This link has been bookmarked by 194 people . It was first bookmarked on 14 Jul 2015, by Carlos Magro.
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30 Jan 20
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09 Jun 19
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22 Feb 19
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12 Jan 19Tristan Bailey
“The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.” https://t.co/Ro7ZHlaied
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21 Aug 18
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12 Aug 17richard sambrook
Here is why I think the web (and thus Wilipedia) is nothing without hyperlinks. #Wikimania17 #wikimania2017
https://t.co/Yi96eSA1GS -
23 Sep 16
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08 Sep 16
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30 Jun 16
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Since I got out of jail, though, I’ve realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.
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Instagram — owned by Facebook — doesn’t allow its audiences to leave whatsoever
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Their gaze goes nowhere except inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying.
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The Stream means you don’t need to open so many websites any more.
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A most brilliant paragraph by some ordinary-looking person can be left outside the Stream, while the silly ramblings of a celebrity gain instant Internet presence.
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Maybe it’s that text itself is disappearing
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Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening?
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departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet.
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Instead, there was the web, and on the web, there were blogs: the best place to find alternative thoughts, news and analysis.
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Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you’d rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them.
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the most powerful web pages are those that have many eyes upon them.
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web pages outside social media are dying.
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The Stream means you don’t need to open so many websites any more. You don’t need numerous tabs. You don’t even need a web browser
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opinions are not the same as material goods or services. They won’t disappear if they are unpopular or even bad
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The prominence of the Stream today doesn’t just make vast chunks of the Internet biased against quality — it also means a deep betrayal to the diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned.
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The centralization of information also worries me because it makes it easier for things to disappear.
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Around me, I noticed a very different Tehran from the one I’d been used to. An influx of new, shamelessly luxurious condos had replaced the charming little houses I was familiar with. New roads, new highways, hordes of invasive SUVs. Large billboards with advertisements for Swiss-made watches and Korean flat screen TVs. Women in colorful scarves and manteaus, men with dyed hair and beards, and hundreds of charming cafes with hip western music and female staff. They were the kinds of changes that creep up on people; the kind you only really notice once normal life gets taken away from you.
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If I wanted to lure people to see my writing, I had to use social media now.
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There was no Instagram, no SnapChat, no Viber, no WhatsApp
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there were blogs: the best place to find alternative thoughts, news and analysis. They were my life.
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“the blogfather” in my mid-twenties — it was a silly nickname, but at least it hinted at how much I cared.
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But reading Iranian blogs in Toronto was the closest experience I could have to sitting in a shared taxi in Tehran and listening to collective conversations between the talkative driver and random passengers.
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The hyperlink was my currency six years ago. Stemming from the idea of the hypertext, the hyperlink provided a diversity and decentralisation that the real world lacked. The hyperlink represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web
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Nearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object — the same as a photo, or a piece of text — instead of seeing it as a way to make that text richer.
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Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers.
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these social networks tend to treat native text and pictures — things that are directly posted to them — with a lot more respect than those that reside on outside web pages.
-
the images are much less visible to Facebook itself, and therefore get far fewer likes. The cycle reinforces itself.
-
Instagram — owned by Facebook — doesn’t allow its audiences to leave whatsoever. You can put up a web address alongside your photos, but it won’t go anywhere.
-
Lots of people start their daily online routine in these cul de sacs of social media, and their journeys end there.
-
When a powerful website — say Google or Facebook — gazes at, or links to, another webpage, it doesn’t just connect it — it brings it into existence; gives it life.
-
On the other hand, the most powerful web pages are those that have many eyes upon them.
-
But apps like Instagram are blind — or almost blind. Their gaze goes nowhere except inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying.
-
two of the most dominant, and most overrated, values of our times: novelty and popularity, reflected by the real world dominance of young celebrities.
-
That philosophy is the Stream.
-
Fewer users are directly checking dedicated webpages, instead getting fed by a never-ending flow of information that’s picked for them by complex –and secretive — algorithms.
-
The Stream means you don’t need to open so many websites any more
-
You open Twitter or Facebook on your smartphone and dive deep in. The mountain has come to you. Algorithms have picked everything for you.
-
In many apps, the votes we cast — the likes, the plusses, the stars, the hearts — are actually more related to cute avatars and celebrity status than to the substance of what’s posted
-
A most brilliant paragraph by some ordinary-looking person can be left outside the Stream, while the silly ramblings of a celebrity gain instant Internet presence.
-
They won’t disappear if they are unpopular or even bad. In fact, history has proven that most big ideas (and many bad ones) have been quite unpopular for a long time, and their marginal status has only strengthened them. Minority views are radicalized when they can’t be expressed and recognized.
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Today the Stream is digital media’s dominant form of organizing information. It’s in every social network and mobile application.
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here’s no question to me that the diversity of themes and opinions is less online today than it was in the past.
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New, different, and challenging ideas get suppressed by today’s social networks because their ranking strategies prioritize the popular and habitual.
