‘Today, Internet cafés are not fashionable any more. They all tend to close down. For, today, everybody has Internet at home. Also, people go to cafés where they can get free Wi-Fi,’ says Bashar. With its logo of four small ‘at’ signs denoting the Internet, Login Café sits in a quiet place in the city centre, bordered by trees and blooming flowers. And on the menus of this narrow bar of two floors, one can find, written in red letters in English: ‘Like Us on Facebook’. And on the coasters: ‘Log to your mood’. This web slogan summarizes the general optimism of this space that attracts the local youth. As a café and Internet café, Login is the place to go to browse the Internet, order a cheeseburger or an apple strudel, get an Oreo Milkshake or guava juice. They don’t serve alcohol.
Even if the Internet doesn’t bring in money to the cafés, the food and drinks they serve remain a good business, like they are everywhere else. ‘Sometimes customers take photos of what they’re eating at Login Café and post them on Facebook or Instagram,’ continues Bashar the coffee shop manager, himself fascinated by the incomprehensible phenomenon.
Bashar also states that the social networks are in the process of taking over the blogs. ‘Some bloggers do come in every morning. They order a small espresso, log on to the Internet and post their articles, but it is not quite what it used to be.’
Bashar adds, just in case, ‘The Wi-Fi code is “logincafe”, without a space.’ Brandishing an HTC smartphone and an Android tablet, he shows me that it works and that we are connected to the Internet. On the first floor, a large flat screen, also connected, displays a mash-up of Lady Gaga and Madonna and, later, excerpts from an American blockbuster. Another day, I would watch on it the National Geographic channel, transmitted by the Internet.
Here, as everywhere else, everybody knows Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon so well that they are forced into a ridiculous acronym, the GAFA. Every shop has its website referenced on Google, its Facebook page, and I see more and more people using iPhone or iPad applications; iTunes is also very successful. Amazon, on the contrary, is not used. There is no delivery of cultural products here. Or more like there is no delivery at all. Instead, one would rather illegally download movies, or catch the last ‘idol’ on YouTube, or make free calls on Viber.
At the entrance of the Login Café hangs a portrait. One can identify on it the face of an American rapper, made from a multitude of small mosaics. Bashar tells me that it’s Eminem. One of the eleven waiters working here corrects him and says that it is in fact Jay-Z. The staff now argues at the entrance of the café: Is this a black rapper or white? Or is it Tupac or Kanye West? It is actually difficult to say, the portrait being stylistic. They take a picture of the portrait and promise to send me the answer on Skype.
Some metres down the Login Café, the 3D was also, for a long time, an Internet café. But it had to evolve with the times. Today, it is a video-gaming store where some twenty boys—and not a single girl—spend time on Battlefield 3, Call of Duty or GTA 4. It costs the equivalent of one euro per hour and per person. Two students visit regularly for some virtual football on PES2013 and evidently, as they tell me, ‘we always choose the Real Madrid colours’. These two young men each have a smartphone in their hands—one has a Samsung Galaxy S3 and the other an iPhone 4. ‘It’s easy to get Internet here. Everybody has Internet. It is cheap. At home, or on our smartphones, we are on Facebook or Twitter or on Instagram. We send messages to our friends on WhatsApp, we call our friends abroad on Viber—all this is free of cost,’ says one of the boys. The other adds, ‘I am completely addicted to Twitter.’
A bit further down Shohadan Street, Jawwal Shop is a mobile phone boutique. All the mobile phone models are available here, from Nokia and Samsung to HTC, Blackberry or Apple, even if the latest iPhone is rare in a town where 3G is still unheard of. The basic models come at affordable prices—here, they are called ‘pre-Android phones’ or ‘feature phones’. On the other hand, the smartphones come at exorbitant rates, equivalent of 400 euros. The shop has Wi-Fi and many youngsters of the locality come in to browse the Internet or recharge their cellphones on an electric charger. ‘We let them do this for free. It helps us get to know this locality,’ says Mohammad, the sales assistant. According to him, the youngsters prefer free applications and non-profit websites such as the Firefox search engine of the Mozilla foundation, Wikipedia and Linux. ‘They rail against software such as GarageBand and Photoshop which have become increasingly difficult to pirate. They think it’s abnormal,’ says Mohammad. I am surprised by the technological fluency of the customers of this shop: they know their software, the tricks to obtain them free of cost, basic programming techniques, and even the Cloud, which helps store data and information remotely.
