 "Geert Lovink")
Geert Lovink, a European media theorist, internet researcher, critic and activist, runs the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Lovink has authored over half a dozen books that explore the socio-cultural role of the internet. This includes Social Media Abyss (2016), Uncanny Networks (2002) and Stuck on the Platform (2022). Vanita Kohli-Khandekar caught up with him at his Institute in Amsterdam recently for a chat about the internet and what it is doing to society. Edited excerpts:
Q – Why don't you use Google and Meta products?
A - This is a long story of the fight over the means of production and distribution of media. I come from a social media and social movements background where the question of how people come together, coordinate, organise, conspire, debate, and discuss are vital activities in the life of a politically engaged person. From the 70s and 80s, we learnt to organise this alternative media use ourselves. This autonomy to have control over the means of communication and means of expression is very important. We do not want to give that to corporations or state television or whatever. About 100 years ago, people were able to gain the production of, say, graphic design, book publishing, newspapers, and magazines. It was important for artists, designers, activists and politically engaged persons to have that control. First, it was the control of the printing press and related distribution; then, later, we added radio, film, and TV.
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It is sad that my own history of being an internet activist has ended up in the same tragic situation where production has been decentralised through very few players, namely Facebook, Google and TikTok.
Q - Why is control important?
A – We are in a situation called "platform capitalism." People will soon find out that with AI (artificial intelligence) and algorithmic control, the freedom that was once theirs has already been taken away. Control is not just about what you are saying or the images you are using. Control is hidden in the formats you are using. If you look at TikTok, for instance, people are swiping videos but complain that there is no social life behind it. TikTok has reduced it, but we don't even see it; how do we see functionalities that are lacking? For a social medium with 1-1.5 billion users, we are allowed to ask that question. What we see generally is that media consumption on the internet is in a state of regression going back to old forms of listening to radio and television, of passive consumption.
Q - But there is a social aspect to it; people are commenting and sharing.
A - I hope so because most companies want to get rid of that. This is where most of the trouble is (you need editorial filters).
Q – One of the issues is polarisation. If we do not agree on facts and consume some common media/feed, we get ghettoised.
A – Yes and no, because the ghettoes you are pointing to are these giant platforms. There is something strange with the notion of the ghetto. Traditional boundaries of class, caste, gender, city, and countryside confine us. However, online platforms rearrange the older or traditional divisions in society. It is simply not the case of the old divisions reproduced online. If that were the case, young people would feel the old generation is forcing the smartphone on them. The regression online is one where many people feel alienated/lonely, so the machine empowers them. Yet, at the same time, it isolates them in a new form.
Q – Do you think people realise this?
A – They do. The machine is giving them possibilities but also new forms of isolation and despair, which translates into more medical expressions such as depression, sadness and melancholy as mild forms of mental health.
Q – Is all scale bad? Is regulation the answer?
A – No. I don't believe in regulation. I believe in self-organisation. If you understand how you can create the infrastructure and modes of information and communication, you will be able to get rid of undesired social behaviour. It is so much easier. At the moment, we don't have the power to do that. And so, we ask Google and Facebook to employ 10,000 people in the Philippines to do that for us. How did we get into such a situation?
Q – What are the big disruptions the internet has brought?
A – The first and most important is the marriage in the late nineties and the period after that, between the phone and the internet. The earlier generation did not really foresee this because, obviously, they were coming from mainframe, terminal, PC and modem.
Second, for a very long time, computer media communication was primarily seen as something that happened at the text level. But in the last ten years, this has changed. Chips became so much more powerful. Computation power and the fall in storage price facilitated a visual turn. Over 85 per cent of all internet traffic is video. Why are we so focused on the 15 per cent? Why do we think the power of words is so important? The importance of text is diminishing at an incredible speed. Memes are playing a very tiny role in it (The Institute has done a lot of work around memes). Even YouTube is not very powerful if you look at the numbers. Netflix and others are much bigger in traffic.
Q – What does the fact that a bulk of online consumption is video do to the wiring of our brains?
A – For a long time, my generation thought the written word was very limited in a (Marshall) McLuhanesque way. We were very focused on this idea that the human brain can process visual information so much faster and with so much more complexity than the written word. Out of that presumption comes the emphasis on the design of graphic user interfaces. Because we, mistakenly perhaps, thought that if you design better user interfaces, more people will be able to access the information. This is a very late nineties paradigm. We set up these traps of subliminal behaviour modifications in a way that we thought would empower the individual user. But already, in this word "user", there is ambivalence. We were not exactly referring to heroin users. We thought the user was a citizen.
Q - Where in this current edifice is AI?
A – For the first time, AI can be accessed by users. The hype cycle for AI is already over. The investments have gone down. In the next 1-2 years, this money will dry up. Then, the investments will have to prove themselves.
