Error 404: Doubting the
Web
The final version of this
essay appears in Metaphor, Magic, and Power, Ed. A. Herman and
T. Swiss. 1: Not found
If I say, "the
Web" -- casual shorthand for "the World-Wide Web," itself a
dubiously loose way of talking about certain things possible within Hypertext
Transport and Internet Protocols -- you will probably form some immediate set
of impressions. These may involve vast, trackless information spaces (the
abstract or topological Web), or more likely, particular features in this
indeterminate expanse ("pages," "sites,"
"channels," and more recently "portals"). Clearly the
first alternative will not suffice. To speak of the World Wide Web as pure
abstraction confers no more understanding than thinking about "the
telephone" or "radio" or even "network television"
in such imprecise terms. The many objects and interests caught up in the
technologique of WWW/HTTP/IP can hardly be glossed so simply. They constitute
something that is more event than object, more subjectivity than subject,
more a network of bewildering particulars than a system of generalized
content. Yet the alternative
strategy -- veering into the particular, as Joan Didion might say -- seems no
more useful. What instance of Web production can serve as metaphor or even
metonymy? Microsoft's vision of the Web fused into the Windows desktop might
seem a logical candidate based on its audacity, if not its actual
universality. To symbolize the Web in this way would identify the phenomenon
mainly as a tool of productivity, the non-stick surface or myelin sheath for
Mr. Gates' "frictionless economy." But even as its capital base
expands to surreal proportions, the information economy has yet to
demonstrate solid and reliable gains in efficiency or production (see
Landauer). There is in fact good reason to suspect that digital networks
promote substantially different models of commerce and even of value (see
Kelly, Rules). Where else can we go today? Perhaps to the city of On the other hand, surely
the World Wide Web has more to offer than fleshpots and gunsights. Reading the
Web as an entertainment medium obscures its role as forum and fount of
potentially important information. Consider on the one hand the millions of
"home pages" featuring everything from vacation snaps to political
philosophy, and on the other, the infamous "Drudge Report," the Web
site whose scandal-mongering touched off one of the most significant
political controversies in recent In fact, the Web's
implications may be very large indeed. If it lives up to its currently
dubious "World-Wide" status, we might expect the Web at least to
complicate the effects of cultural imperialism and nation-state identity in
the New World Order. Thought-experiment: choose ten Web pages that represent
what you consider the most important developments in this medium at the
moment. How many of those pages use a language other than English? What is to
be said about Web sites that English-only speakers cannot read, or can only
barely comprehend? Or to take the inquiry beyond language to cultural
practice: what about Web publications that do not carry corporate
advertising, or are not indexed by search engines and linked from
"portal" sites? To ask these questions is
to raise issues of accessibility and access, which are always crucial in
cases of technological innovation. Access can be mediated by language and
culture, but material factors also come into play. To whom is the Web
visible, after all? Or to turn this question the other way, even for those
who have ready access to the Internet, how much of the Web is visible from
moment to moment? What about the pages that are very hard to find -- or
impossible to find at all? Perhaps this, after all, is the most
representative aspect of anyone's Web experience:
In fact, I have begun to
think this error message may be the most profound thing one can say about the
World Wide Web -- the best representative for all its shifting multiplicity.