Outside the shop, I see, on the floor in front of the Jawwal Shop, an electric generator. ‘This is not a good generator’, confesses Mohammad. ‘It is from the brand Lutan. The Chinese manufacture it. I prefer Shatal generators from Israel; they are better-quality generators, but are more expensive.’ Before us, three armed soldiers dressed in black—from Hamas—monitor the Bohemian neighbourhood of Jundi Al-Majhoul. The day before—I was there in June 2013, a few months before the deadly war in 2014—the Israeli army had bombed the outskirts of the city.
Here in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian prison territory where there is neither entrance nor exit, the Internet cafés, smartphone sellers, Internet service providers are the same as everywhere else in the world. Internet and digital technology are globalized, and as they say, deterritorialized. Everywhere, the digital experience is the same, the sites that are browsed and the applications that are used are the same, and the usages similar. Everything is connected. The world is flat.
Camilo is the namesake of Che Guevara’s famous companion—but he hates the Che. Black and Cuban, he dreams of living in Miami, ‘where there is no racism, no Castros’, he pretends to believe, taking care to speak of Castro in plural. Less than 150 kilometres from where we are, Havana, the Cuban capital, are the United States, Florida, Key West, and beyond that, Miami and South Beach. Camilo tells me that he is ‘confined here within an immense prison’. We queue up in front of an Internet café in the Calle Obispo, a pedestrian market street near Parque Central. The waiting line is endless, and it is necessary to anticipate at least one hour of waiting before one can actually be accommodated into the ground floor of the over-ornate building, of ancient Cuban aristocracy, prestigious but dilapidated, crumbling under the stucco and which is being restored for the last ten years. Luxurious in the 1950s; destitute in the first decade of the millennium.
‘Here, we must pay in convertible pesos, the prices are prohibitive,’ says Camilo irritably, exasperated by the general dysfunction and corruption in the Castroist regime. In Cuba, basic necessities are bought with local currency from small shops, which are mostly just rented that offer shampoos that don’t lather, shoes whose heels break off in two weeks, small quantities of biscuits, etc. To get imported products, one must pay twenty-five times more in convertible pesos (CUC), the other currency. In Cuba, toothpaste, soap, shaving foam, toilet paper, and of course, mobile phones and Internet access are luxury goods.
Like China, the paranoid regime of Cuba guessed precociously, almost out of experience, that the Internet was going to be a factor for social disorder, a source of rebellion and passport to international information and may be even visas. So, it classed the Web, on the scale of risks, up to the level of estado peligroso, an official term of the penal code that can be translated as ‘danger’. It was one of the ways for the communist state to take preventive measures against all forms of dissidence. But instead of completely banning the Internet like North Korea, or constructing a great ‘intranet’ network like China, Cuba preferred practising parsimony. Mobile phones, computers and tablets are imported under strict surveillance and the ‘Special forces’ control their passage through customs.
Inside the Internet café which I finally entered with Camilo, the ambience is oppressive. The walls are full of cracks. The fans run without producing any air. Twenty people, not more, check their emails or messages from their families, without wasting time, like in Gaza, on fun sites and online video games. Some had already composed their message on paper to hasten things. Login time is too expensive to dawdle (one euro for every ten minutes, which is almost one day’s salary). ‘And, on top of that, the connection is so low,’ deplores Camilo. On the international scale, Cuba occupies the second last place for its Internet speed, before Mayotte. I also believe that the bureaucracy is over-particular even to this small oficina: one must submit their identity card, provide their address, sign a document agreeing to the monitoring and indicate the kind of information to be consulted online to avoid ‘subversive’ sites. Facebook, for example, is banned on the island, as well as the blogs of Cuban opponents.
I try accessing Generacion Y, the page of the famous dissident Yoani Sanchez. I get an error message. I know that Yoani, placed under close surveillance in Cuba, often composes her texts and Tweets on SMS and texts it to a reliable contact, most probably living in Florida, where they get posted online. Her regular blogs describe, with a cultivated monotony of an entomologist, the everyday life in Cuba, with its persistent food scarcities, defective public transport, widespread corruption and child prostitution. The dispassionate style, the meticulous deciphering of facts, numbers, bureaucratic prohibitions are more apt than any pamphlet to describe the dictatorship. This is not an anti-Castroist media; it is a media that sticks to describing reality. Of course, the site, which boasts of forty million visitors a month, is read more in Little Havana, the Cuban district of Miami and headquarters of the Cuban counter-revolution, than in Havana. But Camilo, without being able to read it, knows that this blog exists and says with a broad smile, ‘That’s enough to make my day.’ Practical and calm, Camilo expresses himself in prose, very different from the poetic language of Castro.