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The centralization of information also worries me because it makes it easier for things to disappear.
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But what if my account on Facebook or Twitter is shut down for any reason? Those services themselves may not die any time soon, but it would be not too difficult to imagine a day many American services shut down accounts of anyone who is from Iran, as a result of the current regime of sanctions.
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especially since there is a financial relationship between you and the seller which makes it less prone to sudden and untransparent decisions.
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: It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.
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Surveillance is increasingly imposed on civilized lives, and it just gets worse as time goes by. The only way to stay outside of this vast apparatus of surveillance might be to go into a cave and sleep, even if you can’t make it 300 years.
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states that cooperate with Facebook and Twitter know much more about their citizens than those, like Iran, where the state has a tight grip on the Internet but does not have legal access to social media companies.
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What is more frightening than being merely watched, though, is being controlled. When Facebook can know us better than our parents with only 150 likes, and better than our spouses with 300 likes, the world appears quite predictable, both for governments and for businesses. And predictability means control.
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no one knows what is next.
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There’s less and less text to read on social networks, and more and more video to watch, more and more images to look at.
-
Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening?
-
But as the number of image scanners and digital photos and video cameras grows exponentially, this seems to be changing. Search tools are starting to add advanced image recognition algorithms; advertising money is flowing there.
-
We seem to have gone from a non-linear mode of communication — nodes and networks and links — toward a linear one, with centralization and hierarchies.
-
The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.
-
When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of course self-playing videos. I occasionally click on like or share button, read peoples’ comments or leave one, or open an article. But I remain inside Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like. This is not the web I knew when I went to jail. This is not the future of the web. This future is television.
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A loss of intellectual power and diversity, and on the great potentials it could have for our troubled time.
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In the past, the web was powerful and serious enough to land me in jail. Today it feels like little more than entertainment. So much that even Iran doesn’t take some — Instagram, for instance — serious enough to block.
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I miss when people took time to be exposed to different opinions, and bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters. I miss the days when I could write something on my own blog, publish on my own domain, without taking an equal time to promote it on numerous social networks; when nobody cared about likes and reshares.
That’s the web I remember before jail. That’s the web we have to save.
-
-
-
Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you’d rarely know much about
-
Some networks, like Twitter, treat hyperlinks a little better.
-
Instagram — owned by Facebook — doesn’t allow its audiences to leave whatsoever. You can put up a web address alongside your photos, but it won’t go anywhere
-
When a powerful website — say Google or Facebook — gazes at, or links to, another webpage, it doesn’t just connect it — it brings it into existence; gives it life.
-
On the other hand, the most powerful web pages are those that have many eyes upon them.
-
But apps like Instagram are blind — or almost blind. Their gaze goes nowhere except inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths.
-
The Stream now dominates the way people receive information on the web.
-
The Stream means you don’t need to open so many websites any more
-
In a free-market economy, low-quality goods with the wrong prices are doomed to failure.
-
history has proven that most big ideas (and many bad ones) have been quite unpopular for a long time, and their marginal status has only strengthened them.
-
Today the Stream is digital media’s dominant form of organizing information.
-
challenging ideas get suppressed by today’s social networks because their ranking strategies prioritize the popular and habitual.
-
The centralization of information also worries me because it makes it easier for things to disappear.
-
But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.
-
Surveillance is increasingly imposed on civilized lives, and it just gets worse as time goes by.
-
Being watched is something we all eventually have to get used to and live with and, sadly, it has nothing to do with the country of our residence.
-
What is more frightening than being merely watched, though, is being controlled
-
There’s less and less text to read on social networks, and more and more video to watch, more and more images to look at.
-
Search tools are starting to add advanced image recognition algorithms; advertising money is flowing there.
-
But the Stream, mobile applications, and moving images: They all show a departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet.
-
The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.
-
A loss of intellectual power and diversity, and on the great potentials it could have for our troubled time.
-
In the past, the web was powerful and serious enough to land me in jail. Today it feels like little more than entertainment.
-
-
-
If I wanted to lure people to see my writing, I had to use social media now.
-
On the other hand, when he posts a link to the same picture somewhere outside Facebook — his now-dusty blog, for instance — the images are much less visible to Facebook itself, and therefore get far fewer likes. The cycle reinforces itself.
-
web pages can capture and distribute their power through hyperlinks.
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What are we exchanging for efficiency?
-
The prominence of the Stream today doesn’t just make vast chunks of the Internet biased against quality — it also means a deep betrayal to the diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned.
-
obsessed with new trends. Utility or quality of things usually comes second to their trendiness.
