The Virtual Revolution.

TV The Virtual Revolution, the BBC’s new landmark series about the internet began tonight, introduced and authored by the newly Doctored and fabulously engaging Aleks Krotoski. The first film, The Great Levelling, offered an invigorating primer on the origins of the web and investigated its philosophical origins within the counter-cultural revolutions of the 60s and 70s and its initial attempts to democratise people giving them an equal voice across the network, before demonstrating how that has been eroded over time, by governments and more specifically big business. As a co-production with the Open University it treated the subject with a refreshing seriousness and balance. Often a contributor like Ariana Huffington or Bill Gates would be called upon to offer their experience before being demolished moments later by a naysayer.

Over the past few years I have become increasingly disappointed with the web. The reasons are too numerous and varied to list here, but it boils down to commercialisation and how the blogosphere has drifted into becoming little more than an echo chamber in which individual thought and a weblog as expression of the individual have been swept away to the point that most sites, amateur and professional, have become simple aggregators of links to other people’s content or in some cases the reproduction of that content. Spend much time on the web, and you find yourself reading the same story, even the same words, over and over and over again. Hundreds of clone sites parroting what if you were to trace back far enough could turn out to be a press release which at some point has taken flight and become “news”.

It’s something I’ve continuously fought against here; the new(ish) miniblog and its archive are as close as I will hopefully step towards that and the excessive sourcing of The Guardian. But I try to keep things within my “narrow” focus of interests and talk about life as much as anything else, even if sometimes that’s simply the devouring of content in the real world. To an extent, though I know the quality of this blog has wavered backwards and forwards, it’s sheer bloody mindedness that keeps me going, that and the statistic offered in The Virtual Revolution, that of all of the amateur blogs that were in play in 2002, 90% are no longer active.

The beauty of The Virtual Revolution was that as well as covering the more obvious elements of internet history, it left room for the forgotten subjects, it strove to do something different. Despite having studied the web at university between 1993 and 1996, not too long after Sir Tim flicked his switch, and when Lycos and Alta Vista were still the major players in web search, I was pleased to see there was something I hadn’t previously been aware of, The Well, an early prototype for the social networking sites which would come later. The Well users featured in ropey VHS footage describing their experiences within that system could eerily be applicable to users of Facebook and Twitter.*

It was comforting to know that even social networking is cyclical. Perhaps if I carry on with this for long enough far from being an old fuddy-duddy clinging to some old form of expression, I'll be at the vanguard of a second wave and that at some point in the future, another Dr. will show how people used to write "weblogs" which were the older equivalent of the new thing they're doing then. So though I’ve embraced twitter as a different form of expression (see the miniblog etc), I expect I’ll still be writing this blog for years to come. Or until Blogger, Wordpress and the rest are shut down and become a memory.

* Aleks didn’t make the direct connection, but the description of how The Grateful Dead’s John Perry Barlow made his presence in The Well known to the general populace and caused an influx of new users reminded me of the way Twitter entered the mainstream when the likes of Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross spoke evangelically about it on (near) prime time television last year. There must be plenty of people who've joined because of the possibility they might be able to talk to one of their idols.