Internet excelling in publicness

DON’T you hate it when your computer suddenly changes its behaviour without asking? Something that has worked for months or even years suddenly stops behaving that way.
In an office you can usually rely on the resident nerd to come and fix it. In a home office it is a different story.

The other day, for some reason the arrow keys would not work in Excel. For years, I entered data in a cell and pressed the arrow key and the cursor would move to the next cell. Not any more. I must hit the Return key instead.

A few years ago this would have been intensely annoying and I would have put up with the festering sore. Any chance of finding anything in the Help menu was next to zero, particularly with a Microsoft product, or even on an Apple. It would have been a “life gets worse” story.

Now, however, it is part of a “life gets better” story. This is because, as a mostly home office person, I have been discovering the increasing power of the internet – not just for facts-and-figures information which we have been doing for years – but for stunningly accurate help on appliances, gadgets and computers.

In this instance, among the millions of people who use Excel, someone had had the identical problem and spent some hours working at it until stumbling upon the solution.

Apparently, you can inadvertently turn on the scroll lock, but if you are using a laptop you cannot turn it off again because you have to press Shift F14, and only the plug-in extended keyboard has an F14 key.

Problem solved – like a myriad of other computer and non-computer queries – through the power of precise information generated by one of millions of users.

The internet is changing our loves slowly in a myriad of ways,

At the time of the invention of the printing press, no-one would have predicted that it would lead to the Protestant Reformation (70 years later) and the scientific and industrial revolutions a century or so later.

Now we are less than 20 years from the creation of the world wide web. The radical changes are yet to come. We are becoming more open, more public.

A book out earlier this year – Public Parts, by Jeff Jarvis – uses the word publicness because the usual abstract noun – publicity – has the pejorative connotations of media spin and sensation-seeking. He argues that the internet is a great force for good and will be greater. He says people should embrace publicness. Ironic that he wrote it in a book, yes, but books will all be electronic eventually.

Many people regard the aggregation of mountains of personal information in computer databases as “scary” and “creepy” invasions of privacy. Jarvis argues this is not good enough. How is it “scary” or “creepy”, he asks. On the contrary, there can be a lot of benefits.

I quite like retailers keeping a record of everything I have bought. Saves me losing bits of paper with guarantees on them. Also they know you are a good customer and should treat you right. The data is less an invasion of privacy than a basis of a mutually beneficial relationship.

The internet is changing retail. Consumers now have the knowledge and the power, not only about best price, but also the quality of goods through consumer reviews. What would you trust – the glossy manufacture’s brochure at the store or a review by a consumer like you who says XYZ washing machine tears your clothes?

Billions of dollars worth of small items are being ordered online from companies that do not have to run stores with the expense of rent, large inventories, and large staffs.

Manufacturing might change. Instead of car companies developing the next model in secret and pulling off the covers to reveal the work of a few designers, they will develop it in collaboration with consumers. The result will be features consumers like.

Indeed, a company in the US is doing precisely this.

Further, they will log publicly all complaints on the net – many complaints are made public by consumers anyway. This sort of publicness, Jarvis argues, will save companies money in the long term. The Toyota brake crisis, for example, would have been nipped in the bud.

Media is already changing. Mainstream media is having difficulty finding a business model to support quality journalism.

The Murdoch empire — having flirted unsuccessfully with the internet with its failed MySpace venture and other forays – now wants to retreat. It has taken major British and US papers behind the paywall and intends to do the same with The Australian.

You will have to pay for News Ltd online content. Wrong model. They won’t.

If Fairfax follows suit so that nearly all Australian dailies are behind the paywall, it will invite competition. Hitherto newspapers – unlike virtually every other industry – have been spared the blowtorch of international competition. If the bulk of Australian online newspapers go behind the paywall, an international news company could easily set up a free site covering Australian news and scoop the advertising.

Just as Fairfax has set up the Brisbane Times and WA Today online to compete in Murdoch-controlled cities, the Guardian could easily set up an Australian edition. No multimillion dollar press needed.

The Guardian says it will never go behind the paywall. It has the second-largest English-language online audience in the world, behind the New York Times.

Mainstream media is using the public as reporters more often. People in places where news events happen have the wherewithal – mobile access to the internet. They can send pictures, video and audio to news organisations. But citizen reporters won’t send to news organisations behind a paywall. Why should they pay to see their own stuff.

Medicine has already changed. Doctors are acutely aware of the second opinion online. Patients are increasingly looking up the drugs they are being prescribed. Dangerous stuff, the medical profession says. No so. It is public stuff that can keep drug companies in check.

The law is changing, but more slowly. Barristers still gather in large chambers in the centre of town. They mainly do it to share large, expensive libraries of law reports and to share opinions about documents and the law with colleagues. But the law reports are online now and colleagues are an email away from sharing a document.

Lawyers with a good online presence – with plenty of links and lots of shared knowledge – will attract business from city-big firms with high overheads and poor public access.

Governments are becoming more public and should be even more so. They should routinely put all their information online – with few exceptions like security. It’s our information. Private users should be encouraged to exploit it. It is a valuable resource.

This is slowly happening as last year’s Freedom of Information changes show.

Of course, many people have predicted revolutionary change because of the internet to be met with others saying they have been proved wrong. But the change is happening gradually all the time. And amid all the doom and gloom, I think it will be change for the better.

In the old world Fred Nerk, from Mung Bean Falls California, would not have been on hand to free my Excel scroll lock.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 22 October 2011.