In Version 2.0 of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith will have a ‘preferred customer’ gold card for Googlezon, the corporation that results from the merger of the internet giants Google and Amazon.
Google has completed its mission to organise all the world’s words, images and sounds and make them easy to find; and, once you’ve found what you want, Amazon sells it to you. By recording everything you purchase, look for, look at, listen to or read, Googlezon comes to know your tastes better than you yourself do. It serves you a personalised programme of recommendations and targeted promotions, all of these backed up with patented One-Click™ ordering. You need never again use your initiative to track down new favourites: the privatised Ministry of Information has anticipated your every need.
This scenario is taken from an eight-minute film distributed (via the internet, of course) in 2004 and presenting itself as reportage from the Museum of Media History in the year 2014. It conjures up one of two dystopian visions of our digital future — the one that sees our cultural choices filtered and processed by software algorithms and statistical number-crunching.
The other dystopia owes less to Orwell and more perhaps to the anti-collectivism of Ayn Rand’s Anthem. In his recent book, The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen paints a picture of what he calls a ‘dictatorship of idiots’. His bugbears are not technocrats but sites such as Wikipedia where anyone can edit the record of events and impose their interpretation, regardless of credentials or expertise. Wikipedia is one of the family of online initiatives known as ‘Web 2.0’: if Version 1 of the web saw the internet primarily as a publishing medium for corporations and advertisers, then this new incarnation is much more participative.
Keen presents a doom-laden prognosis when it comes to the emergence of media that encourage users to contribute comments and ratings, or even to originate their own material on blogs, rather than be merely passive consumers.
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