Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2013, and Rob May is described as CEO and co-founder of Backupify as of that year. Backupify was later acquired by Datto in 2014.
An interesting piece by Rob May, CEO and co-founder of Backupify (the original article was published on VentureBeat, in English).
Rob May argues that the internet is not what many people once hoped it would be. In the early days of the World Wide Web (www.), it felt like the sky had opened up: we could access all kinds of information and opinions, along with real diversity of thought. At last, rebels, eccentrics, visionaries and innovators could send their messages out to the whole world.
The internet had no barriers, and in fact it still doesn’t, because the biggest barrier is in people’s minds. For this author, the internet has been a failure. He explains that nowadays everyone reads the same blogs and shares the same information from the same outlets about the same topics.
In other words, what promised to be a means of expression and a source of knowledge has ended up as a herd that keeps thinking the same thing and going wherever everyone else goes.
The internet increases traffic, but it reduces the diversity of that traffic across websites.
When users visit the major news sites, they don’t browse the web; they go straight to the most popular articles (the “most read” section). As a result, short on time, readers default to what everyone else has already read. According to the author, this behavior drives the economics of the media, pushing writers to write about those successful pieces, the most commercial ones.
Among millions of websites and blogs, everyone reads the same tech blogs and the same newspapers that match their political views. That holds back everyone else: even when they have a different opinion that might be right, they get no attention, simply because not everybody reads them, and so it is taken for granted that their information must be of lower quality.
Freedom of thought has given way to a lack of thought.
As in so many other areas of life, on the internet an outlet can publish an excellent article that goes completely unnoticed on social media, while popular outlets churning out shallow filler pieces flood social networks with retweets, likes and so on. That is what everyone shares, and therefore it is what people like.
While internet freedom criticizes consumer society for pushing people to buy, online everyone is being pushed to consume the same information, often without even realizing it.
The idea of the internet has failed to the point that an exclusive story has no credibility until the most popular outlets publish it. You sometimes see conversations like this: “That’s not true, because newspaper **** hasn’t reported it… oh, look, it is true after all, **** has just published it.”
And this last point is perhaps the most worrying, because freedom of expression is worthless if what you are going to say is shaped by common or popular opinion.
Perhaps it is time to ask ourselves how far Rob May may be right about this.
Featured image: Joan Campderrós-i-Canas, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
