What makes the Internet different from traditional tri-media?

- No single entity owns it; no single entity controls it. There are no programming managers or station owners to decide what gets "aired" and what doesn't. And it eludes censorship more than any other medium.

- Related to the previous point, the amount of "airtime" is infinite. Infinite viewpoints. Infinite voices. A teenager's blog can exist side by side with BBC News.

- More conducive to interaction and discussion. (Compare any bulletin board with any phone-in radio or TV show.) In some ways it allows for more discussion than even face-to-face meetings, because it transcends geographic limitations (more than all other media as well), and people don't even have to be in the same time zone.

- It'll only get cheaper and more accessible, while TV spots are only getting more expensive. In major cities in the Philippines, it now only costs P15 for an hour of high-speed broadband Internet use in an Internet cafe, and that price is only going to go down.

- The number of people that access tri-media is going down. The number of people using the Internet is going up. The most recent McCann study shows that urban Philippine teenagers don't read newspapers or watch traditional TV as much anymore; they get both their news and entertainment from the Internet.

- While it is currently limited by mobility (up until now you still need to be in front of a computer to use the Internet), as the technology improves, it will only become more mobile.

Of course it has it's limits. For the most part, it's only available where the necessary infrastructure (electricity, for example) is available. But similar limitations affect traditional tri-media as well.

===================

Introduction

My husband is one of the country's experts on Internet marketing; he is also one of the founders and the current GM of the most successful Internet bulletin board in the country, that also happens to be the most succesful non-news Philippine website. He is, in addition, in charge of ad sales for the Filipinos' favorite social networking site.

Both of us are fascinated with but realistic about the possibilities that the Internet provides. As an economics graduate who is very much interested in culture, he's been spending the last five years or so observing and analyzing how the Internet is gradually transforming the marketplace. As a political philosopher who is also very much interested in culture, I've been wondering what effect the Internet might also have on our public spaces.

The Marketplace

My husband, of course, has already accumulated lot of data about how the Internet has already been transforming the marketplace. Neither of us think that the Internet is going to make brick-and-mortar stores obsolete any time soon (as some people have exaggerated). However, the way that commerce on the Internet works does seem to be somewhat different from the way it works in the brick-and-mortar world. Instead of only buying the most popular, the most marketed, the most advertised goods online, people appear to take a relatively more active role in purchasing and looking also for books that might not necessarily be on the bestseller list, looking also for films or video that did not have the same multi-million marketing budget that Hollywood films had (a phenomenon that has launched an interesting debate about "The Long Tail", the shift from mass markets to niche markets--a view that I think is a little extreme in some respects but quite insightful). Instead of being taken just by the flashiest ads, consumers use the Internet to look for information and reviews about the computer, the car, the gadget, or the cellphone that they're interested in. And in that way, more power is put into the hands of the consumers; the most famous story is of how a defect in a Pentium chip was discovered by a consumer, how information about the defect was spread through the Internet, and about how this forced Intel to launch the first mass recall of computer chips in the history. Ethically-minded consumers in the UK visit Ethiscore to find out information that will not be voluntarily provided by companies: how they do in terms of fair trade, animal welfare, and environmental responsibility.

The stories abound, and most of you are probably familiar with them. One of the most viewed You Tube videos are home made videos made by a pair of Japanese teenagers in their college dorm. You Tube itself and Google before it, are stories of how the little person with limited resources can become a major player in the Internet marketplace. And then of course, there is my favorite story of all, the story of Open Source. (Mozilla rules!)

This is not to say that the Internet is a magical balm for the problems of the market. But to brush aside the very real changes in the marketplace that the Internet is introducing would be foolish.

Public Space

Which leads to my own question, regarding the Internet and public space. There are quite a lot of problems with viewing the Internet in this light, because, first of all, it is not one space, but a multiplicity of spaces where people congregate among other users with similar interests. For the most part, then, the Internet is actually a multiplicity of largely private spaces: a small group here of online friends who read one another's blogs, a small group there of World of Warcraft fanatics who frequent the same bulletin board, and so forth ....

But there are a few phenomena that I want to think about which I think point to the possibilities of how the Internet might affect our public spaces.

One is the rise of the public blogger. A few weeks ago, a book was published of the collected blog entries of "Batjay", a rather popular blogger who writes about his experiences being an overseas Filipino, first in Singapore, now in the United States. Several months ago, the Philippine Star introduced their new regular columnist, "Sassy Lawyer", a lawyer and mother who was "discovered" through her popular blog where she comments on news and public affairs. Both Batjay and Sassy Lawyer became popular bloggers not because of any social network of powerful people, nor because of any extraordinary educational credentials, but simply because, for whatever reason, people liked their blogs. More and more people linked to them from their own blogs. And then finally, the publishers of books and newspapers took notice. The rise of public bloggers is an interesting phenomena which is very different from the way that pundits ordinarily become public thinkers in the traditional tri-media.

There are other interesting phenomena as well, such as the increase of eyewitness accounts to newsworthy events. Just twenty years ago, when a big event happened--a bomb blast, for example--news organizations would send a single journalist to the site and the entire event would be reported from his perspective and the perspective of the few people that he had the chance to interview. Today, when a bomb goes off, what happens is you have hundreds of people directly affected by the bomb blast, all living within its locality, typing on their blogs their own eyewitness accounts, uploading their own videos to You Tube, uploading their own photos to Flickr. The news reports that do come out on official news websites are no longer dependent on the journalists who managed to make the trip to the site, but they draw also from accounts of bloggers, You Tube and Flickr users.

And there's more that I have yet to think about.

Again, I don't think that any of this spells the end of the newspaper or of the television news organization. But I think that there is something about the logistics of the Internet that does have some real impact on our public spaces.

(And if I may just add, I think that the whole radical postmodern deconstructionist reading of how the Internet is going to destroy the meaning of the "self" is just a little ... well ... silly. Gaya ng sinabi ni Padre Ferriols sa isang panayam, ang tao ay maaaring magpanggap kahit nasa harapan mo na siya. Even on the Internet, one isn't completely "disembodied." And deceptive portrayals of the self are a decision that a person makes whether he is sitting in front of you or communicating with you via YM; such deception is not a direct product of being in a "noncorporeal" universe.)