BLOG: The web monoculture

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Moonchild
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BLOG: The web monoculture

Unread post by Moonchild » 2017-06-12, 20:57

It's been a while since I wrote a blog post, but as the web progresses, and influences more and more how people organize and are exposed to their lives and the world, I wanted to write a little bit about what I see as a serious danger: a web monoculture.

What are these dangers?

The dangers of a web monoculture are multiple. A few important ones outlined:
  • There is the danger of information manipulation, information control or even censorship-through-omission. For example, if you rely just on one publisher (or rather publishing company) to provide you with your news, it is all too easy to have this company, for any arbitrary reason, prevent certain things from being published. For example, if news would put the company or any of its affiliates in a negative light. If this is your only outlet of news, deliberate omissions like that will keep you, the consumer of news, in the dark about what might otherwise be important information for you.
  • There is the danger of "bubbling", which is catering search results on the web to someone's personal profile (their bubble) of e.g. gender, race, political persuasion, etc. For more information on that, please see the explanation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
  • There is the danger of financial manipulation. For example, if you need software, and if your only choice is a single certain "store" to get all your needs, whomever operates the store gets to decide which software and at which price points (e.g. through selective assortment, restrictive publishing agreements or required price points) is going to be available to you. Another measure of control and restriction.
  • There is the danger of anti-competitive practice. If your provider has a product or an affiliate that can offer a certain product, and that product is the only or preferred product offered, then there is an unfair disadvantage to any other company creating or publishing a similar product. This too, ties in, in the case of software, with single-vendor "stores" as mentioned above.
All in all, though, the real danger a web monoculture poses is reduction of choice, and reduction of freedom of choice.

Why is choice important?

On the web, choice is important because all people have varying needs and desires. If your audience is the world, it is impossible to cater to everyone's background and mindset because of social, cultural, financial, biological and technological differences and often polar opposites. Not just choice, though, but rather free choice. Choice presented equally, without strings, for people to evaluate and pick what works best for them.
In other words, choice offers degrees of freedom, and should be anyone's right. If you limit people's choices of what is available, then you are almost certainly limiting their freedom, as well.
In addition, having freedom of choice also keeps the web healthy, because it will require that products are maintained and improved to be favored (as opposed to being the only option available).

The current state of things: we are at a point where the monoculture is becoming real.

What prompted me to organize my thoughts on this matter in this blog is the realization that we are at a point in time where the web monoculture is becoming real. A realization sparked by getting feedback from one of our supporters (Stephen F.) providing some food for thought and a slice of life regarding Pale Moon and using it to actually introduce choice where there previously was none.
Stephen F. wrote:Been pushing Pale Moon out in the Dearborn School District in Michigan. The district uses Google Apps for education - one result is most everyone, teachers and students, think there is only one browser (most do not know the term browser) and only one search engine (the concept of a search engine eludes many [sic] too). Fighting
back to show there are options. So, thank you.
This little bit of feedback sketches a disturbing development, but one that is very real: a situation where school management decides that teaching "the internet" to students is easiest and best streamlined if the curriculum exclusively uses Google: Google "office", Google reference material (maps, etc.), the Google Chrome browser, and the Google search engine. While a good choice from an organization point of view, it is a bad choice from an educational point of view. What students and teachers are exposed to is a collection of software all provided by a single company, which isn't a representation of the actual 'net, providing no choice or alternatives since there is no reason for Google to do so if they have the products all in-house that would reasonably be needed to fill the entire curriculum. With teachers also not being aware of choice and alternatives, it becomes a bigger problem because they will never suggest that students look beyond Google for anything, and keeping everything within the increasingly walled garden of Google services.

Now, this isn't something exclusive to Google, either, so please don't take this post as another "anti-Google" rant (even though those are regularly well-deserved), and similar things are happening with Microsoft, with Bing, Live services and the Microsoft Store. Possibly even worse there with the absorption of social media in their services. A different school district may decide to do the same but then on the Microsoft side, with the same dangers.

