“Any idiot can put up a website.”
Patricia Briggs
The world wide web differs from every other mass communication technology in two enormous ways. They are differences that fully explain why the web is at once exceptionally exciting and exceptionally frightening.
First, the web’s power to amplify our voice and influence is unparalleled—far greater than that of radio or TV. To understand why, consider the basic difference between addition and multiplication.
Radio and TV enable us to reach a lot of people, each of whom is a passive receiver. So, if the reach of a broadcast swells by, say, 100 people per day, after three days the audience will be greater by 300 people: 100 + 100 + 100.
The web, likewise, enables us to reach a lot of people, but with one huge difference: each person is a receiver and transmitter. Each web user can share messages with others at lightning speed. So, if the reach of a broadcast grows by 100 people per day, and if each newcomer shares the message with 100 other people per day, after three days the total audience will balloon to more than 1,000,000 people: 100 × 100 × 100.146
The web, in other words, works like a chain letter. We mail a letter to someone, requesting he make copies and send them to, say, ten friends. Each of them, in turn, is asked to send copies to ten friends, and so forth. If everyone cooperates, the audience for the letter will multiply precipitously (10 × 10 × 10 × . . .). In today’s lingo, the letter will go viral.
I routinely use the chain letter example to teach students about the power of exponentials—the mathematical term for anything that increases multiplicatively. Nature abounds with exponential phenomena, most notably biological cell division. In fact, the web’s meaning of viral stems from the behavior of actual viruses, tiny whits of DNA with the power to take down large host organisms by multiplying uncontrollably.
The second big difference between the web and every other mass communication technology is its arrant democracy. As we’ve seen, Tim Berners-Lee gave away the world wide web specifically because he did not want anyone—not even himself—to control it. Ever.
The content of newspapers, magazines, books, radio, TV—all traditional forms of mass communication—is strictly controlled by an oligarchy of owners, editors, producers, and gatekeepers of various ranks who are typically well-heeled, well-educated, and well-connected. They are members of society’s elite class, guardians of the establishment.
Not so with the web. In principle, every Tom, Dick, and Harry on the planet—rich, poor, educated, uneducated, it doesn’t matter—is able to post content online. And at latest count, 3.7 billion people on all seven continents are doing exactly that, 24/7/365—for better and worse.
The result is a cacophonous, chaotic, global community the likes of which humanity has never seen before. A community of everyday people with the collective power to, among other things, transform nobodies into overnight sensations.
On the radio in the 1930s and 1940s the Original Amateur Hour, hosted by Edward “Major” Bowes, launched the careers of Frank Sinatra, Beverly Sills, Gladys Knight, Pat Boone, Ann-Margret, and many other nascent talents. From 2002 to 2016 TV’s American Idol did the same thing for Kelly Clarkson, Clay Aiken, Ruben Studdard, Carrie Underwood, Fantasia, Jordin Sparks, and other gifted singers.
Today the world wide web is perpetuating the tradition but at a much faster pace and on a far grander scale than ever before. Instantaneously, the web is able to confer global stardom on not just talented performers, but everyday people doing everyday things.
It began in 1991, when computer geeks at the University of Cambridge, England, pointed a video camera at their lab’s communal coffeemaker and fed the live image to computers throughout their building. It gave every caffeine junky among them a fair chance at getting to a freshly brewed pot of coffee before it was completely consumed by those closest to it.
In 1993 when pioneering web browsers such as Mosaic made it easy to publish and retrieve online images, the geeks uploaded the live feed of their coffeemaker onto the world wide web and—presto!—XCoffee became the first viral video sensation.147 “Only on the internet can that sort of thing happen in just a few years,” remarks computer scientist Quentin Stafford-Fraser.148
All told, the XCoffee website was visited by hundreds of thousands of people and talked about by the world’s press, including the BBC, The Times of London, The Washington Post, and Wired. Today, the last of the various coffeemakers made famous by the geeks—a Krups model— is on permanent display in Berlin’s German Museum of Technology.149
In the years since XCoffee, the invention of laptops, computer pads, and smartphones has further increased the web’s reach and influence by making it portable. This, in turn, has given rise to social media, the web-based phenomenon comprising platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram. One monumental result of social media is what I call the triumph of the trivial.