This notion leads to a very serious question: What if the Web as we think we
know it does not really exist? 2: Detour
Though wise to the
dangers of Cartesian thinking, I have to ask indulgence at this point for
something that might look like an attempted cogito. I can cheerfully
enough deny existence of "the Web" in general, but I have a harder
time calling into question one of the Web's fundamental features:
hypertextuality. This is partly because I have spent more than fifteen years
thinking about and tinkering with that concept. While I would not go so far
as to say "I link, donc je suis," I do come back to
hypertext as something not altogether dubious. What follows is a short and
somewhat personal digression meant to explain how it is possible to maintain
an interest in the Web even as one doubts or even denies its proper
existence. Two major influences helped
solidify my emerging interest in hypertext long before anyone had heard of
the Web. The first was Michael Joyce's experimental fiction afternoon,
which convinced me both that hypertexts can be deeply frustrating and that
this frustration, properly understood, yields a fresh approach to reading
(see "Hyperreal"). Working through afternoon, I
realized that the text was like the proverbial iceberg, or as I described it
at the time, a miniature railroad controlled by some remote automaton. Both
metaphors are meant to emphasize the importance of the unseen to any
understanding of the text that is encountered. In the case of hypertext, what
you see is only a small part of what you conceptually get. The text is not
all there in a literal sense, and yet what is not visible or present matters
very much. The second early
influence on my thinking came from a series of essays by Terry Harpold in
which he argued on poststructuralist grounds that hypertext is a
fundamentally perverse practice, a space of illusions and "detours"
(Harpold, "Threnodies" and "Contingencies"). Like many
people beginning to think about hypertext in those days, Harpold had read
George Landow's eminently practical rhetoric of "arrivals and departures"
(Landow), then headed in a different direction, as Landow himself would soon
do. Instead of considering a link as a necessary joining of pre-ordained
parts, Harpold insisted that no link ever runs true. Even when operating as
intended, every link is phenomenologically a "detour," taking us
someplace we did not anticipate. Building on Harpold's insight, Nancy Kaplan
and I argued that links traverse a space of possibility that must be
considered as much a part of the text as the visible expression itself
(Kaplan and Moulthrop). Hypertext is always both seen and unseen, real and
hypothetical. When we came to the Web,
or it came upon us, this notion of detours across semantic space gained new
significance. Considering the things we began to see on the Web, it seemed
that the space traversed by the link had material, social, and even economic
implications that meant something important to a growing number of people,
and not necessarily just the venture capitalists. It was at this point,
around the end of 1994, that I began to see the importance of not-finding, or
the deeper significance of Error 404. It was also then, mediated by my
emerging understanding of hypertextual detours, that I started to wonder what
we meant by "the World Wide Web"; but this was only the beginning
of uncertainty. 3. Ask not what the Web
means to you
I doubt anyone knows what
she or he means by "the Web" -- but this unanswered question leads
inevitably to others. To fully understand our situation we must turn the
question the other way: What do we (present company intended) mean to the
Web? It is important to recognize that as a community of scholars we belong,
especially those of us trained from the 1960s through the 1980s, to to a
communications regime that differs fundamentally from what may be emerging
through the Internet. We were brought up on print and mass culture; and while
I admit that these are broad generalizations whose meaning is even less
precise than "the Web," it still seems true that for most of my
present audience the discursive universe falls into two broad categories. At
the center of this domain we find the stable and generally monologic
productions of the "serious" intellectual disciplines (science, the
law, and their aspiring ephebe, academic humanism). On the fringes of our
attention, though perhaps far more present than we care to admit, come the
ephemeral and rigidly traditional products of the entertainment industry,
those overnight sensations that Pat Cadigan so usefully labels
"porn:" Valjean had a screen for every porn channel,
jammed together in the wall so that food porn overlapped med porn overlapped
war porn overlapped sex porn overlapped news porn overlapped disaster porn
overlapped tech-fantasy porn overlapped porn she had no idea how to identify.
Maybe nobody did, maybe it just bypassed the stage where it would have been
anything other than porn. Meta-porn, porn porn? I don't know what it is, but it makes me horny, and that's all that
matters. (140;
emphasis original) Porn: to paraphrase the
recent talk in Given such a cataclysmic
outlook, perhaps a print-based academic can say nothing useful about the Web.
Maybe we should consign its strange productions to the cultural Oort cloud
along with pop songs, TV shows, comic books, pro sports, and other
excremental spectacles. Maybe the smartest strategy is to step from
skepticism to denial. Word: What Web? Is there anything out there that really
matters? What if the whole thing is just more Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner
propaganda, pure Silicon Alley and This is not to say,
however, that all varieties of unbelief are equal. Some must clearly be
excluded as trivial or tautological: for instance, the assertion that the
Web, as precursor to the grand vision of cyberspace, somehow falls outside
our temporal jurisdiction, vested in a future evermore about to be. The head
of a prominent university press once told me, with evident bitterness, that
the prospect of electronic publishing made her glad she would soon be
retiring. While it is nice not to have to worry about the future, this sort
of skepticism is no longer defensible with respect to the Internet.
