Is the Internet History’s Greatest Hoax?

Samuel J. Morales August 18, 2023

For a while there, the Internet and the World Wide Web showed awesome promise. They whispered sweet nothings in our ears, promising to be the voice of the marginalized, the new democracy, the great equalizer.

But it wasn’t to be, for the Internet has a brand new master. No, it’s not Google. No, it’s not Microsoft. And no, it’s now not even appropriate ole’ Uncle Sam. They’re simply caretakers. The Internet’s new grasp is bigger than it will ever be, and ways, some distance older.

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Meet the grasp

The Internet’s new grasp is the same master who holds the leash of all traditional commercial media.

The Internet’s new grasp is cash and energy. Not the ability to earn cash or the capability to increase power (although those are satisfactory fringe-blessings). No, the Internet’s new master is the moneyed, powerful collective—those who concurrently mold and reflect ‘mainstream’ opinion, values, and behavior.

I assume we should have foreseen it, given the Internet’s army birthplace. But then, we were younger and constructive, and boy did we want to agree with!

A little melodramatic? Perhaps. But pretty correct, nevertheless. Let me explain for…

The early promise of equity

On the path, even in the one’s heady days, we all diagnosed a few essential realistic and technological barriers which surely threw a spanner in the works for the ‘New World Orderless’ principle. First, the fantastic majority of the sector’s populace didn’t even have to get admission to a computer, a lot less very own one with Internet access. In reality, that changed into the case even after the brand new grasp took the reins (and in all likelihood still is).

But we had religion within the Internet’s capability. I even wrote a paper within the mid-90s discussing the Internet’s promise for empowerment, and I quote:

“Being one of these decentralized, anonymous forms of conversation, the Internet gives terrific opportunities to the sector’s oppressed – improved (anonymous if desired) communications talents, and better get entry to extra sources of local and worldwide information, to call just a couple. At the identical time, the Internet poses awesome threats to the arena’s existing media and political powers, now not best due to the re-distribution of records (and, consequently, electricity) to the population, however additionally because of the plain impracticality (impossibility?) of regulating the data flowing in and out of any united states of America.”

Alas, I did no longer see the Internet’s proper capacity for censorship and manipulation… Content.

He who wields content is king.

We frequently listen that “content is king.” The logic of the argument is as follows. For some time now, the lion’s share (a few 80%) of Internet traffic to the average website has been coming from the most important search engines like google and yahoo. What’s extra, while human beings use serps, they rarely appear beyond the second page of seeking consequences. Additionally, research indicates that being #1 in Google equates to twice as many visitors as being in range 2. In this method, you want to rank in the first two pages of the fundamental engines like google – ideally at number one – before your voice starts to be heard. The simplest way to attain the pinnacle of the serps is to have heaps of links returned to your internet site from other websites. There are ‘reliable’ methods of achieving this intention:

1) Publish helpful statistics on your website and continuously update it so that others link to your web page because it’s so super – maintain ‘eyes on paper.’ Some popular methods consist of news sites, BLOGS, folksonomies, journals, e-newsletters, and customizable net portals like Google Personalized, allowing site visitors to pick (from a pre-decided choice) what they see, e.G. Information, e-mail, weather, stocks, and so on.

2) Article PR – write helpful articles and allow publishers of newsletters and ezines to use them without cost – on the proviso that they link again in your website online. (These articles are pretty often written via search engine optimization copywriters. They need to be submitted to established article banks, from which they’re collected using online publishers without cost.)

In other words, to attain the engines’ pinnacle like google, you want to post virtual reams and reams of high first-rate, knowledgeable content (i.E. Copy). And you want to hold doing it indefinitely.

On the premise of this evidence, the pronouncing that “content is king” has emerged as truly a truism. But while we look intently, the saying is wrong. There’s not anything wrong with common sense; it is the realization it’s a problem. In reality, the content material is no extra king than changed into the sword. In truth, he who wields the content material is king (and I say “he” with cause, as the wielder is normally male or some patriarchal organization).

And who wields the content? Only those with the social electricity to command schooling and the cash to indulge inside the time-consuming mission of researching, writing, and publishing said content (or the ones who have the price range and foresight to engage a search engine marketing copywriter).

Wielding content material is getting tougher.

Even for seek engine (search engine marketing) copywriters like myself, that is a venture that is turning into an increasing number of time-consuming, truly because more and more content material is being delivered to the Internet (largely as a result of the content material emphasis of seek engine ranking!). To illustrate: In 1997, there have been an envisioned 200 million pages on the World Wide Web (K. Bharat and A. Broder, ‘A method for measuring the relative length and overlap of public web serps’ [WWW1998]). By 1998, that range had jumped to 800 million pages (S. Lawrence and C.L. Giles, ‘Accessibility of facts at the web’ [Nature 400:107-109, 1999]). A mere 7 years later, the estimate is now 11.Five billion pages (A. Gulli and A. Signorini, ‘The Indexable Web is more than eleven.5 billion pages’ [2005]).