At a time when many people are saying innovation is dead along with the economy as we knew it, I can’t help but feel the hot breath of a surge in the power of the network. As Marc Andreessen reminds in his fascinating conversation with Charlie Rose, the Internet didn’t take off until the browser. The infrastructure was in place for some time already, but when the browser appeared, the TV generation sat up and took notice.
Now we’re at the threshold of the realtime moment, and history seems to be repeating itself. For some of us, the advent of a reasonably realtime message bus over public networks has changed something about the existing infrastructure in ways that are not yet important to a broad section of Internet dwellers. The numbers are adding up — 175 million Facebook users, tens of thousands of instant Twitter followers, constant texting and video chats among the teenage crowd — a semi-secret economy of interactive media that is sucking the chewy chocolate center out of the one-way broadcast sector.
The standard attack on realtime is that it is the new crack. We’re all addicted to our devices, to the flow of alerts, messages, and bite-sized information chunks. We no longer have time for blog posts, refreshing our Twitter streams for pointers to what our friends think is important. It’s the revenge of the short attention span brought on by 30-second television ads — the myth of multi-tasking spread across a sea of factoids that Nick Carr fears will destroy scholarship and ultimately thinking.
Of course this is true and also completely irrelevant. My daughter told her mother today that her boyfriend was spending too much time on IM and video-chat, and not enough on getting his homework done. She actually said these words: “I told him you have to get away from the computer sometimes, turn it off, give yourself time to think.” This is the same daughter who will give up anything – makeup, TV, food — just as long as I don’t take her computer or iPhone away.
So realtime is the new crack, and even the naivest of our culture realizes it can eat our brains. But does that mean we will stop moving faster and faster? No. Does that mean we will give up our blackberries when we become president? No. Then what will happen to us?
The browser brought us an explosion of Web pages, produced first by professionals, then by small business owners, and finally, with blogs, by anybody. The struggle became one of time and location; RSS and search to the rescue. The time from idea to publish to consumption approached realtime.
The devices then took charge, widening the amount of time to consume the impossible flow. The Blackberry expanded work to all hours. The iPhone blurred the distinction between work and play. Twitter blurred personal and public into a single stream of updates. Facebook blurred real and virtual friendships. That’s where we are now.
Realtime has to be managed. The first tools in any transformative period are hard coded to the sensibilities of the radicals, the pioneers on the front lines. Scoble may appear ridiculous in his zeal for the extremes of the social media envelope, but his calculation is much more conservative than you might think at first glance. By opening himself to the tyranny of the crowd, he connects with that reality we each face.
The difference between 150 friends in our address book and 5,000 in Facebook is vanishingly small: we don’t have time for either. Trying to capture the nuances of friendship in a social media context is no more difficult than in high school, or easier. This is our life’s work, learning how to balance our needs with those of those we care about.
Once we reach a certain point in the shift, the tools begin to be more malleable as technologists surrender some control in search of viral spread. Bookmarks in the early browsers led to del.icio.us, Yahoo’s index to Digg, banner ads to page rank. The two-way quality of the network encouraged the viral spread of sharing.
Swallowed as we are in this vortex of change, it’s hard to see where the tools are going. Realtime has to draw on the human elements to ease the transition, harness the power, quiet the fear. The anger about Twitter mania, the reluctance to delve into the civil rights aspects of the quarantining of our data, the fratricide going on between bloggers and journalists — all these are symptoms of the power of this struggle for our minds.
Andreessen is one good reason why we’ll work our way through this. He talks impossibly fast, probably only a small fraction of the speed at which he thinks. Listening to him is an exciting and sometimes daunting experience, like listening to The Dark SIde of the Moon at 78 rpm.
Charlie Rose:
So to play offense for a newspaper for you means what?Marc Andreessen:
Oh, you got to kill the print edition.Charlie Rose:
You would stop the presses tomorrow?Marc Andreessen:
You have to kill it.Charlie Rose:
Stop the presses tomorrow.Marc Andreessen:
You have to kill it.Charlie Rose:
Stop the presses tomorrow.Marc Andreessen:
Stop the presses tomorrow. I’ll tell you what. The stocks would go up. Look at what’s happened to the stocks. This investors are through this. The investors are through the transition. You talk to any smart investor who controls any amount of money, he will tell you that the game is up. Like it’s completely over. And so the investors have completely written off the print operations. There is no value in these stock prices attributable to print anymore at all. It’s gone.Charlie Rose:
So you would recommend to the owners of the New York Times, stop printing papers.Marc Andreessen:
Yeah, absolutely. You have to. You have to –Charlie Rose:
And take your losses –Marc Andreessen:
Yeah. You have to.Charlie Rose:
Like a courageous person.Marc Andreessen:
Chronic pain? Acute pain. How many years — music industry, same thing. How many years of chronic pain do you want to take to avoid taking a year of acute pain?
My 8 year old daughter doesn’t read the newspaper off or online, but I found her showing my wife new emoticons in Gchat today. Now she’s on a speakerphone talking with a friend while playing a game over the Net. I rarely see or talk with friends from high school or earlier, but what’s to prevent these virtual friendships from continuing to flourish for a lifetime? What are the consequences of the lowering of the barriers of space and time? We’re finding out, in realtime.