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mostly for things I’d written on my blog
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If I wanted to lure people to see my writing, I had to use social media now
-
That sparked something that was later called a blogging revolution
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Stemming from the idea of the hypertext, the hyperlink provided a diversity and decentralisation that the real world lacked
-
way to abandon centralization
-
replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks
-
They were windows into lives you’d rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. Blogs were cafes where people exchanged diverse ideas on any and every topic you could possibly be interested in
-
Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers
-
native text and pictures — things that are directly posted to them
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aren’t just the skeleton of the web: They are its eyes, a path to its soul
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blind webpage, one without hyperlinks, can’t look or gaze at another webpage
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dynamics of power on the web
-
it doesn’t just connect it — it brings it into existence; gives it life
-
web pages can capture and distribute their power through hyperlinks
-
Their gaze goes nowhere except inwards
-
The Stream now dominates the way people receive information on the web
-
A most brilliant paragraph by some ordinary-looking person can be left outside the Stream, while the silly ramblings of a celebrity gain instant Internet presence
-
they also tend to show us more of what we’ve already liked
-
The prominence of the Stream today doesn’t just make vast chunks of the Internet biased against quality — it also means a deep betrayal to the diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned
-
New, different, and challenging ideas get suppressed by today’s social networks because their ranking strategies prioritize the popular and habitual
-
It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations
-
the world appears quite predictable, both for governments and for businesses. And predictability means control
-
There’s less and less text to read on social networks, and more and more video to watch, more and more images to look at. Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening?
-
We seem to have gone from a non-linear mode of communication — nodes and networks and links — toward a linear one, with centralization and hierarchies
-
it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.
-
This is not the web I knew when I went to jail. This is not the future of the web. This future is television
-
A loss of intellectual power and diversity, and on the great potentials it could have for our troubled time
-
I miss the days when I could write something on my own blog, publish on my own domain, without taking an equal time to promote it on numerous social networks; when nobody cared about likes and reshares
-
That’s the web we have to save
-
-
29 Jun 16
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Lots of people start their daily online routine in these cul de sacs of social media, and their journeys end there
-
a blind webpage, one without hyperlinks, can’t look or gaze at another webpage — and this has serious consequences for the dynamics of power on the web.
-
The Stream now dominates the way people receive information on the web.
-
the algorithms behind the Stream equate newness and popularity with importance, they also tend to show us more of what we’ve already liked
-
There’s less and less text to read on social networks, and more and more video to watch
-
books-internet toward a television-internet
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26 Apr 16William Gunn
RT @lightcoin: The Web We Have to Save https://t.co/w4Ak02oC35 by @h0d3r ht @dsearls @brewster_kahle cc @kyledrake
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13 Jan 16Aldo de Moor
"between you and the seller which makes it less prone to sudden and untransparent decisions.
But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: It is making us all much less" -
02 Jan 16
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28 Dec 15Frank Hamm
The Web We Have to Save — Matter — Medium
"Seven months ago, I sat down at the small table in the kitchen of my 1960s apartment, nestled on the top floor of a building in a vibrant central neighbourhood of Tehran, and I did something I had done thou… -
10 Oct 15Wessel van Rensburg
I guess one upside of going to Iranian prison for six years is getting a whole new perspective on the web https://t.co/e7mknhY7Z4
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05 Oct 15
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01 Sep 15Michel Bauwens
"bloggers were rock stars back in 2008 when I was arrested. At that point, and despite the fact the state was blocking access to my blog from inside Iran, I had an audience of around 20,000 people every day. Everybody I linked to would face a sudden and serious jump in traffic: I could empower or embarrass anyone I wanted.
People used to carefully read my posts and leave lots of relevant comments, and even many of those who strongly disagreed with me still came to read." -
24 Aug 15
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21 Aug 15
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20 Aug 15
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17 Aug 15
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16 Aug 15
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12 Aug 15
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11 Aug 15
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it was a silly nickname, but at least it hinted at how much I cared.
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10 Aug 15
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07 Aug 15
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04 Aug 15
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03 Aug 15
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michael chalk
very important article about changes in the web, from an Iranian blogger.
blog web change culture social.media iran perspective blogger
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02 Aug 15mathew lowry
The rich, diverse, free web that I loved - and spent years in an Iranian jail for - is dying.<br />Why is nobody stopping it?...
The hyperlink was my currency six years ago... represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web ... a way to abandon centralization ... and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks.
Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: windows into lives you'd rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other ... cafes where people exchanged diverse ideas on any and every topic...
the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete...[by] ... a philosophy that combined two of the most dominant, and most overrated, values of our times: novelty and popularity....
That philosophy is the Stream... dominates the way people receive information on the web... fed by a never-ending flow of information that's picked for them by complex -and secretive - algorithms...tailor our news feeds with posts... they think we would most likely want to see...
vast chunks of the Internet biased against quality ... a deep betrayal to diversity ... When Facebook can know us better than our spouses with 300 likes, the world appears quite predictable, both for governments and for businesses. And predictability means control...
[the Web] is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.... . In the past, the web was powerful and serious enough to land me in jail. Today it feels like little more than entertainment."
