Fibreculture Journal (Jan 2009)
Dreams of a New Medium
Abstract
Problematic at best, the desire for a transparent interface nevertheless drives much of digital culture and technology. But not the Web; or at least, not Web 1.0. Thoroughly commercialized, comfortably parsed into genres, serving billions of pages of predigested content to passive consumers, the World Wide Web as developed in the '90s unabashedly embraces its role as medium. While so many digital technologies work to hide their mediacy--drawing in the user with a total simulated sensorium, dematerializing the resistances of size and weight, untangling the knots of cables tying user to machine and machine to cubicle, minimizing the interface--Web 1.0 proudly clings to the browser as a glaring reminder of its medial character. While Web 2.0 has not forsaken the browser altogether, it nevertheless seems to offer a different sort of mediation. Arising alongside the atomization of browser functions, the ubiquitization of connectivity, and the coincidence of producer and user, Web 2.0 retains the form of a medium while reaching for the experiential logic of immediacy. This is not the immediacy of the transparent interface; rather, Web 2.0 effects an immediate relationship between the individual and culture. The interface does not disappear, but its mediacy is subsumed under the general form of cultural participation. Focusing on the "version upgrade" from Web 1.0 to 2.0, this essay will explore the implications for mediacy of this transition, noting that the fantasy of immediacy which drives Web 2.0 is layered and complex. The typical account of immediacy proposes to eliminate the interface and so construct a virtual reality (VR). But Web 2.0 mostly sidesteps the virtual, propelled instead by a fantasy of intuition in which the Web already knows what you want because it is you. Crucially, fantasies about the digital are effective: the computer's futurity inhabits our world, finding its expression in politics, advertising, budgeting, strategic planning, fiction, philosophy, and in the hopes and fears that infuse and define our culture. Conceptions of today's future are inevitably shaped by the digital, which appears in forward-looking images and texts from patent applications to novels and film. A fantastic promise, often utopian, drives the development and adoption of digital technologies. But we do not fantasize without an attendant anxiety, a worry about what becomes of us in the digital future.
