, market, sell and distribute products and services on a small scale without the need for large capital investment. It allows my entrepreneurial journalism students to serve small markets and communities, and make a living doing so.
Yes, Amazon threatens to kill bookstores just as the big-box stores before it killed mom-and-pop hardware stores, and a century and a half ago the first chain supermarkets doomed the corner grocery store. But as customers, the net provides us with an unprecedented choice of products at competitive prices.
Note, too, that social media has changed customer service by empowering consumers to hold public hissy fits. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been frustrated by endless hold music or customer-service people handcuffed by their scripts. So I’ve turned to Twitter (I’ll never call it X) to beg for help from a cable company, airline or store and quickly received aid because we, the customers, now have the power to embarrass even big companies in public, on the net.
A culture of connection and community. Every time I see a complaint about people ignoring other people in favour of their screens, I think of archival photos of crowded trains, every nose buried in a newspaper. With our phones, who is to say we are not interacting with more people more of the time than was ever possible before? Most of the time on my phone, I’m listening to or interacting with people, not machines.
I value the connections I have made over the past three decades with individuals – newly made friends, colleagues and conversationalists – and also with communities, assembling together with people of shared interest and sometimes organizing action, whether friendly get-togethers or protests. The internet has given life to the idea of the public as a mass. It has revealed the beautiful, tangled web of many publics that has always made up society.
Does the internet have problems? Of course it does. It is, again, a human endeavour. I hope we may reclaim our internet from the technologists, moguls and moral panickers who rule it now to build its future on our terms. To do that, we should begin by examining what is worth keeping.