“Everything is turned into a highway”
(three weeks without Google)
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| “The building of new ELECTRONIC SUPERHIGHWAYS will be an even bigger enterprise [compared to building the Interstate Network]. Suppose we connect New York and Los Angeles with multi-layer of broadband communication networks, such as domestic satellites, wave guides, bunches of co-axial cables, and later the fiber-optics laser beam. [...] The effect would be more numerous [as the side effects of the moon landing]” Nam June Paik (quoted from Wulf Herzogenrath (Ed.): “Nam June Paik. Werke 1946-1976″, Köln 1976.) At the Venice Biennial, Nam June Paik as German contribution 1993 showed The Electronic Superhighway ‘Venice → Ulan Bator’. Paik had in a study for the Rockefeller Foundation as soon as 1974 presented a concept of a data highway, that Bill Clinton would pick up for his campaign twenty years later. |
“How many slums will we bulldoze to build the Information Superhighway?” Kivistik said. [...] “How many on-ramps will connect the world’s ghettos to the Information Superhighway.?”
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
The Internet as data highway – Daten-Autobahn; from the beginning this metaphor was smiled at contemptibly. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl rings in our ears and Al Gore is is unbearable self-righteousness.
Also Rany Waterhouse, the protagonist of Neal Stephenson’s great novel Crypotnomicon gets outraged on the sociologist Dr. Kivistik – apparently completely untouched by technology – spoiling his beautiful Internet by drawing the parallel of an “Information Superhighway” to its end.
“I know that you’re not qualified to have an opinion about technical issues.” Waterhouse barks helplessly back; the sociologist – in his opinion lacking technological insights – should just not be able to give a qualified statement on the Internet!
But the picture of the highway is very well not that inappropriate for the Internet – however not so much, because data speeds along some Backbones. It is rather, that to build Highways, you hat to plane away whole landscapes, and former remote spots suddenly become suburbs of the metropoles.
“The American way of life: [...] What America has to offer: comfort, the best gadgets in the world, ready for use,[...]wherever they go, everything is turned into a highway with the world as a wall of billboards on either side [...]“
Max Frisch puts in the mouth of his misanthrope Homo Faber. The highway as picture for waste land, the monotonous, flanked by advertising. The planing and homogenisation of once varied regions: for this analogy of highway and Internet there is likely much sympathy amongst the book sellers!
And while regions, connected to the highway get homogenised to one periphery, the remaining land moves suddenly far away. People without a car loose their connection – in the very sense of the word.
Not being active
The tendency to plane down, to grade, to misappropriate on the one hand and marginalise on the other, that comes with the Information Highway, has to get opposed by a framework that gives everybody the same chance to use the Net and at the same time preserves the multitude of opinions, and counteracts homogenisation by “affirmative action” on minorities.
In the meantime I have not been using search engines for three weeks. I am not strict with that – one week or three or for ever – this is likely the same. I have to date not reached a point, at which it would be hard to get perfectly oriented in the Internet and in the real world without Google.
In Google’s system, I see the Information Superhighway – for better and for worse- come to perfection. Everything gets in reach, everything can become visible and accessible. Everything gets planed into a hit-list, changing the world into the wall of billboards as in Max Frisch’s quote above.
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