Upon first glance at Kevin Kelly’s Wired article We Are the Web, one may nod in agreement with most of what Kelly states. We are witnessing an epoch with the creation of the Internet. Lives are being connected in ways that most could not fathom a short decade ago. However, with a closer inspection and dissection of his article elements of Kelly’s stance begin to fall apart. Below is an illustration of portions of his argument that require careful analysis.
The Role of Blogs
Kelly has an abundance of enthusiasm for one of the Web’s most popular creations, namely, blogs. Undeniably, this enthusiasm is well placed. Blogs are a phenomenon of ever-increasing popularity and allow for a sharing of information between principal and audience on every topic from the war in Iraq to the social happenings at a local junior high school. However, when detailing the blog-explosion he does not account for the fact that with the every growing number of new blogs, there is an accompanying number of dead blogs (i.e., blogs that have been abandoned by their author).
The number of dead blogs doesn’t negate the passion for the medium, but it suggests a more tempered view is appropriate.
In this more tempered view, it would have been worthwhile to discuss the types of blogs that have proven successful and the implications for the future of the web. No doubt blogs will continue to be an important part of the web going forward, but not every blog, and certainly not most of the blogs born every two seconds.
Is the Web for Everyone?
Kelly also shows an unrestrained view of the Web’s social and economic reach. “With the steady advance of new ways to share, the Web has embedded itself into every class, occupation, and region.” This has to be mistaken. Certainly, Kelly is right on his smaller points. Specifically, that the “the Internet [would be] 100 percent male” and that web users would be “out of the mainstream.”
However, his broader claim about how embedded the web has become fails. Kelly does not account for social, economic and geographic inequities.
With regards to geography, Kelly has neglected to take into consideration most of the population in third world countries. Believing that the web has managed to even remotely touch lives in Natitingou, Benin or will within the next ten years is most likely a complete misconception.
In regards to social and economic considerations, a lot of what we see represented on the web is from the perspective of the middle to upper class. Access to the web is still, to some degree, a luxury and the ability to invest leisure time on the web is unquestionably an indulgence not equally shared by all. Some do not have access to a computer or the Internet and even if they do, their time to fully explore and enjoy the Web is much more circumscribed than for others.
Glossing over the inequities that impact web usage and web involvement hides an issue that will resonate on the web over the next decade.
Overly Optimistic
Kevin Kelly is overly optimistic about the Internet’s future ability to counter act new problems. Kelly argues that:
“[B]y 2015 [the Machine] will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment they are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again.”
However, there will always be a handful of people at the top of programming that will be one step ahead of the Machine. The viruses these select few create will constantly be coded and executed in a unique way. The Machine may be able to anticipate disturbances and avoid ones they already have encountered, but being able to thwart a completely new virus that is coded quite different from anything it has previously determined to be “viral” is impossible and precisely why the Machine will never be a virus-free, smoothly running operating system.
Kelly’s article supports this conclusion when he states that, “[t]he Machine will take on anything we do more than twice.” Therefore if Kelly is arguing that the machine needs initial exposures to learn and assimilate threats, then so long as top programmers can use that against the machine in developing new viruses and threats, there will be the potential for attacks and viruses beyond the Machine’s capabilities.
