JRosenfield Article

Goodbye "Internet" and hello "internet!"

James R. Rosenfield

April 2003

According to the December 29, 2002 New York Times, Joseph Turow has begun a crusade to de-capitalize "Internet."

Professor of media studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Turow says the Internet has outgrown its novelty phase. New media command initial capitals, whose existence fades as use becomes routine: "Telephone" was transformed into "telephone," "Television" turned into "television." It's time, says the professor, for "Internet" to become "internet."

What's going on here, aside from Professor Turow having a good PR person? Is de-capitalization significant, or is this just a case of an academic indulging himself?

As Turow intimates, media become most powerful in direct proportion to their apparently innocuous absorption into everyday life. When woven into the way we live, a medium disappears from our terminology. No one talks about watching television; people refer to seeing a show. No one mentions using the telephone; people say they called a friend. "Surfing the 'net," which disappeared a few years back, now sounds clueless on the rare occasions you hear it, like someone resurrecting hipster slang from the 1950s.

When a medium truly penetrates quotidian reality, one can no longer imagine life without it. We experience a seismic, albeit unconscious, paradigm shift. We are living today not in the old world with a new medium - that's a temporary phenomenon, which ended by the late 1990s. We are now in a world utterly transformed, whose ramifications, though, remain to be determined. (Television, to cite an obvious analogy, had long since become an everyday phenomenon before its profound cultural impact became apparent.)

I flew last week to San Francisco to see an art exhibit. I arranged every element of the trip through the internet: hotel, airplane reservations, rapid transit information, museum tickets, and restaurant bookings. Significantly, I was not conscious of the process. A few years ago I would have said to myself, "Gee, I can't believe I'm doing all this stuff on-line!" Turow is right about the "internet."

ALL PARADOX, ALL THE TIME

Important technologies are always paradoxical. They give and take away. They slide into reverse at a certain point of intensity. Five hundred channels is an embarrassment of riches. Information overload keeps us from getting information. Medical intervention can make us sick. Traffic is so bad in big cities you'd move faster on foot.

What could be more paradoxical than a technology sinking into verbal oblivion at just the moment when it starts to become hugely important? But the invisibility of the technology is what gives it power. "Let's jump in the Motorcar and visit Grandmother" is a novelty act. "Let's go see Grandma" is mass production, universal ownership, and irresistible influence.

The internet can be a compass, and it can be a labyrinth. That's the paradox. One can get lost. At the writing of this article, Pete Townsend of The Who has been arrested in England for accessing kid porn sites. He said he did it for research, since he's involved in charities involving child abuse. I think I believe him - I certainly want to believe - but he has entered the labyrinth, and been bitten by the Minotaur.

I'm reading The Recognitions, an immensely long and complicated novel by William Gaddis. A brief search on Google brought me extensive annotations, explicating page-by-page a massive web of allusions. How wonderfully helpful, and how quickly I was able to do this, literally within seconds. That's the internet at its best!

On the other hand, who knows how many sites promote outlandish pseudo-science, spew the most toxic venom, or espouse unspeakable acts?

It's part of the vexing problem of freedom and free speech, isn't it? In the physical world, freedom ends right before your fist meets my nose, and free speech when a hoaxer screams "Fire!" in a crowded theater. On the internet, we're still trying to sort out where the limits are.

DON'T SELL ALL YOUR RETAIL STOCKS

The internet should become the greatest marketing phenomenon in history. And a great deal of its power will lie in instant two-way communication, a refinement of what we currently call direct marketing.

But this doesn't mean that traditional shopping will die. The new does not kill the old. Old things change roles, but they don't disappear. Television didn't lead to the demise of radio or movies, contrary to pundits' predictions in the 1950s. Instead, television became the leading disseminator of movies. And radio, abandoning drama and comedy to television, re-invented itself as a music, sports, and talkback medium.

It's foolish to predict that the internet will spell the doom of stores or shopping malls, particularly when you look at the nature of the experience itself. In the consumer society, shopping is a mode of social interaction, a method of browsing and grazing. Instead of nibbling on grass, we window shop. Instead of grooming each other, we meet at the mall. Virtuality has many advantages, but physicality is not one of them.

Media exist in a world of "both/and," not "either/or." Most of the "either/or" people have now disappeared into the oblivion of the dot-com bubble.

E-MEDIA AND TRADITIONAL MEDIA

As of today, at least, the internet is much better at reinforcing than in building brands. It's too interactive, too left hemisphere to create mass consumer franchises: beer, automotive, the things big companies spend big money on. The internet works fine with niche products, and with business-to-business, just as direct marketing media always have. But for the mainstream stuff, there's still nothing like television, in spite of fragmentation, audience distraction, remote controls, and the sheer hideousness of the commercials themselves.

Television always has been, and remains, the great fantasy medium, speaking directly to the right hemisphere of the brain, promising beauty, health, youth, and riches to those who would only drink the right beer or drive the right car. What other medium can get away with this?

During the height of the dot-com boom, the big agencies desperately tried to turn the internet into TV, driven by fear that this new medium would compromise the big easy television bucks. They failed, of course, but it hardly matters, since they were barking up the wrong tree to begin with, and the big TV bucks are still there, and will be for a while.

Far from the glamour of television lurks the drab tedium of direct mail, one of my specialties. I'm often asked if email will eliminate direct mail. I don't trust any prophets, including myself, but a look at the history of media suggests that direct mail will be with us for a long time. Just as the physicality of shopping can't be reproduced on the internet, the physicality of direct mail cannot be duplicated there. You can print out a brochure, but you'll lack the asymmetrical interruptions and tactile involvement so essential to direct mail's effectiveness.

Since new media alter the role of old media, email will certainly change direct mail. In the near future we'll probably do less but higher quality direct mail, which will be good for the environment, consumers, and companies. It will even be OK for printers, who will learn how to adjust.

What about the day after tomorrow, when most consumers will have grown up in an e-world where the discussion that began this article - "Internet" vs. "internet" -- will be of the merest historical interest?

Only the foolish would dare predict, forgetting that, always, the gods are filled with surprises.