The Internet thus filters into rare Internet cafés in Cuba, into universities and companies. ‘This Internet café is a state enterprise. The regime does not allow private dealership of communications,’ says Camilo fatalistically. All companies, restaurants, and agricultural firms were nationalized in 1968 in Cuba, even if, in the last few years, Raul Castro, the ‘young’ brother of Fidel and ‘new’ president—at the age of eighty-three years—prudently authorized small-scale trades, micro-entrepreneurs, fast-food joints, certain craftsmen and agriculturalists. Almost on all the walls in the avenues of Havana, one can find giant portraits of Castro and Che Guevara, accompanied by the same, overused nationalist and socialist slogans, repeated for an infinite number of times: Viva la revolución, Viva Fidel, Patria o muerte or i Socialismo hoy, mañana, y siempre! For a good Internet connection, one can always go to big, international hotels like the Habana Libre—which doesn’t live up to its name.
Founded on the 23rd Avenue, this is a star hotel, an old Hilton requisitioned and nationalized by Castro, and its Internet speed is slightly better than elsewhere. But one must buy a card with limited access, reserved for foreigners and, priced at an average of ten CUC (around eight euros) an hour. This connection remains inaccessible to a great majority of Cubans.
‘The suffix “.cu” is a mirage. Nobody actually ever sees it,’ says Madelín (name modified) with irony. This former teacher of forty years was paid twenty euros a month in the Cuban public service. Today, she makes almost a hundred times more just by renting out, on the black market, three rooms of her habitación situated near the famous Malecón, the long avenue between Havana and the seafront. I stay in a ‘casa particular’—a sort of bed and breakfast reserved on the telephone or through revolico.com, a Cuban site resembling Craigslist or Airbnb. The ‘.cu’ is the Cuban Internet suffix. Madelín adds, with the nutty optimism that sometimes characterizes Cubans, ‘At least, the Cuban regime made an effort to get a suffix. North Korea did not even care to ask for its suffix!’ That’s true, the suffix ‘.kp’ was only recently created, which proves that Pyongyang remains uninterested in the Internet. The North Korean regime, unlike Cuba, does not exist online.
Other than in private dwellings such as Madelín’s, there is no Internet access elsewhere. In Cuba, Internet connections are almost never available at home—at best Internet penetration rates are only 0.5 per cent on dial-up connection, facilitated through copper telephone wires, with its characteristic thumping noise, hardly ever providing connectivity. Personal computers are rare, found in around 3.5 per cent of households, and modems even more so: they are still officially banned by the regime. The only oft-used devices are USB sticks and I could see them everywhere in Havana—the famous pen drives that enable exchanging music, movies and telenovelas, all that which cannot be forwarded by the Internet.
Madelín tells me that sometimes it is possible to get an Internet connection from a neighbour, because a certain number of Cuban officials such as commissioners, servicemen or reputed doctors enjoy dispensation (and special access through a censored server with the suffix ‘correodecuba.cu’). And they often sublet their Internet passwords to supplement their incomes. This is obviously illegal and expensive. During a dinner at Doña Blanquita, a rare ‘private’ restaurant found on the first floor of a dilapidated colonial palace, the Havana Rampa, a family-run establishment which serves black turtle bean soup, plantain, and cafecito, Madelín lets herself go, ‘The rare success of the regime is all artificial. There is great insecurity in Cuba, the health system is made more fragile by the cruel lack of technical means and the mass exodus of qualified doctors to Venezuela, in exchange for petrol. Racism is permanent, even if it was supposed to exist only in the United States.’
At the same time, plays out before our very eyes, a ballet from a different time: old, American cars lurch along the avenue, among which a Chevrolet Bel Air bounces as though it has lost all its shock absorbers. Cuba is frozen in the year of revolution: 1959. And the teacher, dismayed by this antiquated scene says, ‘Even the education system, that Castro has always been proud of, is outdated and purely for propaganda purposes, especially in the fields of history and economics, and not to mention the schools of commerce and journalism. And we teach computer science without computers or Internet!’ Like many Cubans I met, Madelín dreams of living in Florida, where Internet is free and where there is 3G . And she adds the oft-repeated joke: ‘What’s great about Miami is that it is very close to the United States.’