"Cyberspace" may still be science fiction, but the World Wide Web
is not -- and anyway, as Bruce Sterling has famously said, we live in a
science-fictional world (xi). It is increasingly hard to separate fiction
from reality these days. Cyberspace may be hallucinatory (or hallucinogenic),
but "consensual" it certainly is not, especially if we understand
that word not in Gibson's unusual sense of sensory input but with its more
familiar sense of community or polity. Taken this way, the unreal image of
the Web seems a shadow or projection of very real social and economic
concerns. Things may matter even though -- or as -- they do not exist. So the Web does not
exist; but it fails or refuses to exist in a particular way of which we must
take note. If we must give up the pleasure of historical nihilism, we should
probably also forego any easy anti-essentialism or reflex affirmation that
"the" Web, monologic singular, cannot exist because Web space is of
course a multicosm, a heterogeneous network of complex and dynamic regimes.
The truth of this statement equals its banality. Heterogeneity matters, as we
said in beginning, but that is a given. What things in life are not complex
and dynamic? These are fundamental qualities of most if not all social
activity, at least insofar as that activity is reflected in discourse. True,
the infamous "404" often indicates mutability and instability, and
the Web is indeed a strange and shifty set of appearances; but these
qualities must be the beginning, not the end of doubt. We should know, or at
least suspect, that reflex anti-essentialism can lead to more serious abuse.
Dr. Johnson knew what he was doing when he attacked 4: Monster
Enter the devil's
advocate, or super-skeptic. Perhaps we can know where we are in relation to
the Web as well -- and perhaps, as I suggested earlier, that position will
not seem tenable. What if the Web is not just hallucination but pernicious
delusion? Let us assume not simply that the Web does not exist, but that
surely nothing like it ever could exist. Consider the World Wide Web as (in
every sense of the word) a monster. No one will be admitted to the theater
during the terrifying death-of-reading scene. You may have heard that
the Web is inherently hypertextual (Haraway 125), even though many chief
exponents of that more general technology, from Ted Nelson to Michael Joyce,
deeply resist the claim. Authorities may differ about their nature and
function, but hypertext links do provide a foundation for Web discourse.
Links bring with them an important element of intertextual relatedness, and
even a kind of hypertextuality, so it seems safe to assert that hypertext and
the Web have something important in common. But here is a problem. To
anyone brought up in an ideology of textual mastery -- which is, after all,
what many of us were taught in graduate school -- hypertext is apt to inspire
horror. Not only does this sort of writing expand the scope of the textual universe
by allowing links from one body of signs to others, it also invites users to
complicate and exfoliate their textual productions. There is more and more
text all the time and more discursive volume within the component texts. The
burden on critics and editors, to say nothing of ordinary readers, expands
exponentially. As a literary or literate practice -- viewed from the
comfortable parameters of the print regime -- hypertext does not seem to fit
into our world of discourse. On practical if not intellectual grounds, then,
we might wonder how there could ever be a World Wide Web, at least in the
sense of an enterprise we mean to take seriously. The devil's advocate rests.