- The Web We Have to Save - Matter - Mediumlike blogging medium filterbubble stream social media b2b4me curation
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01 Aug 15
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29 Jul 15
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27 Jul 15
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25 Jul 15Lun Esex
"The web...is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking." https://t.co/FmiZLjUE7d
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24 Jul 15Grace Rodriguez
Blogger goes to jail in 2008, comes out and can't believe what happened to the web https://t.co/NoHNGtaXO3 Recommended. (From ten days ago.)
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23 Jul 15
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22 Jul 15
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21 Jul 15
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The hyperlink was my currency six years ago. Stemming from the idea of the hypertext, the hyperlink provided a diversity and decentralisation that the real world lacked. The hyperlink represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web — a vision that started with its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralization — all the links, lines and hierarchies — and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks.
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Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you’d rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. Blogs were cafes where people exchanged diverse ideas on any and every topic you could possibly be interested in. They were Tehran’s taxicabs writ large.
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Nearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object — the same as a photo, or a piece of text — instead of seeing it as a way to make that text richer. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting: Adding several links to a piece of text is usually not allowed. Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers.
-
You can put up a web address alongside your photos, but it won’t go anywhere. Lots of people start their daily online routine in these cul de sacs of social media, and their journeys end there. Many don’t even realize that they’re using the Internet’s infrastructure when they like an Instagram photograph or leave a comment on a friend’s Facebook video. It’s just an app.
-
The Stream now dominates the way people receive information on the web. Fewer users are directly checking dedicated webpages, instead getting fed by a never-ending flow of information that’s picked for them by complex –and secretive — algorithms.
-
The Stream means you don’t need to open so many websites any more. You don’t need numerous tabs. You don’t even need a web browser. You open Twitter or Facebook on your smartphone and dive deep in. The mountain has come to you. Algorithms have picked everything for you. According to what you or your friends have read or seen before, they predict what you might like to see. It feels great not to waste time in finding interesting things on so many websites.
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Some of it is visual. Yes, it is true that all my posts on Twitter and Facebook look something similar to a personal blog: They are collected in reverse-chronological order, on a specific webpage, with direct web addresses to each post. But I have very little control over how it looks like; I can’t personalize it much. My page must follow a uniform look which the designers of the social network decide for me.
-
But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.
-
Maybe it’s that text itself is disappearing. After all, the first visitors to the web spent their time online reading web magazines. Then came blogs, then Facebook, then Twitter. Now it’s Facebook videos and Instagram and SnapChat that most people spend their time on. There’s less and less text to read on social networks, and more and more video to watch, more and more images to look at. Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening?
-
But the Stream, mobile applications, and moving images: They all show a departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet. We seem to have gone from a non-linear mode of communication — nodes and networks and links — toward a linear one, with centralization and hierarchies.
-
-
notthis body
https://t.co/RlegWuxaVA fascinating perspective on the current state of the internet from @h0d3r , gained at far too high a price.
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Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you’d rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. Blogs were cafes where people exchanged diverse ideas on any and every topic you could possibly be interested in.
-
No matter how many links you have placed in a webpage, unless somebody is looking at it, it is actually both dead and blind; and therefore incapable of transferring power to any outside web page.
-
The Stream now dominates the way people receive information on the web. Fewer users are directly checking dedicated webpages, instead getting fed by a never-ending flow of information that’s picked for them by complex –and secretive — algorithms.
-
The centralization of information also worries me because it makes it easier for things to disappear.
-
It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.
-
Surveillance is increasingly imposed on civilized lives, and it just gets worse as time goes by.
-
What is more frightening than being merely watched, though, is being controlled.
-
When Facebook can know us better than our parents with only 150 likes, and better than our spouses with 300 likes, the world appears quite predictable, both for governments and for businesses. And predictability means control.
-
Maybe it’s that text itself is disappearing.
-
Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening?
-
But the Stream, mobile applications, and moving images: They all show a departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet. We seem to have gone from a non-linear mode of communication — nodes and networks and links — toward a linear one, with centralization and hierarchies.
-
The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.
-
-
-
Soon, hundreds and thousands of Iranians made it one of the top 5 nations by the number of blogs, and I was proud to have a role in this unprecedented democratization of writing.
-
instead of seeing it as a way to make that text richer. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting
-
social networks tend to treat native text and pictures — things that are directly posted to them — with a lot more respect than those that reside on outside web pages
-
Some networks, like Twitter, treat hyperlinks a little better
-
When a powerful website — say Google or Facebook — gazes at, or links to, another webpage, it doesn’t just connect it — it brings it into existence
-
On the other hand, the most powerful web pages are those that have many eyes upon them
-
But apps like Instagram are blind — or almost blind
-
The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying.
-
The Stream now dominates the way people receive information on the web.
-
It feels great not to waste time in finding interesting things on so many websites.
-
In many apps, the votes we cast — the likes, the plusses, the stars, the hearts — are actually more related to cute avatars and celebrity status than to the substance of what’s posted.