In 2011, an underwater fibre-optic cable of 1,600 kilometres was installed between Cuba and Venezuela, with the help of the Europeans, to increase the speed of Internet on the island. After two years of inertia, in the summer of 2013, the Castroist regime finally authorized the opening of a hundred cyber points, a kind of Internet salon open to all. But the exorbitant costs still limit their use. A great majority of the population still has no access to the Internet, says the communications specialist Bert Medina, a Cuban American that I met on the island. (On a new trip to Cuba in the summer of 2014, I would see that the cyber cafés promised by Raul Castro remain essentially a myth.)
Unlike cyber cafés, cellulares , as they call mobile phones in Cuba, are more frequent. Around 12 per cent of the population owns a mobile phone. With Camilo, I go to a telephone store, in the La Habana Vieja area. Another state-owned store, there is a long queue here as well. Widespread bureaucracy, prohibitive prices and the rampant poverty restrict sales. And without 3G, the phones don’t provide access to the Internet. They are not smartphones. Cuba is one of the rare, last countries of the world, which is almost entirely without Internet. In today’s Cuba, totalitarian of the tropics, stuck in the times before Sputnik, ‘Internet would be an anomaly: it would be too twenty-first century,’ concludes Camilo.
On the blue helmet of Sipho Dladla, is the slogan: The Limitless Youth. Under thirty years old, sporting Converse shoes and a Blackberry smartphone, Sipho is the very incarnation of a young activist wanting to push limits. He runs a digital education programme, the Kliptown Youth Program, in Kliptown, an underprivileged area of Soweto in South Africa. ‘We work here with 400 youngsters and everything is free. We teach them how to use computers and go online. But what is really surprising is that they already know more than we do about technology,’ says Sipho. He adds, ‘In the evening, they go back with their little phones and teach their parents how to use them.’
For the first time in the history of Africa, it is not the ancestors transmitting knowledge to the young, but children training their parents. ‘It is a major change in our civilization,’ admits Sipho. However, he says that ‘the children also come here to eat, because our training comprises of a free meal’.
I see a large pot of rice and chicken being heated up. The food will soon be ready. Kliptown is situated in the heart of Soweto, to the south-west of Johannesburg. Around a million people live in this ghetto town (two times more according to other estimations that include immigrants). While a part of Soweto is revamped, dozens of townships still remain. It is the case of Kliptown, one of the shanty towns cut away from the country—there are no tarmac roads, just wide open dirt tracks and a sewer flows by, infected. There is no drinking water, nor electricity. Everywhere, one finds wavy sheets of corrugated iron. And AIDS is the first cause of mortality: the rate of HIV-positive people is very high, at around 11.5 per cent in the country, maybe triple the rate in the area.
In this difficult context, one is surprised by the omnipresence of technology and the Internet. ‘Everybody here has a cellphone. We listen to the radio, consult the weather, read horoscopes and all that on a cellphone that is not even “smart”. The torch lamp in the mobile phone is one of the most popular applications. Soweto is currently switching over to the digital,’ says Sipho. He adds, ‘Here, the problem is no longer the digital divide, for everybody has access to the Internet. It is the question of web education. People have understood that they must be “digitally literate” so as not to be behind on things.’ Sipho repeats this phrase many times—‘digital literacy’. This, according to him, is the future of the Internet. (The expression ‘digital literacy’, the capacity to lire the web by using a computer or by accessing the Internet, is considered today as a factor for economic development at the international level.)
And what resourcefulness! What agility! Without electricity, the phones are recharged with truck batteries or through small solar panels. An Internet connection often goes through a 3G key. In the Kliptown Youth Program bungalow, scruffy youngsters are consulting their Facebook pages on computers connected on fat Internet cables. Others use an application, very popular in South Africa, called Mxit, through which they send free instant messages to friends from any mobile phone. I also see little kids sitting on the ground, killing time playing video games on 100-dollar laptops, made of apple-green plastic. These are the well-known XO laptops offered by the American NGO One Laptop per Child. I listen to these kids speaking with one another in English, Sesotho and Zulu, among the eleven official languages of South Africa. They are laughing. The adults in the township have no access to the Kliptown Youth Program facilities. Thus, to browse the Internet, they have to cross, by a small aerial bridge, the highway that runs along the ghetto to access one of the closest cybercafés. The cost is around fifteen rands per hour, which is around 1.20 euros. ‘But most of the time there is no need to go to an Internet café, one can browse online on the telephone,’ insists Khopotso Bodibé.
Interviewed in Soweto, this writer and web journalist adds, ‘Ninety per cent of what I know, I learned on the Internet. The web educated me.’