However, this is cannot
be the end of our skepticism. Michel Foucault defined the "author
function," our practice of delimiting bodies of literary work under
proper names, as the "thrifty" principle that prevents
signification from proliferating out of control (158-59). The economic
metaphor was well chosen, for there seems to be a deep connection between
textual and material economies. This is quite evident today. Now that we have
undone the limits on text, the old rules of business practice seem also to
have disappeared. We have entered a period of explosion, if not inflation, in
finance as well as texts. A recent article in the corporate journal InfoWorld
observes that the seven most prominent "all-Internet" businesses,
companies like Netscape, Excite, Infoseek, and Amazon, have registered
roughly a billion dollars in losses after two to three years in operation
(Reed). Most are still losing money and have no clear plan to generate
profits except by dominating some inestimable market. Yet at the time of this
report these unprofitable companies had capitalizations ranging from $1 billion
to $17 billion, figures equal to or greater than those of old-line concerns
like American Airlines and Sears Roebuck. While the vast, silent
majority of info-business startups have already failed, and though massive
retrenchment may always be just around the corner, there has been as yet no
sustained retreat from Internet or Web commerce. The boom continues to defy
logic. The gamble on information technologies continues to prove irresistible
-- witness the notorious case of Microsoft, which may have been undone, in a
judicial if not an economic sense, by its desire to rule the Internet. And
yet the economics of the Web, even in a fundamentally sound business like
Amazon (of which more later), seem to make little sense. Amazon may be
profitable, but it seems unlikely to succeed at the titanic levels expected.
Surely the Web cannot sustain itself as a business proposition, if by such we
imply anything beyond pure symbolism. Having turned to the
economics of the sign, however, we may find that our skepticism expands in
unsettling directions. Perhaps it is not the Internet or the Web that is
untenable, but the entire social order from which these technological
boondoggles arise. For the same bizarrely self-contradictory pattern that
seems to obtain in textual production and Internet business plans -- a mad
expansion that threatens to outrun the capacity of any underlying market --
can be seen at the most general level of social relations. Technologies likle
the Web seem to promise a general devolution, at least in discursive or
symbolic production. Every computer-equipped, reasonably wired person can be
a publisher or "content provider." Let a million startups bloom!
And yet even as this vision unfolds, the logic of mergers and acquisitions
consolidates ultimate control of communications channels, to say nothing of
finance and industrial production, in the hands of a vanishingly few: the
Gateses, the Murdochs, the Turners, the equity holders of Time-Warner,
Bertelsmann, Wolters-Klüwer. Are we living through an expansion or a huge
contraction -- the apotheosis of free markets or their final implosion? How
can the answer be both at once? Surely no society such as
this can really exist. By reading the Web as illusion, we may have discovered
that it is indeed a creature of fantasy, a very scary monster indeed -- but
the creature is no stalker of the 5: What use?
Maybe the revery of
postindustrial capitalism will not last much longer; sleepers eventually
awaken. If the Web does not exist, it may be because it is, like the society
that engenders it, an artifact of transition, a blur in the slow-motion film
of history, or to try a less anachronistic metaphor, a file that can no
longer be found. 404 indeed. Perhaps the world is truly about to end, or
change utterly. As McLuhan claimed, one may identify certain social
formations or identities with evolutions in technology (1967, 68-69). He
argued that "the public," the body of rational individuals
inculcated by the Enlightenment, could be traced in large measure to the
influences of print, while "the mass," the next social identity to
evolve, owed its emergence largely to broadcast media. If the Web and other
forms of Internet communication represent nascent forms of something yet to
be fully defined, will they usher in a third form of humanity? Who or what
succeeds the mass? At this point we might
think about tempering somewhat our sustained skepticism. If space may produce
new worlds and cyberspace brave new people, then maybe there is something to
look forward to after all. Maybe the Red King can remain in his dream state a
good while longer; long enough, at least, to consider a more constructive set
of questions. Why should the Web exist? Assuming the manifold contradictions
of information culture could be worked through, what would be its likely
social effects? Or at the risk of a certain banality: What is the World Wide
Web good for? One canonical answer,
perhaps the standard Enlightenment answer, looks to augmentation or
prosthesis. The Internet is the distributed human nervous system, Oversoul,
nošsphere, or as Don DeLillo once wickedly named it, "Space Brain"
(DeLillo, 45). So who are these Web people even now climbing out of their
learning pods and Skinner boxes, ready to re-invent the digital economy, or
at least start processing all that hypertext? Whoever they are, I suspect
they are the millennial equivalent of Fitzgerald's rich -- not the same as
you and me. They are, one hopes, smarter. The dream of augmenting
or "bootstrapping" human intelligence can be a good thing, less
perhaps in the self-serving rhetoric of Gates or Negroponte than in the
visionary thinking of Douglas Engelbart, the great designer who invented many
fundamental technologies on which our current dreams are based (Engelbart).
