With writer, blogger, and author Wendy Grossman, Jon and Scoop discuss the differences between early Internet culture and the current state of the Internet and social media. Wendy focuses in her work on the Internet, computers, freedom, and privacy. She’s been writing about “net.wars” since the early 1990s, and her book by that name was published in 1997.
Wendy Grossman: The place where I think we really started to diverge from the old Internet was right around 2006 to 2010. 2006 is when the iPhone came out, and 2010 is when the iPhone plus social media exploded. And so in that period – Facebook was founded in 2004, I think, and Google went public in 2004. You had a whole bunch of different social media sites vying to be what Facebook became, and Facebook was the winner. And that whole push toward centralization where you want to be where your friends are, and if your friends are on Facebook, then you’re on Facebook – that all happened in that 2006-2010 period.
Photo by Paul Jenkins (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
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