He tells me that in the evening, when the public library of Soweto closed, he worked at McDonalds, the fast-food joint being one of the rare places open in the area, with free access to Internet. As for Sipho, he expects much from the new Datawind Android tablet, which will cost thirty dollars, and the smartphones are advertised at fifty dollars. He thinks that this can change the life of the township. Brimming with energy and optimism, born in Soweto and living still in the ghetto, without water or electricity, he believes in the Web with an impassioned fervour, in its almost exalted position. He leaves a mark. Some people, who have had no luck and who have been through the mill, know naught but to be full of generosity and goodwill. Having only the Internet for his viaticum, Sipho wants to share this ‘white light which is going to nourish the dark continent’. By Jove! Seeing my scepticism, this Internet evangelist urges me to take stock of the magic of technology: ‘The Web changed my life. I taught myself on the Internet while the Bantustan schools didn’t allow it. I learnt geography and history on it. I even did a bit of law. I wouldn’t even have been able to speak with you in English but for the Web. The Internet is the best thing that happened to me. And it is only beginning.’
Smart is a field survey of the digital globalization. In Gaza, Havana or in Soweto—and in total, in fifty countries—this book is an attempt to describe the digital transition of today and the digital world that is in the offing. Seen from afar and in a superficial manner, this technological globalization appears to be standardization. The Palestinians of Gaza, extensively connected, use the same social media and applications as the rest of the world, even though they may be deprived of the simple freedom of leaving their country. The Cubans dream of the Web—they want to access the Internet to escape their isolation. As for the South Africans in the townships, they believe in individual emancipation through the Internet and hope to leave the township through economic and digital development. Everywhere, one can observe the multiplication of similar digital practices.
With its one billion subscribers, Facebook is used by one out of seven people in the world, and half of this number uses it on the mobile, and ‘it’s free’. In these three cities, however, we deal with three different Internets: an Internet for combat and emancipation; a censored Internet; an Internet for survival. Despite its standard global image, the Internet is different everywhere. This is the thesis of Smart. The underlying idea of the book is simple: unlike what one may believe—what one can imagine in Gaza, Cuba or Soweto—the Internet and digital questions are not the main global phenomena. They are anchored to a territory; they are territorialized. Most often, it is about men and women, information, e-commerce, application, maps and social media which are connected by physical, material and real links. It is both a ‘smart world’ and a ‘small world’, but in any event, it is a world that is neither lifeless nor flat. To those who intuitively think that the world is widening, that it is evolving into a unique network and that the cultural and linguistic dissonances are being erased, this counter-intuitive book brings a different vision. It breaks off with the generally accepted idea of a digital globalization beyond space and frontiers. As surprising as this may appear, the Internet does not abolish traditional geographic limits, does not dissolve cultural identities, nor does it smooth out linguistic differences: it consecrates them.
This territorialized dimension of the Internet must even strengthen itself in the years to come, through the generalization of Web access and smartphones. The future of the Internet is not global, it is anchored to a territory. It is not globalized, it is localized. Besides, one must stop speaking of the Internet with a capital ‘I’, and use ‘internets’ in small letters and plural—and this is how I will write it in this book. This is my subject: the diversity of internets.
This new way of thinking of the internet paves the way for a world that is smarter than we imagine. The diversity of internets, national singularities, languages, cultures—all have their place in the digital world. The internet is not hostile to identities, local differences, languages nor is it against ‘cultural exception’ or diversity. This is the good news and the main discovery of this book. Digital transition is not a phenomenon that increases standardization, it leads to—not more than cultural globalization—a unique mainstream. In the end, it is a more complex globalization that we are witnessing, and the fear it creates, from this point of view, deserves to be discussed and put in perspective. To those who live in the anxiety of losing their identity due to globalization and technological swing—a legitimate worry—this book shows that one shouldn’t be pessimistic. And that is not the most probable scenario. The internet is thus smarter than we believe and that is the reason behind the title of this book. The word ‘smart’ in American English has different usages: one talks of smartphones, of a smart city, smart grid, smart TV, smart economy, smart watch and a smarter world. What does one mean by that? The term ‘smart’ is simply becoming a synonym of the word internet and can be used for the world’s digital sector, by including smartphones, applications, technology and the digital in general. When the NYPD, the famous New York Police Department, is announcing the arrival of ‘smart squads’, it is talking about new patrol cars with video surveillance equipment, detectors and censors to memorize license plates and compare them in real time to criminal databases.