Consider the YouTube video of an uneducated Oklahoma woman named Kimberly “Sweet Brown” Wilkins. In April 2012, it racked up one million views in the first forty-eight hours, simply because of her colorful description of a calamitous fire in her apartment complex. Overnight, her tag line, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!” was on everyone’s lips.150 The video was eventually set to music and to date has tallied more than sixty-two million views.151
In December 2015, Justin Bieber posted on his Instagram account the photo of a girl, together with the message: “Omg who is this!”152 Very quickly, one of his forty-seven-plus million followers helped determine she was Cindy Kimberly, a seventeen-year-old Dutch-born student living in Spain. Quickly following her sudden stardom, Kimberly was recruited by Uno, a top modelling agency,153 and is now a bona-fide fashion celebrity. Appearing on high-profile magazine covers and catwalks throughout the world, the once-random teenager now has an Instagram following of 3.9 million people.154 “It seems like a fairytale,” she says.155
Indeed.
The most popular web video of all time—“Gangnam Style”—was posted in 2012 by Psy, a little-known South Korean K-pop singer. His catchy song-and-dance routine racked up one billion views in the first five months alone and today has more than three billion views!156
When Gangnam Style first came out, people of all stripes—even world leaders—were seen publicly busting out with Psy’s horse-riding dance moves. Then UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who met with the singer, told him: “I hope that we can work together using your global reach . . . You have, I think, unlimited global reach.”157
The web’s unparalleled influence also makes unwilling stars out of bad actors, such as businesses that mistreat customers. “Smartphone cameras and social media have democratized information and shifted power to consumers,” says Mae Anderson, tech reporter for the Associated Press (AP). “Companies can no longer sweep complaints under the rug.”158
In April 2017, United Airlines learned this modern lesson the hard way. Passengers at Chicago’s O’Hare airport recorded and posted video of an Asian American doctor, David Dao, being ignominiously bumped from their scheduled flight to Louisville to make room for a United employee. The video—showing security officers yanking the bespectacled man from his seat and dragging him, bloodied and bruised, down the aisle and out of the plane—went viral.
The public’s outrage was instantaneous and universal. In China— Dao’s ancestral homeland and the second largest aviation market in the world—the video quickly attracted 330 million views on Weibo and WeChat, Chinese versions of Twitter and Facebook Messenger.159 A typical reaction was this post on Weibo: “The security guy beat him until his face is covered in blood. Is this the so-called American democratic society?”160
Caught off guard, United’s CEO, Oscar Munoz, issued an inept statement that was less than sympathetic to the passenger, exacerbating the global public’s fury. Munoz eventually backed down and apologized, but it was too late; the passenger’s lawyers held a press conference and announced they were suing. A few weeks later the two parties settled out of court.161
The web’s stunning ability to swiftly elevate the status of everyday people and situations is revolutionizing the retail industry as well. Historically, 1995 will always be remembered as an annus mirabilis—a miraculous year—for tiny startups such as craigslist, eBay, and Amazon.
Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos, a computer and business wonk whose smashing success story echoes those of nineteenth-century titans such as Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller.162 The latter once remarked: “It requires a better type of mind to seek out and to support or to create the new than to follow the worn paths of accepted success.”163
Bezos exemplified that “better type of mind” when he set out to create an online bookstore. He wanted to call it Cadabra, as in abracadabra, but recanted when his attorney mistook the name for cadaver. He also considered calling it Relentless, but ultimately went with Amazon, reportedly because he saw his business becoming as big and powerful as the world’s largest river. Indeed, his original slogan was Amazon: Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.164 (Nevertheless, even today, enter www.relentless.com and you will be directed to Amazon.)