Still, there is always a gap between vision and reality. Writing about a
particularly bizarre piece of fiction from William Burroughs, the critic
Charles Newman called it "an aesthetic experience recommended for a
species which has yet to appear on earth" (93). Generalizing from
literature to culture more broadly, we might find in Newman's critique an
important corrective. Biologists differ about the speed at which speciation
occurs, but there can be little doubt that it takes longer than the release
cycle of most Web browsers -- a fact that may explain much. The true children of the
Internet may be already among us, or they may be much longer in coming. It is
probably impossible to characterize their arrival except in retrospect. In
any event, the apocalyptic notion of a technological Great Awakening or
Childhood's End seems to have little bearing on the present status, or
not-quite-entity, of the World Wide Web. Hopelessly addicted to
the McLuhan Channel, I have always preferred another crackpot explanation for
our current predicament. Admittedly, this thinking probably works better as myth
or fiction than cultural analysis, but I offer it nonetheless. McLuhan noted
that technologies "reverse" as they approach some limit of
development or expression (1964, 35). Carried to its extreme in the 20th
century, industrial mass communication reversed from the linear and
perspectival medium of print into the "cool" immediacy of
broadcasting. Scaling up this rationale, we can derive the origin of the
Internet and its curious illusion the Web from the reversal of that supreme
signifier, the thermonuclear bomb (as Susan Sontag quipped, "cogito ergo
boom"). Having produced doomsday weapons, we turned from technologies
that reduce discursive potential to one (I win) or zero (everyone loses) to
technologies that ramify discourse beyond any dream of control, as Kevin
Kelly points out. This was the creative leap of technoculture, the grand
postmodern swerve from the path of mutual assured destruction. In the words
of Harold Bloom: "Discontinuity is freedom" (39). Or in this case,
survival. Though not intended as
legitimate historical analysis, this account at least registers (though it
cannot explain) the irrationality of our current condition. To continue in a
Bloomian vein: As we fell out of the modern nightmare we swerved, and now we
lie in a postmodern hell improved by our own making. Welcome to the
Information Age. But before I suggest that the end of the Cold War was
engineered by the Trilateral Commission in order to spur commercial
development of the Internet, let me confess that the World Wide Web makes no
more sense as a bridge across the Neither scenario helps
explain the fundamental problem with which we began: though everywhere in
evidence, the existence of the Web cannot be accounted for in any
satisfactory way. What after all would the Web exist for?-- and note that the
answer to this question must be framed in terms of practice, not theory.
Thomas Landauer, system designer and former research chief at Bellcore, puts
this question most effectively in his trenchant study of information
technology and its business culture (13-14). After noting that the massive
computerization of the 1980s and 1990s yielded no appreciable gain in
productivity, and that business would on the whole have done better to put
its technology dollars into the bond market, Landauer raises a crucial and
uncomfortable question. He asks of information technology, what's the use?
This question is
significantly hard to address (though Landauer's answers are well worth
considering); but even in confronting the question we might begin to reach a
better understanding of the deeply dubious Web. If the Web does not yet exist
as a fully formed communications regime, or indeed as an economic
proposition, perhaps it is because we have not yet understood, recognized, or
even formulated the uses to which it should be put. We have yet to understand
the parameters of our fallen state. It may be that the World Wide Web
requires a thorough re-thinking of what we mean by use. Much of that process
is still before us. We may wish, following Kevin Kelly and Sherry Turkle, to
think of the Web as an "emergent" phenomenon whose nature will be
revealed as it unfolds. Taking this line in a pragmatic direction, we may
search with Jay David Bolter for a process of "remediation" in
which the ecology of media settles itself into new arrangements,
self-motivated, autopoetic, and deeply recursive (Bolter and Grusin, 4-5).