The word ‘smart’ however has more consistence than these hidden security usages under a cool name would allow one to think. It indicates a fundamental mutation of the Web, the one which is coming: the passage from information to communication, and now, to the internet of knowledge. Instead of being satisfied with receiving content, the netizens, who have begun to produce it with Web 2.0, make it a tool of human development, as attested by the Soweto youth. In that, ‘smart’ is an essential term whose meaning announces the future of the internet: that of knowledge and that of territorialization. This internet territorialization which I saw at work everywhere does not exclude globalization or acceleration phenomena.
There is of course a global dimension to the internet like there is a mainstream culture; they are not dominant. Who contests the fact that communications are being developed and the speed of our lives is being augmented? The projections for the future, besides, render breathless: the Moore law predicts that the capacity and the performance of microprocessors will double every eighteen months (an unsubstantiated version, in fact, of the Moore conjecture); and a photonic law foresees that the amount of data circulating in the fibre optics at the speed of light will also double every nine months. In 2013, the output was an astronomical number of thirty-one terabits per seconds: at this speed, it takes less than a minute to transfer all the books of the Congress Library, which is the largest in the world.
And though these laws will inevitably reach their physical or economic limit, the promise of an exponential and inexhaustible growth of the digital has been promised. The head of Google recently calculated that ‘every forty-eight hours, we are creating as much content as we had ever created since the birth of humanity up to 2003’. And according to him, computers will be sixty-four times faster in 2025 than they are today. A revolution that defies the laws of history and geography. We are still at the beginning of the digital transition.
Smart is the sequel to my last book on cultural globalization, Mainstream. While Mainstream looked at the situation of creative industries in times of globalization and Americanization, deliberately leaving aside the digital question, Smart focuses on the internet and the digital world.
Like in Mainstream, I gave priority in this book to first-hand information: a field survey was thus undertaken and most of the interviews are new and hitherto unheard of. At the end of the day, Smart is a demystifying work showing that we can take back control of the digital—and our lives—on the condition that we understand the dynamic of the internet phenomenon which, instead of being disembodied and international, is profoundly rooted in a territory, in a community, and assumes a strong localized dimension.
Such a conclusion is based on no other ideological reasoning: it is the result of a field survey. When they speak of the digital, scholars and journalists must however be able to preserve a certain humility. The acceleration of the Web is such that all our certainties are precarious. Had this book been written four years ago, it would not have mentioned tablets or iPad (launched in April 2010), whereas large sections of culture had already switched over to the digital. Six years ago, it would not have spoken of smartphones and applications, so essential to our lives today (the first iPhone came in 2007, and the first application store, the App Store, belonging to Apple, in 2008). Eight years ago, it would not even have spoken of Twitter, created in 2006, and so determining now. As for Facebook and YouTube, they are only celebrating their tenth anniversary. If this book had been written twelve years ago, it would have had no trace of Wikipedia, launched in 2001, nor even Google, which was only a start-up in 1998.
One can also remember the model companies, such as the Finnish Nokia or the Canadian Blackberry, which have missed the turn of the smartphone and which are now no more than shadows of what they used to be. Or of the digital giants, such as Microsoft, Dell, AOL and Yahoo, invincible yesterday and who must reinvent themselves today. The start-up symbol Silicon Graphics became bankrupt, MySpace was unsuccessful in its reinvention and Chatroulette failed in its business model. And even the Google Reader was disconnected. Let alone these fantasy towns, there are many a modern Pompeii, deserted and uninhabited, such as Second Life, which nobody visits any more. The stupefying speed of technology and the revolution we are all experiencing would inhibit any vague desire to prospect. And yet, in keeping with Mainstream, it seemed to me to be indispensable to decrypt this world which is in the offing, the world of ‘after’, and to imagine the ‘next stream’ which is coming.
How to do this? Unlike the gurus of Silicon Valley, who are only concerned with the quantitative when speaking of ‘global internet’, or some consultants and experts who think that surveying technology can be done from a simple office computer, this book adopts a different method. It puts forth the hypothesis that the internet is the same here and elsewhere. It favours an approach to the internet that is both broad and deep. Digital conversations are different everywhere. Being online is not enough to know them; it is important to meet the Web players IRL, as they say, ‘in real life’. It is necessary to go to them, around the world, observe in the course of the journey and put aside the Web navigator, in order to truly discover the internets. It is only through qualitative field survey, and hundreds of interviews across five continents, that it is possible to begin to understand the reality and the scope of the digital transition which is coming.
Frédéric Martel
April 2014