Working out of his garage, Bezos went live with his web business in July 1995. During the first month alone, he sold books to customers in all fifty states and forty-five countries.165 “I knew this was going to be huge,” Bezos recalls. “It was obvious that we were onto something much bigger than we ever dared to hope.”166
Despite experiencing setbacks during the turn of the millennium— the so-called dotcom bust, when a glut of ill-conceived, poorly executed online startups failed—Bezos flourished, by doggedly sticking to a winning strategy. In 2013, just after purchasing The Washington Post, he explained it this way: “We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.”167
Clearly, Bezos’s planet-sized ambitions were a perfect fit for the planet-sized web. For, as with the Sweet Brown and Gangnam Style videos, Amazon went viral, its subscriber base growing exponentially.
Today, as of this writing, Amazon is worth in excess of $700 billion.168 That’s more than Microsoft and more than twice as much as Walmart,169 making Amazon the third most valuable company in the world, behind only Apple and Alphabet.170 In July 2017, Bezos overtook Bill Gates to become the richest man in the world—and, not taking account of inflation, the richest man in history171—with a current net worth north of $140 billion.172
Happily, Amazon’s success is being shared by a growing legion of mostly small businesses hawking their wares on the sprawling website— akin to the myriad shops within a mall. Today, more than two million third-party vendors sell about 50% of Amazon’s total number of paid products, which comprise everything from A to Z—just as the company’s beaming logo boasts.173
By all accounts, e-commerce generally is radically disrupting the retail landscape, the way shopping malls once did America’s downtowns. As 2017 drew to a close, an article in Fortune led with this ominous sentence: “This year is going to go down as the worst year on record for brick-and-mortar retail.”174 In all, retailers closed more than 7,790 stores—including Radio Shack, Payless, Rite Aid, Sears, Kmart, and Gymboree.175 Continuing the downward spiral, more than 3,800 stores are expected to shutter in 2018, including big names such as Toys R Us, Walgreens, Ann Taylor, Best Buy, and Gap.176
“Today, convenience is sitting at home in your underwear on your phone or iPad,” says Christian Buss, an analyst for Credit Suisse Group AG. “The types of trips you’ll take to the mall and the number of trips you’ll take are going to be different.”177
Traditional high-end malls continue doing well, because consumers still do like shopping in physical stores. Worldwide, fully 90 percent of all retail sales still occur in brick-and-mortar venues.178
Nevertheless, by some estimates, of the 1,100 malls in the United States, 400 will close in the near future. They’ll need to reinvent themselves, as some are already doing—converting, for instance, into office-industrial-residential-entertainment hybrid centers—or risk being razed to the ground.179
On a more positive note, the web’s star-making power has given a real boost to philanthropy. Once upon a time, mass mailings were the best—and for many, the only affordable—way to solicit monies for worthy causes. Not anymore.
Using websites such as GoFundMe, DonorsChoose, Booster, and Omaze, any individual or institution has the power to ask the web’s 3.7 billion users for donations, at little or no cost. Can you imagine the price of trying to reach that many people with a mass mailing? Or with ads on the radio or TV?
On its Success Stories page, GoFundMe makes this claim: “Over $5 billion raised for inspiring campaigns by incredible people.”180 I encourage you to read at least a few of the stories, especially if you are in sore need of counting your blessings and having your faith in humanity restored.
One of my favorite stories—because I can readily identify with it — concerns Elijah “E-Jayy” DeVaughn, a young man reared on the mean streets of Compton, California. Overcoming many hardships, he was accepted into Harvard College on a full scholarship. E-Jayy’s mom, who raised him singlehandedly, posted a request for $16,000 to help cover his ancillary expenses.181 In four months, 160 people donated $21,633.
Another one of my favorite stories is from Kickstarter, a website dedicated to raising funds for nonprofits. In a solicitation titled “Reboot the Suit,” the Smithsonian Institution requested $700,000 to restore and display the spacesuits of Alan Shepard (first American in space) and Neil Armstrong (first person on the Moon).182 In fewer than five days, it racked up $500,000 and shortly afterward more than met its goal, raising a total of $719,779.
From Sweet Brown and Psy to Jeff Bezos and Elijah DeVaughn: these exemplars of the world wide web’s star-making power perfectly illustrate the two-edged future we face, and also the fundamental reason for it. The web is and always will be inane and sublime, because—as we’re about to see in stunning detail—we are both those things.