-
A most brilliant paragraph by some ordinary-looking person can be left outside the Stream, while the silly ramblings of a celebrity gain instant Internet presence.
-
Minority views are radicalized when they can’t be expressed and recognized.
-
The prominence of the Stream today doesn’t just make vast chunks of the Internet biased against quality — it also means a deep betrayal to the diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned.
-
New, different, and challenging ideas get suppressed by today’s social networks because their ranking strategies prioritize the popular and habitual.
-
states that cooperate with Facebook and Twitter know much more about their citizens than those, like Iran, where the state has a tight grip on the Internet but does not have legal access to social media companies.
-
When Facebook can know us better than our parents with only 150 likes, and better than our spouses with 300 likes, the world appears quite predictable, both for governments and for businesses. And predictability means control.
-
Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening?
-
We seem to have gone from a non-linear mode of communication — nodes and networks and links — toward a linear one, with centralization and hierarchies.
-
The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.
-
-
-
I could empower or embarrass anyone I wanted.
-
unprecedented democratization of writing
-
The hyperlink was my currency six years ago
-
Lots of people start their daily online routine in these cul de sacs of social media, and their journeys end there. Many don’t even realize that they’re using the Internet’s infrastructure when they like an Instagram photograph or leave a comment on a friend’s Facebook video. It’s just an app.
-
When a powerful website — say Google or Facebook — gazes at, or links to, another webpage, it doesn’t just connect it — it brings it into existence; gives it life.
-
Their gaze goes nowhere except inwards,
-
Its biggest enemy was a philosophy that combined two of the most dominant, and most overrated, values of our times: novelty and popularity, reflected by the real world dominance of young celebrities. That philosophy is the Stream.
-
Fewer users are directly checking dedicated webpages,
-
What are we exchanging for efficiency?
-
equate newness and popularity with importance
-
to show us more of what we’ve already liked
-
digital media’s dominant form of organizing information
-
the diversity of themes and opinions is less online today than it was in the past
-
New, different, and challenging ideas get suppressed by today’s social networks because their ranking strategies prioritize the popular and habitual. (
-
The centralization of information also worries me because it makes it easier for things to disappear.
-
It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.
-
Surveillance is increasingly imposed on civilized lives, and it just gets worse as time goes by. The only way to stay outside of this vast apparatus of surveillance might be to go into a cave and sleep, even if you can’t make it 300 years.
-
When Facebook can know us better than our parents with only 150 likes, and better than our spouses with 300 likes, the world appears quite predictable, both for governments and for businesses. And predictability means control.
-
Now it’s Facebook videos and Instagram and SnapChat that most people spend their time on. There’s less and less text to read on social networks, and more and more video to watch, more and more images to look at. Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening?
-
Search tools are starting to add advanced image recognition algorithms
-
departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet.
-
A loss of intellectual power and diversity, and on the great potentials it could have for our troubled time.
-
Iran doesn’t take some — Instagram, for instance — serious enough to block.
-
people took time to be exposed to different opinions, and bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters.
-
promote
-
nobody cared about likes and reshares.
-
-
-
That’s why they called me “the blogfather”
-
I opened my computer and took care of the new blogs, helping them gain exposure and audience. It was a diverse crowd
-
the hyperlink provided a diversity and decentralisation that the real world lacked.
-
The hyperlink was my currency
-
Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you’d rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. Blogs were cafes where people exchanged diverse ideas on any and every topic you could possibly be interested in
-
Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers.
-
insecure social services, are far more paranoid. Instagram — owned by Facebook — doesn’t allow its audiences to leave whatsoever.
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But hyperlinks aren’t just the skeleton of the web: They are its eyes, a path to its soul. And a blind webpage, one without hyperlinks, can’t look or gaze at another webpage — and this has serious consequences for the dynamics of power on the web.
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No matter how many links you have placed in a webpage, unless somebody is looking at it, it is actually both dead and blind; and therefore incapable of transferring power to any outside web page.
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novelty and popularity,
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the Stream.
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The Stream means you don’t need to open so many websites any more. You don’t need numerous tabs. You don’t even need a web browser. You open Twitter or Facebook on your smartphone and dive deep in.
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Algorithms have picked everything for you.
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These services carefully scan our behaviour and delicately tailor our news feeds with posts, pictures and videos that they think we would most likely want to see.
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In a free-market economy, low-quality goods with the wrong prices are doomed to failure.
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Minority views are radicalized when they can’t be expressed and recognized.
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My page must follow a uniform look which the designers of the social network decide for me.
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But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.
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Being watched is something we all eventually have to get used to and live with and, sadly, it has nothing to do with the country of our residence
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most people in the world,
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are obsessed with new trends
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Maybe it’s not the death of the hyperlink, or the centralization, exactly.
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Maybe it’s that text itself is disappearing.
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Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening?
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Is this trend driven by people’s changing cultural habits, or is it that people are following the new laws of social networking?
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This, though, was the first time in six years. And it nearly broke my heart.
