Evsey Weiner. To each

Everyone has their own Internet!
Evsei Weiner

Publication date: July 24, 2001

As the year passes (as a rule, unnoticed by anyone except the direct participants) the Russian Internet Forum, the National Intel Internet Award has already been awarded twice, there are as many as four Internet Academies (two of which are very frivolous and are called, respectively, the Vocal-Instrumental-Analytical Internet -Academy named after Edita Piekha and Sausage Internet Academy, but the other two are extremely serious). Not to mention small forums, seminars, round tables and so on, with impressive names, which your humble servant often has to attend and which take place, without exaggeration, in dozens. The list can be continued, but this is enough.

Question: what is implicitly postulated both by the loud names and the very fact of the existence of this very motley gathering? One simple statement: the Internet is an established (or in the process of formation, in this case it is not important) specific industry. No one has ever tried to describe its essential features, which is not surprising, since it is impossible - which, in fact, is what all of the following is about. But it is precisely this confidence that allows us to hold forums, organize academies and determine our own place in the world through our relationship to some new community of people (with equally indescribable properties, we note).

Let us consider the traditional premises that are most often cited in defense of the “Internet industry” thesis.

a) The existence of a traditional opposition for professionals (especially the older generation, which is characterized by the active use of specific jargons, which cannot serve as a general feature, since it is dying out) of “online - offline”; self-identification in terms of this opposition.

b) The existence of quasi-professional associations of “Internet users in general” (EZhE - “commonwealth of online periodicals”, academies, ideas expressed from time to time about the need to create professional associations).

c) The existence of a specific group of “Internet elite”, which considers itself such and introduces similar ideas to more or less broad masses.

d) Reflection of the described ideas in traditional media (especially non-core ones), accordingly, presumably, the formation of public opinion in the spirit of such ideas. As a matter of fact, no matter in what terms the network is described: “a new and most promising environment”, “a toy for American morons” or “a cesspool of pornography” - it is described as a single entity that has a set of characteristics characteristic of it and only of it.

Before proceeding directly to criticism, let us turn to the arguments in defense of the opposite thesis. Then, perhaps, no criticism will be needed. So:

a) Growing disintegration as the number of professional projects increases, or more precisely, the “division of labor.” In fact, there are no “Internet professionals” (except A.B. Nosik); there are professionals in the field of commerce, design, publishing, production, journalism, etc.

b) There is a constant increase in the amount of evidence of understanding the following fact: in each specific field of activity related to the Internet, a professional has much more in common with off-line colleagues than with other “Internet users”: the problems and interests of the owner of an online store are common with the problems owners of other stores, and not with problems, for example, an online publisher. And vice versa.

c) Lack of a unified professional jargon; The professional language of the “early Internet” is dying out, or rather, it is becoming a narrowly professional jargon of programmers and webmasters; the professional jargon of professionals in certain fields is more likely to gravitate toward off-line ones.

d) Accordingly, there is a still insignificant in volume and predominantly online wave of publications, reflecting a new understanding of the situation, that is, the beginning of the formation of a public opinion that is alternative to the previously formed one.

It is easy to notice that the preconditions of the “industry” type stem from the world, to use Popper-Plato, of ideas and are conditioned by the history of the first years of the development of the Internet in Russia. Their only strong point is that the old “Internet elite” partially fit into the new situation (for example, many of its representatives headed major projects) and, according to all historical laws, tends to preserve their own mythology.

Behind preconditions like “non-industry,” on the contrary, there is the “world of things,” that is, money and real processes of current history, primarily business processes. It is not difficult to predict who will win the competition. Criticism - as promised - thus becomes unnecessary.

Accordingly, we should finally express something between a recommendation and hope: since there is no “Internet in general” (unless we are talking about wires and other metal), but there are exactly as many Internets as there are specific areas of activity, there is no need to waste your own time and sponsorship money to prove otherwise. It is much more reasonable to abandon the opposition between “on-line” and “off-line” and try to integrate into real, or, if you like, even normal processes. Let the online pie maker bake pies in collaboration with ordinary pie makers, and not look at them from the height of mastery of information technology, hugging an online shoemaker with whom he has nothing in common. Let, in a word, everyone cultivate their own site.