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Resisting Internet Orthodoxy
I've been thinking a lot about what makes the work I do and the ideas I have different from my contemporaries. Rather facetiously, I talk about the internet as a new religion embraced by the masses in search of salvation. By resisting internet orthodoxy, I deliberately try to see our society and its relationship with technology in a unique manner.
This begins with refusing to use the same jargon and phrases as others, and playing with words to find more accessible and meaningful ways of explaining trends and phenomena. The internet is full of technical concepts that have exclusive and rigid meanings.
Yet the power and resilience of the internet is derived from its open nature, so it only makes sense that we embrace freedom when we talk and think about related ideas and concepts. I do this by generally distrusting technical authorities, including early adopters, technology executives, and I.T. admins. I respect their knowledge, but always question whether their perspective has the potential to be transfered to people who aren't in a position of technical authority (the vast majority of us).
When it comes to the world of social media, which is both technical and non-technical, elitist and also accessible, I find myself consistently frustrated by the level of "group think." In contrast to other technical areas, social media accommodates anyone and everyone, so jargon isn't an acceptable vocabulary to control the discussion and analysis.
What you commonly find is a spoken and unspoken orthodoxy, rules that dictates how tools should be used and people should act. The problem is that this stifles innovation and doesn't allow for the kind of true experimentation we should be seeing in this sector.
Public relations, marketing and advertising people lament the rash of social media experts who project their own industry orthodoxy onto an emergent discipline. Few understand the dynamic involved when in a long chain of diverse individuals and organizations who have a range of expertise culturally acclimatize their own networks and friends.
The seeds of this kind of internet orthodoxy were sown in Ursula Franklin's definition of technology as being "how we do things around here". The variable comes in how we define where we are, with the internet collapsing space into time and everyone being "here" at some point in time.
William Gibson notes this changing relationship between space and time by declaring that "the future has already arrived, it's just not evenly distributed yet". The problem is that the pioneers who are eager to get wherever first are eager to assert their control over new space, and in this case it's quite simply a definition of how things should be done (i.e. carried out over time).
Ironically, another source of internet orthodoxy is the rigid culture of mainstream media, and the efforts to frame our world for easy consumption in between increasingly boring and irrelevant commercials. Television, radio and publishing, while becoming less dominant everyday, still set the tone for how we should be sharing stories and analyzing the world. The orthodoxy that governs the operation of these industries not only stifles society, but also threatens their survival.
For example, this past week CBC News has gone through a rebranding, redesign and renewal process, that has been a total travesty as far as critical Canadians are concerned. It's not that something new wasn't called for, but rather that what they've done is stay entirely within the orthodoxy of sensationalist cable news, a position which is neither appropriate for a public broadcaster nor desired by their audience.
What they should have done is try something new. Something that reflected both the opportunities the internet has to offer, and its potential to bring real substance and investigative journalism back to televised news. A number of newspapers, like the Toronto Star, have returned to a heavy diet of investigative reports as a means of differentiating themselves from aggregation services. This kind of unorthodox approach in an age of journalist cutbacks is exactly the type of contrast that courageous old-school organizations need to embrace in order to renew their relevance.
The business world plays a role in perpetuating a hypocritical approach to orthodoxy. They demand that everyone conform, except for a successful few who have the privilege to rebel. This ignores the fact that rebelliousness is the source of much of their success.
Had the CBC done anything other than pimp their personalities and superficial redesign, the corporate world would have been in an uproar: How dare the CBC do anything different? You can bet that my ideas about what they could have done would be condemned as anarchistic and "just not how things are done around here."
That's something you hear a lot in politics, where orthodoxy is perhaps the strongest force against reform and genuine change. The big news out of Ottawa this week has been the change in office of the leader of the opposition. Peter Donolo was brought in to save the floundering leadership of Michael Ignatieff.
From day one Iggy has been a joke, and rather than admit they made a mistake, the Liberal Party turned to orthodoxy as their means of salvation. Unfortunately, short of dumping their leader, they may be right that politics respects tradition, especially when it comes to back-room power deals.
I think one of the reasons my clients and audiences enjoy the work I do and the perspective I bring is that I help them see problems and our society in a way that opens doors and opportunities rather than locking them.
As space continues to collapse, and time continues to accelerate, people will increasingly wonder why the promises of the internet are not being delivered. The reason is simple: internet orthodoxy prevents us from realizing the true potential of open and distributed networks. Now is the time for us to build our own vision of what the internet should be, and to do so we must reject just about everything that anyone is saying about it.
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My name is spelled Jesse Hirsh, however it's often misspelled Jesse Hirsch, Jesse Hersh, Jessie Hirsch and many other variations.
Comments
CBC needs HETERODOXY
On the CBC's latest rebranding effort...
We should have seen this coming.
Before the current unveiling, they executed the same strategy with George Stroumboulopoulos. They took a rebellious researcher & interviewer, & turned him into a pathetic American late night talk show host.
They gave him a fancy set, flashy graphics package & studio audience.
Problem is, he sucks at talk-show comedy & he's interviewing the very people he would ridicule back on MuchMusic (and the earlier incarnations of his CBC show).
This nonsense is better suited for CTV.
