Wired’s got a great piece about the way the Web is, how it’s nothing like what was predicted 10 years ago, and where it might be going (even though part of the point of the article is that we have to be careful when making predictions about the Web). But the most interesting aspect of the piece is that it doesn’t seem to realize that it’s saying that geek philosophy is what made the Web the way it is.
There’s this, for instance:
Linking unleashes involvement and interactivity at levels once thought unfashionable or impossible....
The electricity of participation nudges ordinary folks to invest huge hunks of energy and time into making free encyclopedias, creating public tutorials for changing a flat tire, or cataloging the votes in the Senate. More and more of the Web runs in this mode. One study found that only 40 percent of the Web is commercial. The rest runs on duty or passion.
But anyone who looked at what geeks and Xers were doing before the rise of the Web should have been able to anticipate this. We write fan fiction and make fan art; we organization and attend science fiction and fantasy conventions; we run fantasy baseball leagues (which is nothing but sports fan fiction!). We’re creative and passionate and gregarious and love playing around in new ways with the stuff we love, and we really love getting together to talk about the stuff we love. So it’s no surprise that when we moved online, we created a space like this:
The deep enthusiasm for making things, for interacting more deeply than just choosing options, is the great force not reckoned 10 years ago. This impulse for participation has upended the economy and is steadily turning the sphere of social networking - smart mobs, hive minds, and collaborative action - into the main event.
The force was not reckoned with -- and still is not -- because everyone is too busy giving us metaphoric wedgies... perhaps because they’re afraid to acknowledge that while they were busy calling us names in high school, we were getting on with the creation of the new culture (even if we didn’t realize that’s what were doing at the time).
And that new culture?
In part because of the ease of creation and dissemination, online culture is the culture. Likewise, the worry about the Internet being 100 percent male was entirely misplaced. Everyone missed the party celebrating the 2002 flip-point when women online first outnumbered men. Today, 52 percent of netizens are female. And, of course, the Internet is not and has never been a teenage realm. In 2005, the average user is a bone-creaking 41 years old.
In other words, the average user is the leading edge of Generation X.
