Do you remember the Internet?

Yesterday Microsoft launched a new campaign around their update to Internet Explorer, with a video entitled “Child of the 90’s”. The slightly micro-soft-touch video aimed to tug at our Gen Y heartstrings with memories of pogs, tamagotchi’s, slap bands and - you guessed it - “the browser you loved to hate”. To use a term coined by The Future Laboratory, “netstalgia” is in full force, as me and my contemporaries begin to fondly remember the good old days of dial-up broadband and phones the size of a Fiat Punto. For the perhaps the first time, it’s now possible to market web-based services with the rose-tint of nostalgia, rather than the blinding glint of innovation. 

On a similar, if somewhat, tangential note, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the internet on film. Whether it’s about retrospective storytelling (The Social Network, Jobs) or the web as a narrative device (HBO’s Girls will be my primary reference for this), filmmakers are facing an increasingly challenge of making screens, code and online activity as visually exciting as the real world action taking place in the story.

I am loathe to give Lena Dunham any more column inches, but her integration of the Internet within the plot and lives of her characters marks a watershed moment for film and TV. We can no longer pretend that online interactions aren’t contributing to the momentum of a contemporary storyline. I’m not talking “You’ve Got Mail”, where an occasional screen-shot of an email revealed the characters’ burgeoning relationship. Technology has made human interaction complex - a broad range of subtle cues from across a range of platforms now impact the trajectory of our lives. 

But if people looking at screens is boring, do we have to invent a new cinematic style to literally show the deep subtext taking place in the virtual world? For some reason, I keep returning to this video.

It’s gaudy, it’s over the top, and it’s French.... but it kind of works. I may be part of a generation that gets “netstalgic” for when life took place on just a few platforms, when the protagonists we watched on TV had only to wait by the just one phone for her life to change. But, to the generations behind me, this kind of overt meta data, is an intrinsic part of their world view. And film and TV need to reflect that if they are going to continue to tell rich, meaningful stories about characters we believe in, love and remember forever.

Pinterest secrets

Pinterest may be the “ladies” social networking site, but a Business Insider article from last February highlighted Pinterest’s growing problem with porn. BI pointed out that for Pinterest to generate ad revenue, it would have to “Find a way to crack down on the naked flesh and get back to fashion and recipes”. So, let’s get real here, Pinterest. Your new “secret boards” addition isn’t about “keeping track of holiday gifts, planning a special event, or working on a project you aren’t yet ready to share with the rest of the world”, it’s about giving all the naked, tattooed hipster chicks a place to roam free.

Regardless of intention, however, I find the release of “secret boards” a fascinating new string to Pinterest’s bow. Similarly, Twitter’s direct messaging facility - a known loss-maker for the platform - remains a key draw for its users. As Grace Dent wrote in ‘How to leave Twitter’, “...if one morning everyone’s direct message box was suddenly, accidentally posted in the public timeline there would be rioting in international cities by lunchtime. Most of this would be warring couples chucking bin-bags of clothes at each other”. Ultimately, while we all love to share and chat and banter, we also need the Internet equivalent of that dark corner of the pub in which to get up to no good.

Pinterest’s naughty corner is “secret boards”. As they say, you can “keep your secret boards to yourself or invite friends to pin with you”. Cheeky. In all seriousness, though, genuine privacy and real secrets are some of the few things a digital life cannot offer in the way our offline lives can. Online, we operate on the cusp of becoming victims of our own propensity to connect and share. Out there on the interwebs we are always just one wrong click away from the judgement of the government, international corporations, and, ultimately, our own nearest and dearest. We live in the age of the screenshot and seamless sync, where no indiscretion can ever truly be hidden, forgotten or flatly denied. Just ask the Generals Petraeus and Allen.

Whatever their motives, “secret boards” mark an interesting step not just for Pinterest but for the direction of social networking platforms as a whole. Human instinct for keeping secrets puts the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest between a rock and hard place. Do they cater to the private desires of their users by providing the digital dark corners in which to be naughty, or do they insist on purely public platforms in order to be nice to the money men?

However well these platforms strike a balance between their user needs and business needs, the responsibility for our behaviour remains our own. A direct message only allows for 140 characters. But a pin can say a thousand words. Whether we use them to be naughty or nice is down to us.

Say you want a revolution

I went to two talks this week. Both on similar subjects yet both very different in attitude and approach. The first was The Frontline’s talk on Cyber Snooping in partnership with BBC Arabic. The panel was well put together; consisting of a varied mix of people working at the forefront of technological and online governance in a range of capacities. Though proceedings occasionally took a turn for the paranoid, the general sentiment was that it was time to get real about the definition, legislation and regulation of online activity for individuals, corporations and governments on a global scale.

 In contrast, D&AD’s “Digital Revolution 2.0” event was, with a few minor exceptions, as worryingly backward as the title itself. Not only did I find myself wondering if 2.0 was just a way to make the proceedings feel more “Internet-y”, but, with references to Second Life and Star Trek, whether I had also somehow travelled back in time to 2004. Assuming, for a moment, that I had, then the event was right on the money. In the early noughties, technology had almost divested itself of its geeks-only image and started to go mainstream. The line between online and offline began to blur, and everyday life was changing dramatically as a consequence. It felt wondrous, magical and overwhelming. In 2004 we had no idea how it was all going to pan out or, to paraphrase Neville Brody in Wednesday’s opening remarks, how we as people might potentially interface and interact.

If I had been asked to present on Wednesday, which is unlikely since D&AD evidently find it unthinkable to have more than two women in a panel of six, I would have pointed out that this is 2012 and the Revolution has been and gone. Wikipedia (yes, no longer do I refer to my twelve volume encyclopedia) defines a post-Revolutionary state as one that has resulted in major changes in culture, economy and socio-political institutions. Could you argue that “Digital” has contributed to fundamental change in those areas already? Yes.

The Digital Revolution (let’s just drop the 2.0 shall we?) not only changed institutions, it instigated new ones. The human experience expanded from one existing entirely in the physical world, to one that now incorporates an ever-evolving online world. So much so that people like Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a panelist at the Frontline Club’s event, are not only championing civil rights in the context of the twenty-first century but actively pioneering things like a global freedom of information act and international codes of conduct.

D&AD stands to represent the global design, creative and advertising industries. In this privileged capacity, they ought not to be pontificating on “what it all means”. Getting up on stage and throwing around words like “instagram”, “fluid data” and “re-Renaissance” just add to the noise. Like their political counterparts, D&AD have a responsibility to leverage their name and their expertise to design the direction of digital culture in our changed, and still changing, world.