Though Bolter recognizes remediation as something of a sideshow trick that
demands critical inspection, there is a palpable change here from his earlier
line, which began by arguing that "this [hypertext] will destroy that
[print]" (Writing Space, 1). Perhaps Bolter is on to something. Is there
remediation (if not remedy) for our doubts? Might it be possible to stop
worrying and love the Web? 6: Credo
So the Web is all in your
head, pure illusion, not so much consensual hallucination as special digital
effect. That doesn't mean you can't learn to appreciate the thing, or perhaps
even cherish it, especially if you happen to hold a chair in a humanities
department somewhere in the wired world. Bolter's new pragmatism -- and it is
mine as well, since I come from a working-class college balanced on the
ax-edge of budget cuts -- can have strong appeal, considering the career
prospects of majors in literature and the fine arts. Could the Web be the
great salvation of the humanities at century's end, a decent fallback option
for talented people left wanting by feeble academic job markets? If so, the
Web could be the most important development for the humanities since
interlibrary loan. But what if one still
refuses, perversely and adamantly, to accept this miracle? Some people cannot
bring themselves to embrace this sort of unbridled (and perhaps unprincipled)
pragmatism. They are not necessarily wrong. Cautious engagement seems the
best course, a position that neither dismisses the possibilities for
emergence nor takes as read what is not yet written. There is undeniably a
danger in the Web mirage -- perhaps especially, to strike closer to home, in
the conceit of Web design as a cure-all for a moribund academic
culture still yoked to the printing press. Palliatives may conceal symptoms
of more serious disease. If we choose to believe pragmatically in the Web, we
should remember that it may be a diversion meant to hold the attention of
intelligent people while the masters of capital lock down the gates of
oligopoly control. What, after all, do Web
designers design? To adapt Landauer's line, what is the use of textual
production on the Web? There may of course be valid answers to these
questions. Perhaps there are things for weavers of Webs to do besides
creating user interfaces for PC banking software, corporate intranets, or
banner ads for the latest At the same time, there
may also be possibilities for improvement within the oligopolized space of
late-late capitalism. Consider this story about a funny thing that happened
on my way to the virtual cash register. Seeking a course text for my class in
Hypermedia Production, I paid a visit to Amazon.com and carried out name
searches for several authors whose books I had used with satisfaction in the
past. One of these searches turned up a book whose title contained the phrase
"Communication Design." Among other positive indications, this
phrase closely resembles the name of my academic program, so I was ready to
add the book to my virtual shopping cart, with thoughts about making it a
course requirement; but these thoughts vanished as I read further down the
Web page. The descriptions of books
at Amazon prominently display brief, unsolicited reviews by readers. The very
first comment I encountered for the text in question (which in fairness
should remain unnamed) advised that this book, billed as a collaboration
between a respected senior writer and a relative unknown, was actually
written almost entirely by the unknown. The comment concluded with the simple
prescription: "Avoid." After looking at the negative review in more
detail and remembering problems with similar books in the past, I followed
the reviewer's advice. There was no sale. My tale from the cybermall
may say something important about the reforming potential of the World Wide
Web. It has been some time since I walked into a bookstore and picked a title
from the shelves only to be talked out of the purchase -- although this did
happen more than once, in another place and time, when I was dealing not with
multinational chains but with a dedicated, independent bookseller. I wonder
if this bookseller is still in the business; things are different now. I do
not recall ever choosing a book at my local Borders or Barnes and Noble or B.