A few weeks earlier, I’d been abruptly pardoned and freed from Evin
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In November 2008, I’d been sentenced to nearly 20 years in jail, mostly for things I’d written on my blog.
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Mr. Hossein Derakhshan, as of this moment, you are free.”
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Women in colorful scarves and manteaus, men with dyed hair and beards, and hundreds of charming cafes with hip western music and female staff. They were the kinds of changes that creep up on people; the kind you only really notice once normal life gets taken away from you.
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I called it Ketabkhan — it means book-reader in Persian.
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Six years was a long time to be in jail, b
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t it’s an entire era online.
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on the internet itself had not changed, but reading — or, at least, getting things read — had altered dramatically. I’d been told how essential social networks had become while I’d been gone, and so I knew one thing: If I wanted to lure people to see my writing, I had to use social media now.
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ended up looking like a boring classified ad. No description. No image. Nothing. It got three likes. Three!
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I felt like a king.
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Instead, there was the web, and on the web, there were blogs: the best place to find alternative thoughts, news and analysis. They were my life.
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I was puzzled and confused and, looking for insights and explanations,
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Then, on November 5, 2001, I published a step-to-step guide on how to start a blog. That sparked something that was later called a blogging revolution: Soon, hundreds and thousands of Iranians made it one of the top 5 nations by the number of blogs, and I was proud to have a role in this unprecedented democratization of writing.
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I was the first person any new blogger in Iran would contact, so they could get on the list. That’s why they called me “the blogfather” in my mid-twenties — it
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It was a diverse crowd — from exiled authors and journalists, female diarists, and technology experts, to local journalists, politicians, clerics, and war veterans — and I always encouraged even more. I invited more religious, and pro-Islamic Republic men and women, people who lived inside Iran, to join and start writing.
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The breadth of what was available those days amazed us all. It was partly why I promoted blogging so seriously. I’d left Iran in late 2000 to experience living in the West, and was scared that I was missing all the rapidly emerging trends at home. But reading Iranian blogs in Toronto was the closest experience I could have to sitting in a shared taxi in Tehran and listening to collective conversations between the talkative driver and random passengers.
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The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralization — all the links, lines and hierarchies — and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks.
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logs were cafes where people exchanged diverse ideas on any and every topic you could possibly be interested in.
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got out of jail, though, I’ve realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.
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Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers.
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photographer friend explained to me how the images he uploads directly to Facebook receive a large number of likes, which in turn means they appear more on other people’s news feeds. On the other hand, when he posts a link to the
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stagram — owned by Facebook — doesn’t allow its audiences to leave whatsoever
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. Many don’t even realize that they’re using the Internet’s infrastructure when they like an Instagram photograph or leave a comment on a friend’s Facebook video. It’s just an app.
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But hyperlinks aren’t just the skeleton of the web: They are its eyes, a path to its soul.
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And a blind webpage, one without hyperlinks, can’t look or gaze at another webpage
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20 Jul 15
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So I tried to post a link to one of my stories on Facebook. Turns out Facebook didn’t care much. It ended up looking like a boring classified ad. No description. No image. Nothing. It got three likes. Three! That was it.
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-
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In November 2008, I’d been sentenced to nearly 20 years in jail, mostly for things I’d written on my blog.
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Six years was a long time to be in jail, but it’s an entire era online.
-
If I wanted to lure people to see my writing, I had to use social media now.
-
Soon, hundreds and thousands of Iranians made it one of the top 5 nations by the number of blogs, and I was proud to have a role in this unprecedented democratization of writing.
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The hyperlink was my currency six years ago
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The hyperlink represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web
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Since I got out of jail, though, I’ve realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.
-
Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers.
-
Instagram — owned by Facebook — doesn’t allow its audiences to leave whatsoever. You can put up a web address alongside your photos, but it won’t go anywhere.
-
But hyperlinks aren’t just the skeleton of the web: They are its eyes, a path to its soul. And a blind webpage, one without hyperlinks, can’t look or gaze at another webpage — and this has serious consequences for the dynamics of power on the web.
-
When a powerful website — say Google or Facebook — gazes at, or links to, another webpage, it doesn’t just connect it — it brings it into existence; gives it life.
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apps like Instagram are blind — or almost blind. Their gaze goes nowhere except inwards
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novelty and popularity, reflected by the real world dominance of young celebrities. That philosophy is the Stream.
-
Fewer users are directly checking dedicated webpages, instead getting fed by a never-ending flow of information that’s picked for them by complex –and secretive — algorithms.
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The mountain has come to you. Algorithms have picked everything for you.
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A most brilliant paragraph by some ordinary-looking person can be left outside the Stream, while the silly ramblings of a celebrity gain instant Internet presence.
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the diversity of themes and opinions is less online today than it was in the past.
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The centralization of information also worries me because it makes it easier for things to disappear.
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centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.
