Douglas Rushkoff
Online
When I started writing columns about the Internet I thought of myself as something of a midwife.
We were birthing a new culture, and had experienced some complications in our labour. My purpose was to hold on to our collective hand, help us remember to breathe, and tell us how precious the baby would be when it came out.
That baby is born. Cyberculture is not an edge phenomenon, a future technology, or fringe cultural expression. It’s the way things are. We live in an online world.
We’re past the point where the potential of cyberculture outweighs its reality. To write about technology is no longer an act of futurism. It’s a reporting of present fact. But stuck in the future tense, I keep projecting forward about where this movement is headed and why we should fear nothing in our path.
I began writing columns intending to reduce our of fear about change. I promised to write back to any reader who wrote to me, and – except in the case of two death threats – managed to do so. About 60 columns and 4 000 e-mails later, I’m finding myself fatigued and a little cynical.
I read over my columns and was disturbed by how my optimism darkened as my topics changed from the “global brain” and “rave” to “Microsoft attacks” and “Net censorship”.
Instead of championing my optimistic view, I attacked whenever I saw someone, somewhere, doing something This happened, in part, because it’s easier to find something bad to write about than something good.
But so, too, is it easier to see the blood and pain during a woman’s labour than it is to imagine the beautiful baby that’s about to come out, or to widen one’s scope enough to see the whole process as natural, even divine.
And I suspect that now this shouldn’t even be the task. The birthing is over. Our job is no longer to envision an electronic future that provides equal opportunity for all.
The electronic future is now an elec- tronic present. Online activities are almost ubiquitous. There are real issues to deal with – literacy, economics, censorship, access – but these are the same issues confronting us everywhere we turn. They are not unique to the online world.
And right now, neither am I. There are two kinds of cyberwriters out there: the useful but boring writers who tell you how to configure your Web browser, and the futuristic ones who remain so abstract from the real world that their musings, though fascinating at times, are useless.
Confronted by my own growing cyni-cism and hand-wringing, I considered stepping back from this column altogether. The world hardly needs another cynical hack. But I think it will be a valuable ex-periment to see how to move on from here.
How does one write a cybercolumn when there really is no such thing as “cyber” anymore? By realising that the so-called real world is just as malleable, open-ended, and fraught with possibility as the most hyped, fantastic vision of cyberspace.
It’s not cyberia that has been grounded by the realities of business and government. It’s business and government that have been co-opted by the spirit of cyberia. They just don’t know it yet. c Douglas Rushkoff
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