What is the web you speak of? Is that the Facebook or the Twitter? I’m so confused.

A bit of sarcasm there but it does feel to me as though we’ve taken a step backwards. We’ve gone from the walled garden of services like AOL and Compuserve to the walled garden of Facebook and Twitter. Like AOL, there’s nothing forcing people to use the Internet in this manner, except for sheer size and inertia. There are now countless examples of businesses, recreational groups, fundraisers, and so forth whose sole online presence consists of their Facebook and/or Twitter pages. If they bother to maintain a webpage it’s hopelessly out of date. Need updates about our activity? Like us on Facebook! Have a question? Post it on our wall! Good luck trying to e-mail us.

Besides the sheer annoyance (not all of us wish to be sucked in Facebook’s ecosystem) factor there are consequences here for free speech. Mediums like Usenet or IRC were resistant to attempts at censorship, they embodied the internet as most of us knew it. The contrast with large corporations like Facebook or Google is depressing; they’re compelled to engage in censorship for legal (try Googling Tienanmen Square in the PRC) reasons, to say nothing of their tendency to cave to public pressure and censor unpopular viewpoints, or even to behave like our nanny (Facebook’s policy towards non-sexual topless photos of females)

At the rate we’re going I’d be surprised if anyone remembers the «internet» in another ten years.