With Pale Moon being introduced there, with it comes a sudden wealth of choice: the start portal, for example, opens up a whole new world of non-Google services that offer alternatives and different selections of news, software, entertainment and reference materials. It also shows that there are, indeed, different pieces of software that can do the same thing (i.e. the browser) and that there is freedom to choose whichever works best for people, instead of just accepting a single provider for everything.

A positive development, enabled by Pale Moon, and executed by someone who makes a stand for a free and more neutral Internet. Something most of you who read this can likely also do in your own environment!
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Latitude

Re: BLOG: The web monoculture

Unread post by Latitude » 2017-06-13, 03:06

The school has become a place of indoctrination and a crime scene of the murder of creativity and freedom.

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Re: BLOG: The web monoculture

Unread post by adesh » 2017-06-13, 07:25

I ditched Google in favor of DuckDuckgo three years ago. At work people used to think I was crazy not using Google, but I was able to make few of my colleagues switch to DDG (although not full time). I specially hate it when people say "google" it. Most of the people do not know what a search engine is.
People who know better should do better and ignorance is not an excuse. But the fact is people have stopped using their brains.

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Re: BLOG: The web monoculture

Unread post by lyceus » 2017-06-13, 08:22

The web monoculture is just a reflect of the world monoculture. From Retronaut website you can often see photos of XIX & XX Century where people dress in very different forms. Today people use mostly the Western aka American way for dress. So the only correct way to think, eat (Coke anyone?), live, shop, learn, etc is the American one.

The monoculture is a mashup of icons that everybody thinks that are global and represent all us. Taking a random comic: Aokamidu's Unknown Evil in England http://aokamidu.deviantart.com/art/Unknown-Evil-in-England-Pt-23-142163473, you see a mashup of comics, books, anime and videogames references inside this story. Without known about these references, you are toast and you miss a lot of what happens in this story. So badly that the author even need to add references inside the comic, losing space and timing in the plot. So now the monoculture tells you what to see, read and play and discard anything that is not "in".

So of course web is the next territory to conquer for the monoculture.

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TwoTankAmin
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Re: BLOG: The web monoculture

Unread post by TwoTankAmin » 2017-06-13, 20:21

In the end it is pretty simple.

The internet helps make about 5% of people smarter, the rest it works to make dumber.

Smarter people question things, dumber people follow like cattle.

Being smarter is not easy, being dumber is a snap.

quod erat demonstratum..............
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Re: BLOG: The web monoculture

Unread post by gracious1 » 2017-06-14, 03:18

TwoTankAmin wrote: The internet helps make about 5% of people smarter, the rest it works to make dumber. …
quod erat demonstratum..............
Quod erat demonstrandum (But I blame the Internet for that. ;) Which means, actually, it helped your point. :D )

I am endlessly stunned how many people do not know what a browser is. I first encountered this a few years ago in graduate school when we working on quantitative methods in history, and I mentioned that the computers in the lab lacked Firefox to a fellow student, and he said, "What is Firefox?" I said (trying not to sound patronizing), "It's a browser." He said, "What's a browser?" :shock:

We were studying history, not comp sci, but really.....

It also scares me that some people get all their news from Facebook. They drive; don't they ever turn on the radio? I still get a newspaper, though it has grown so ridiculously thin that it is a joke.

And how sad that American culture is taking over the world. (And I'm an American!) That trend has been going on for a long time now; but it is certainly accelerated.
Latitude wrote:The school has become a place of indoctrination and a crime scene of the murder of creativity and freedom.
There is certainly no learning going on. Kids today know a lot about "Whatsapp" and streaming audio services and Candy Crush and emojis etc. etc. but they are not learning science, history, literature, or even grammar. And certainly not civics. Teachers are spending too much time entertaining the kids, who won't pay attention otherwise.

And libraries in the USA, which used to be bastions of silence and study, are now as noisy as a sports bar. I almost got banned from the public library in my little village because I complained about the noise of little brats playing video games and people bringing food and sitting at tables and talking loudly as though they were at a restaurant. Bah. It is sad when you have to go and find a quiet place because the library is too noisy (and smelly).
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