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Facebook and Twitter know much more about their citizens than those, like Iran, where the state has a tight grip on the Internet but does not have legal access to social media companies.
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the world appears quite predictable, both for governments and for businesses. And predictability means control.
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text itself is disappearing.
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here’s less and less text to read on social networks, and more and more video to watch, more and more images to look at.
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web started out by imitating books and for many years, it was heavily dominated by text, by hypertext.
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The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.
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But I remain inside Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like. This is not the web I knew when I went to jail. This is not the future of the web. This future is television.
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A loss of intellectual power and diversity, and on the great potentials it could have for our troubled time. In the past, the web was powerful and serious enough to land me in jail. Today it feels like little more than entertainment. So much that even Iran doesn’t take some — Instagram, for instance — serious enough to block.
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-
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, I’ve realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.
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Nearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object — the same as a photo, or a piece of text — instead of seeing it as a way to make that text richer. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting: Adding several links to a piece of text is usually not allowed. Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers.
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Fewer users are directly checking dedicated webpages, instead getting fed by a never-ending flow of information that’s picked for them by complex –and secretive — algorithms.
-
-
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The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralization
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Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you’d rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. Blogs were cafes where people exchanged diverse ideas on any and every topic you could possibly be interested in. They were Tehran’s taxicabs writ large.
-
Since I got out of jail, though, I’ve realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.
-
hyperlinks aren’t just the skeleton of the web: They are its eyes, a path to its soul. And a blind webpage, one without hyperlinks, can’t look or gaze at another webpage — and this has serious consequences for the dynamics of power on the web.
-
The prominence of the Stream today doesn’t just make vast chunks of the Internet biased against quality — it also means a deep betrayal to the diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned.
-
Maybe it’s that text itself is disappearing.
-
Is this trend driven by people’s changing cultural habits, or is it that people are following the new laws of social networking?
-
The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.
-
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19 Jul 15
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Six years was a long time to be in jail, but it’s an entire era online. Writing on the internet itself had not changed, but reading — or, at least, getting things read — had altered dramatically. I’d been told how essential social networks had become while I’d been gone, and so I knew one thing: If I wanted to lure people to see my writing, I had to use social media now.
-
The hyperlink was my currency six years ago. Stemming from the idea of the hypertext, the hyperlink provided a diversity and decentralisation that the real world lacked. The hyperlink represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web — a vision that started with its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralization — all the links, lines and hierarchies — and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks.
-
Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you’d rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. Blogs were cafes where people exchanged diverse ideas on any and every topic you could possibly be interested in.
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Some networks, like Twitter, treat hyperlinks a little better. Others, insecure social services, are far more paranoid. Instagram — owned by Facebook — doesn’t allow its audiences to leave whatsoever. You can put up a web address alongside your photos, but it won’t go anywhere. Lots of people start their daily online routine in these cul de sacs of social media, and their journeys end there. Many don’t even realize that they’re using the Internet’s infrastructure when they like an Instagram photograph or leave a comment on a friend’s Facebook video. It’s just an app
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More or less, all theorists have thought of gaze in relation to power, and mostly in a negative sense: the gazer strips the gazed and turns her into a powerless object, devoid of intelligence or agency. But in the world of webpages, gaze functions differently: It is more empowering. When a powerful website — say Google or Facebook — gazes at, or links to, another webpage, it doesn’t just connect it — it brings it into existence; gives it life. Metaphorically, without this empowering gaze, your web page doesn’t breathe. No matter how many links you have placed in a webpage, unless somebody is looking at it, it is actually both dead and blind; and therefore incapable of transferring power to any outside web page.
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On the other hand, the most powerful web pages are those that have many eyes upon them. Just like celebrities who draw a kind of power from the millions of human eyes gazing at them any given time, web pages can capture and distribute their power through hyperlinks.
But apps like Instagram are blind — or almost blind. Their gaze goes nowhere except inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths. The consequence is that web pages outside social media are dying.
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Even before I went to jail, though, the power of hyperlinks was being curbed. Its biggest enemy was a philosophy that combined two of the most dominant, and most overrated, values of our times: novelty and popularity, reflected by the real world dominance of young celebrities. That philosophy is the Stream.
The Stream now dominates the way people receive information on the web. Fewer users are directly checking dedicated webpages, instead getting fed by a never-ending flow of information that’s picked for them by complex –and secretive — algorithms.
-
The Stream means you don’t need to open so many websites any more. You don’t need numerous tabs. You don’t even need a web browser. You open Twitter or Facebook on your smartphone and dive deep in. The mountain has come to you. Algorithms have picked everything for you. According to what you or your friends have read or seen before, they predict what you might like to see. It feels great not to waste time in finding interesting things on so many websites.
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Today the Stream is digital media’s dominant form of organizing information. It’s in every social network and mobile application. Since I gained my freedom, everywhere I turn I see the Stream. I guess it won’t be too long before we see news websites organize their entire content based on the same principles. The prominence of the Stream today doesn’t just make vast chunks of the Internet biased against quality — it also means a deep betrayal to the diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned.
