Jacques Distler asks the question that every blog-reader has asked at some point:
Did all of this exist before the Web? Or have people just gotten a whole lot weirder in the past 15 years?
(I’m not even going to attempt to describe what triggered the question…)
I tend to think that the weirdness was always there, and the Internet has just made it easier for the weird people to find each other. You can find antecedents of the social Internet in things like mimeographed fanzines and nineteenth-century magazine letter columns, so I suspect that for any modern weirdness, there are probably analogous bizarrities in some pre-Internet forum or another. A bit of Googling will probably turn up some lovingly maintained page on exotic mail-order kink in 1795, or some such– whatever weird stuff went on in the past, somebody probably knows all about it, and is dying to share that knowledge with the world.
The Internet has just enabled this stuff to get around faster. But bizarre behavior is just an emergent property of large groups of humans given the ability to communicate over long distances.
I think it was always there and even worse. Where did all of the various cults and such through history come from? The internet allowed a bunch of people with funny ideas to get together, but more importantly I think, it allows people caught in a local situation of closed mindedness to see out and get some ties and strength outside. I think this in the long run actually hurts the cults and coercive mindset more than the ability to get together electronically helps them. Absolutely no evidence one way or another of course.
I shall not engage in any ad hominem for or against Jacques Distler, who is indeed at the focus of some weirdness.
To me, the killer app of the web is collaborationware. The internet may at some point in the future connect more devices to devices than people to people or devices to people, but right now the web connects people to people.
The connection is not broadcasting. Nor is it, as some claimed a decade or so ago, narrowcasting.
The web allows people with overlapping beliefs to communicate on trivia (this is what I’m listening to, this is my mood, this is whom I have a crush on). But more importantly, blogs and wikis are collaborative activities, and that can ramp up to people in communication through multiple channels (on the blog: “email me”) and f2f (face-to-face). Collaboration can lead to “virtual corporations” (I’ve been in a corporation whose President was in England and CEO moved from Singapore to Bangalore) while I stayed in California.
People who meet through the web because of common interests, as in the old days people fell in love while attending the same concert or museum or bookstore, can accomplish things together that they could not do on their own.
Hence Social Networking. Hence Web 3.0.
I spend some time every single day in collaborative Mathematics activities, thanks to the web. The web is crucial to my (much interrupted) work as a Science Fiction author and editor and publisher.
Jacques Distler is in a nexus of agonized debate about String Theory, which even many of its experts consider to be in crisis.
“The Structure of Scientific Revolution” [Kuhn] meets the power-law structure of the Web.
Of course it’s weird. People have always been weird. But the web is a revolutionary infrastructure for combining the weirdness of multiple people in weird ways, from the Dr. Dean online fundraising that’s changed American Politics, to the SDSU students busted for emailing drug deal details, to terrorists social networking, and jackasses showing off their idiocy on YouTube, and Intelligent Design loons plotting against Darwin and rationality.
When the going gets weird, the weird want the web.
Yeah, that sounds exactly right to me.
Weird people can find each other much more easily in order to act weird together. Also, people who are disturbed by particular types of weirdnesses can expose themselves to those weirdnesses much more easily.
The latter scenario is the source of much hilarity on the Internet.
There was a a book out back in 1988, “High Weirdness by Mail” with the addresses and snarky descriptions of all sorts of strange groups.
A quick google says that that it has reincarnated on the web, like so many things.
I agree that the Internet has mostly made this stuff easier and more visible.
Pretty much any fetish you can think of can be found in ancient Greek literature. Those guys spent a long time thinking about this stuff.
When I saw this post in my feeds reader I thought about weird ideas, rather than pubic lice; trolls and wackos who are only too well known to science bloggers. And in that case, I think that the web may have had an effect, by making the Dunning-Kruger effect more common. In the past, if you had an interest for a topic, you had to get a book, and even if you only read the first chapter, you knew that there was more beyond it. Now it’s easy for people to get a 5 minute pill of information, and believe that they already understand a subject. The newer, link-rich wikipedia may be a positive force against this.
The ‘product’ in that story is no more or less strange than what was in the classified ads in one of the free underground papers distributed in San Francisco circa 1967.
The web simply opened it up to the world.
George Carlin once said something to the effect that “Any human activity that more than 5 people participate in has a magazine.” This was obviously pre-web but I believe post-gopher. I last saw it updated to be “Any human activity that more than 1 person participates in has at least 37 web sites about it, pro and con.”
As the old saying goes:
All the world’s strange but you and me, and even you’re a bit strange.