That organization lacks any depth or talent.
They desperately need flashy graphics, inane banter, & queer anchor poses (and now that Mike Duffy is gone, the spectacle of blimp catching fire).
It's tragic because the CBC has actual TALENT & depth.
- Evan Solomon was so cool, he created Earth's only interesting BOOK show.
- Mark Kelly was so charming, his "on the road" reports seduced both the ORDINARY Canadians he interviewed...and the audience watching.
- Amanda Lang was so unique, she retained a SOUL despite being a business journalist.
The point is, CBC has this great stable of smart, off-beat...even subversive talent. Any re-branding effort should have exploited their natural abilities.
Instead, they've built this robotic environment & forced their talent to conform to it.
- Evan Solomon has turned into a deer staring into the teleprompter. He's doing such a good job imitating a 60 year old American anchor, he's STRUGGLING to grasp the very name of his show ("back with power on politics", "stay with us for more political power", "that's the politics of...um...power tonight", etc.).
- Mark Kelly is chained to a desk & basically doing the job of a telemarketer. They've got him talking to projections, unable to work his charms on real life people.
- Amanda Lang is doing the EXACT same show she did on ROB/BNN. They should have seen her hints of subversiveness on that network, & just let her unleash the repressed Keynesian inside. Instead, she's stuck doing lame stock reports with chalkboard-scratching Kevin O'Leary.
They don't need orthodoxy, they need heterodoxy.
Good discussion starter Jesse.
Orthodoxy
Poignant article, Jesse. Thanks for the creative mental sweat that went into it.
Thinking about "Ursula Franklin's definition of technology as being "how we do things around here". Kinda lame definition for technology, but an excellent def for "propriety" or to crank it up a notch to "piety".
Like you, no doubt, I bemoan the prescriptive themes, lists, steps, rules, commandments-to-conform, so predominant in web culture. It strikes me as an absurd extension of the old, self-help book industry.
So, I quite enjoy your iconoclastic posture. Treat it as refreshment from the threadbare internet cliches being retailed day in, day out.
Bob Ashley
@bashley
News, orthodoxy & the internet
This is all very true. This piece has just delivered more news than most of the stories on all the tv news combined; in probably the past year or more. It is because what is labelled news doesn't challenge the viewer to think, but rather to consume. And I really think news should be about questioning what is going on in the world around you; the new in the world, not making it sensational but rather making sense of it. However news is now less about information and more about entertainment, we really should call it infotainment, and not news. How can you have a dancing hamburger glove break up what is supposed to be a serious show about things that are supposed to matter to you? It is all about ratings, and therefore selling products.
In a consumer driven society where convenience is so important, thinking isn't. Critical thinking, and challenging the orthodoxy is not convenient, and certainly doesn't sell more products that rely on mindless consumption. Capitalist society has been conditioned this way for the benefit of those with capital, and those with capital want the trend to continue because it is beneficial for them, even if it means you only know what's going on as a consumer and not a thinker.
The stories on the news are skewed with a sense of urgency and pending doom which are usually unjustified. Nowadays you can get the facts; on the internet, or twitter and decipher the sense of weather the issues are urgent or not without the bias of the presenter, or their interests. This is why the internet is a threat to the orthodoxy of news, politics, and even society, because the channels of information are not limited to the handful of agencies reporting the facts, or the view of your local network of perspectives which usually has its own orthodoxy. The internet opens up a world of perspective when it's in the hands of the people.
Obviously the powers that be, want to control the internet, and make it orthodox as well, so that even information based on facts can be interpreted by them with a bias angled to their benefit. Since capitalist or political interest controls the information we get through the main stream media, and even public broadcasters like the CBC have a bias, it is critical that the internet remain unorthodox, and free for the people. Individuals without affiliation to a paycheck generally don't have capital or political interest when delivering information about the world around them.
I really think it is ridiculous that news is driven by ratings, and that it's content is distracted by commercial interests. If the CRTC doesn't allow for two local news stations to be under one owner, how can they allow for both owners to be in the pockets of the same company that pays their bills by buying advertising from them? Mcdonald's for example. Surely there is going to be a bias in how the information is presented when McDonald's is delivering the news. and it doesn't matter on what station.
Anyways Kudos to real news makers like Jesse Hirsh for making us think about what is really happening in the world around us, what is really new in the way this world works. It is certainly an unorthodox move to be the one to smash the screen everyone is googling at.
The problem is that people
The problem is that people are cognitive misers and that when something is new they attempt to apply the 'rules' that have worked in the past. Then they may move on to developing new rules that are one step way from the old ones and on and on. Very few people take a leap into the unknown and play with what may be. Those that do are labelled 'other'...genius...fool...politically dangerous...criminal.
I am so annoyed with the
I am so annoyed with the CBC's new look and new format. It's way too flashy for my eyes and all these hand-offs during the morning news are really irritating. I noticed they only had poor Suhana walking/standing around for a couple of days before they found the woman a chair, but I notice that the other presenters are all towering over her and her desk. The whole thing just looks ridiculous. I much prefer the previous set-up; it was bare bones, yes, but it's the fracking news for crying out loud! I haven't been motivated at all to watch any of the new programming. I miss Nancy, too!