The Internet as Verb - Shifting Perceptions and the Content Industry

“Surfing” the net back when dial-up was the standard connection felt more akin to wading through molasses. We understood that the term was ironic, and in reality, we viewed the Internet as a collection of nouns delivered to our computers -- web pages, sites, emails, and downloads. But our perception of the online experience has shifted, and we now see it more in terms of verbs such as streaming, Googling, Facebooking, blogging, cloud computing, news feeds, and “the conversation.” This shift in perception is especially natural for digital natives. Digital natives are those born into digital culture as a way of life, as opposed to digital immigrants, or those born before the mid-eighties and who grew up primarily as consumers of mass media. There’s a lot of gloomy talk about how digital natives are different in the way that they interact with technology, process information and socialize, and now, a new study suggests that the Googlization of knowledge is resulting in poorer memory. Whether this development is truly negative, and I don’t believe that it is, it’s clear that digital natives do take for granted their relationship to the Internet as a verb.

Digital natives take for granted that they can curate their own cultural experiences, the idea of “curatorial me.” They take for granted that they can access more music, more film, more knowledge, and more peers than any other generation in human history. They never knew a time when cultural experiences were limited by one’s budget and the whims of the mass media. And they naturally grasp the Internet as a flow of data as opposed to a collection of nouns. In a sense, even the term “curation” is misleading since it suggests collecting, possessing and owning. Curation is really about filtering the overwhelming surplus of cultural choices online. This perception of the online experience as a flow rather than a collection of nouns has staggering implications for the content industry and the economics of the Internet.

What is the value of a Tweet? Would you pay a penny for a good Tweet? For some Tweets, I might pay more than that, but of course, the vast majority aren’t worth the brain cells they burn up glancing at them. For digital natives, and for more and more digital immigrants as well, music, film, news and almost everything else that arrives online is perceived like a Tweet or a status update, as part of the deluge of data. These sparks of culture stream to us down the pipes, flicker briefly on our screens and then fade away into the ether of the Internet. They blend with the crushing flow of information instead of standing out as individual songs or movies that we purchase and possess. They have little permanence and therefore represent little real value. This shift in our perception of online content will have a greater and greater impact on its producers and distributors who, after all, profited in the past by selling us the containers of content, the physical products such as the albums, magazines, books and DVDs, the “stuff” we put on our shelves and collected. Selling culture as a collection of nouns -- newspapers, books, DVDs, photographs or albums -- will feel more and more obsolete as this perception continues to shift.