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here’s no question to me that the diversity of themes and opinions is less online today than it was in the past. New, different, and challenging ideas get suppressed by today’s social networks because their ranking strategies prioritize the popular and habitual. (No wonder why Apple is hiring human editors for its news app.) But diversity is being reduced in other ways, and for other purposes.
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But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.
-
Surveillance is increasingly imposed on civilized lives, and it just gets worse as time goes by. The only way to stay outside of this vast apparatus of surveillance might be to go into a cave and sleep, even if you can’t make it 300 years.
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What is more frightening than being merely watched, though, is being controlled. When Facebook can know us better than our parents with only 150 likes, and better than our spouses with 300 likes, the world appears quite predictable, both for governments and for businesses. And predictability means control.
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Maybe it’s that text itself is disappearing. After all, the first visitors to the web spent their time online reading web magazines. Then came blogs, then Facebook, then Twitter. Now it’s Facebook videos and Instagram and SnapChat that most people spend their time on. There’s less and less text to read on social networks, and more and more video to watch, more and more images to look at. Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening?
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But the Stream, mobile applications, and moving images: They all show a departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet. We seem to have gone from a non-linear mode of communication — nodes and networks and links — toward a linear one, with centralization and hierarchies.
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The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.
-
Sometimes I think maybe I’m becoming too strict as I age. Maybe this is all a natural evolution of a technology. But I can’t close my eyes to what’s happening: A loss of intellectual power and diversity, and on the great potentials it could have for our troubled time. In the past, the web was powerful and serious enough to land me in jail. Today it feels like little more than entertainment.
-
-
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The prominence of the Stream today doesn’t just make vast chunks of the Internet biased against quality — it also means a deep betrayal to the diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned.
-
-
18 Jul 15amandinetexier
Seven months ago, I sat down at the small table in the kitchen of my 1960s apartment, nestled on the top floor of a building in a vibrant central neighbourhood of Tehran, and I did something I had done thousands of times previously. I opened my laptop and posted to my new blog. This, though, was the first time in six years. And it nearly broke my heart.
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citizenwald
"The rich, diverse, free web that I loved — and spent years in an Iranian jail for — is dying.
Why is nobody stopping it?" -
Stuart Buchanan
Seven months ago, I sat down at the small table in the kitchen of my 1960s apartment, nestled on the top floor of a building in a vibrant central neighbourhood of Tehran, and I did something I had done thousands of times previously. I opened my lapt…
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17 Jul 15
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greg hardin
“The Web We Have to Save” by @h0d3r via @medium http://t.co/2uEEXeTAUF
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Lorena O'English
Why The Death Of The Blog Is Threatening Democracy: Hossein Derakhshan spent six years in an Iranian jail for ... http://t.co/2FGqIHcZq4
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16 Jul 15Eric Auld
Imagine not using the web for 6 years, what would you find when you came back? https://t.co/ceNAC0LXO3
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Jan Beilicke
If you have time for one #longread this week, please make it this one: The Web We Have to Save by @h0d3r https://t.co/mmWDJ816Ae
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ut reading Iranian blogs in Toronto was the closest experience I could have to sitting in a shared taxi in Tehran and listening to collective conversations between the talkative driver and random passengers.
-
Adding several links to a piece of text is usually not allowed. Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers.
-
Many don’t even realize that they’re using the Internet’s infrastructure when they like an Instagram photograph or leave a comment on a friend’s Facebook video. It’s just an app.
-
all theorists have thought of gaze in relation to power, and mostly in a negative sense:
-
The Stream now dominates the way people receive information on the web.
-
they also tend to show us more of what we’ve already liked.
-
Minority views are radicalized when they can’t be expressed and recognized.
-
here’s no question to me that the diversity of themes and opinions is less online today than it was in the past.
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After my arrest, my hosting service closed my account, because I wasn’t able to pay its monthly fee. But at least I had a backup of all my posts in a database on my own web server. (Most blogging platforms used to enable you to transfer your posts and archives to your own web space, whereas now most platforms don’t let you so.)
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It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.
-
Surveillance is increasingly imposed on civilized lives, and it just gets worse as time goes by.
-
Maybe it’s that text itself is disappearing.
-
Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web
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A loss of intellectual power and diversity, and on the great potentials it could have for our troubled time.
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without taking an equal time to promote it on numerous social networks; when nobody cared about likes and reshares.
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Paulina Haduong
Seven months ago, I sat down at the small table in the kitchen of my 1960s apartment, nestled on the top floor of a building in a vibrant central neighbourhood of Tehran, and I did something I had done thousands of times previously. I opened my lapt…
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Joshua Oakley
Seven months ago, I sat down at the small table in the kitchen of my 1960s apartment, nestled on the top floor of a building in a vibrant central neighbourhood of Tehran, and I did something I had done thousands of times previously. I opened my lapt…
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