The internet, now interchangeable with the World Wide Web, is the largest sociocultural project humanity has ever undertaken since the printing press. Far bigger than radio, the telegraph or television. All revolutionary communications technologies are, to a large degree, sociocultural experiments.
Why is this important for us to understand?
The reason the internet became a global phenomena is because it enables something we, as a species, have always been trying to do for hundreds of thousands of years; communicate better and faster across the elements of space and time. The technologies that make up the internet enable this at a global scale.
For many, that may seem quite obvious. But rarely have we been able to understand the possibilities, dangers and impacts of truly advanced communications technologies. And because we all have different ways of perceiving the world, individuals with great imaginations can perceive uses the original inventor(s) did not.
Such is the case with the printing press and the Christian Reformation in the 16th century. This was sparked by Martin Luther in the early years of the 1500’s when he published his Ninety-five Thesis, eventually being excommunicated by the Pope in 1521 for publishing the Diet of Worms. Feats he could not have accomplished without the printing press. It enabled him to print vast quantities and distribute them by horse and the speed of sailing ships to carry those books.
Speed along with an advancement in a communications technology is important. Speed means faster distribution and the reduction in space and also affects our perception of time. These are three important factors in the success of any revolutionary communications technology to have sociocultural impacts at scale.
Changes in sociocultural systems around the world have been speeding up for several hundred years, but until the arrival of the internet, they had a degree of time and space in which to absorb the new information that was coming at them. This enabled various cultures and societies to turn that information into knowledge, which could be turned into actions such as new norms, changes to traditions, politics, arts and economic systems. All elements of what culture is.
When employ a communications technology that significantly impacts time and space, it creates tensions between sociocultural systems. Often, the result is periods of fascination, interest, fear, adaptation and then acceptance.
Both societal conflicts and rapid advancements happen. Sometimes wars at massive scale, changes to a societies traditions, behaviours and norms at scale or in small ways that take time to filter usually from urban centres to rural areas.
Our sociocultural systems have always been evolving. They’ve never stayed static. They may have held for a few hundred or a thousand years or so with incremental changes, but rarely huge ones. Then any variety of things would happen that caused a society to become something new or collapse.
But the process was largely slow because it took time for ideas and innovations to move around the planet. New evidence suggests that human societies moved around a whole lot more than we used to think.
While humans who invent communications technologies certainly have ideas for how they’ll be used, it is not always how they actually end up being used. Alexander Bell did not invent the phone for people to have conversations. He invented it to share music.
Twitter (now “X”) was invented to improve communications between ambulance crews and the ER. We know how that story went.
Social scientists have long known that revolutionary communications technologies, aligned with advancing transportation technologies cause massive sociocultural system changes. But we haven’t been able to predict how these new technologies will be applied to change things. Arguably, we have a better idea today. But making any solid forecast would be a fools game at best.
While it is easy to look at the downsides of the internet such as more crime, pathways to violence, political influence operations between nations and so on, there have also been tremendous benefits. Perhaps more good than bad. I’d like to think so. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to truly measure.
To blame the good and bad on the internet however, misses what actually is the cause of these dualities. Humans. Our collective and individual perceptions of reality. What all adds up to sociocultural systems.
Culture, as I’ve written before, is the code or Operating System (what I call cOS) humanity has developed to evolve faster than biological evolution. If humans relied on biological evolution only, we would probably not exist anymore. The more and better information we get, the better we become at turning it into knowledge from which we can then take actions.
And so we may well say that the internet is the grandest, boldest, most amazing sociocultural experiment to ever happen to us. And although it may at times seem unlikely, human societies have always advanced, become better, improved. It’s rough for a while, always has been, but we always get better as a species.
We are using the internet, whether we realise it or not, to evolve or sociocultural systems around the world.