Dalton only to find stuck to the cover a warning to "Avoid." This
sort of thing does not and cannot happen in a regime dominated by inventory
costs, hyper-competition, and the demand for ever higher profits. Yet the value of books
transcends their commodity status -- a reason we still have lending libraries
and (for the moment) first-use rights. Amazon's hallucinatory business model,
in which it holds only a nominal inventory and can afford to un-sell the
books that line its virtual shelves, represents a very interesting revision
of commodity capitalism, albeit in a limited, local instance. Perhaps it
merely corrects a perverse mistreatment of books, which were never meant to
be sold like hamburgers; and perhaps the Amazon effect will not transfer or,
in that most ominous requirement of e-business, "scale." But it
does seem possible that Amazon's approach indicates fundamental and eligible
changes in the way vendors define their relation to consumers -- changes in
which Web designers as well as Internet radicals might find common ground. If this seems an
extravagant suggestion, consider that the notable success of Amazon as a
retailer of books, and lately music and videos, may represent only the first
stage in the development of a new market for textual goods. Amazon has
successfully separated its trade from traditional channels of inventory and
distribution, but this transformation can be taken further. Since the value
of a book, music CD, or videotape inheres mainly in its content and not in
the material substrate, why not eliminate the object altogether? Why print
books? Relatively cheap and lightweight display devices now on the market can
store hundreds of titles. Price and performance of these "electronic
books" seem likely to improve markedly over the next few years. Amazon
could easily deliver texts for these devices as bitstreams transmitted
through the Internet, as several vendors of electronic books are doing
already. For those who still cherish the physical object, local service
outlets could return to the ancient practice of booksellers and print and
bind on demand. Even physical bookstores might survive this change. Redefined
as marketing and browsing places, they might come to resemble lounges and
cafes even more than they do now. Would these differences
make a difference in the larger scheme of things? Much depends, of course, on
unpredictable social and political articulations. In concept, however, sale
by download could allow providers of textual goods to bypass and the large
industrial concerns that now control production and distribution. Amazon.com
depends entirely on the News Corporation, Time/Warner, Macmillan, and a few
other major interests that provide its stock in trade. But this might not
always be the case. If publishing no longer meant expensive production and
delivery of physical objects, content providers might find new outlets for
their work. There would of course be
further complications. The choke point in publishing might shift from
production to evaluation and publicity, with capital interests arguing, as
they already do in Web publications like Salon and Slate,
that they are the only proper arbiters of textual value. The capitalists
might then shift their arguments for heavy investment and high profit margins
to the demands of taste-making, or advertising. However, these functions
depend on tight control of product lines. It is relatively easy to shape the
public's desire for movies at the cineplex or paperbacks at the airport,
where consumer options are limited to a handful of products only briefly
available. Would the same reasoning apply to a market where the shelves or
marquee are replaced by a hypertextual catalog, and where no title ever goes
out of print? While this logic has yet
to penetrate the relatively backward book trade, there has been movement in
this direction in the popular music market, spurred by the advent of MPEG-3
recorders and the rapid growth of music download sites on the Web. Television
programmers may be waking up as well. Thomas Rosenstiel, director of the
Project for Excellence in Journalism, recently said: "Our mass media
depends [sic] on an audience that no longer exists -- a mass audience which
is now fragmented" (Barringer, C1). Might we reach a point at which the
monolithic mass market, for some commodities at least, becomes as chimerical
as the Web seems today? Probably not, if the
current owners of the media have any say in the matter. It is worth noting
that even as MPEG-3 and e-books make their appearance, the U.S. Patent Office
has begun to award alarmingly broad protections for basic business practices
-- a development which apparently spurred the Microsoft Corporation to apply
for a patent on sale of electronic magazines by subscription over the World
Wide Web. That such an application would even be considered seems
instructive. Oligopoly capital continues to call the tune, in this country at
least, and will continue to do so as long as political campaigns are paid for
by corporate subvention. Any major shift in markets is bound to arouse
opposition. As usual, those who would
enter this contest on the side of change must subsist largely on illusions --
radical economic models, faith in individual enterprise, and anachronistic
notions of a public good. To this list of illusions we might now add the
World Wide Web and some of the possibilities it may hold for electronic
commerce. To be sure, it would be foolish to place in these imaginings
anything but the most conditional belief. Like all technologies, the Web and
the Internet in themselves make little difference. Visions do not change the
world, except as they inform real work. But work without vision leads
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URL: http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/essays/404.html