The Internet, what sustains it, and Future-thinking
Been thinking about the future of the web quite a bit lately. I am not a futurist, so it is difficult to see what is happening now and then project that into the future. While I can be an optimist in person, in my head I am a pessimist. Whenever I try to model the future, it never looks good.
The Pessimist’s Topics
A.I. Overviews as one of the four horsemen
But then again, we are in interesting and unprecedented times. Google controls the majority of the search market. Their recent pivot in search to A.I. Overviews means that people do not have to visit your web page to get an answer. They have designed it to reduce click through and to keep people on Google longer. What does this mean for websites that rely on that traffic?
On the one hand, these visitors seeking a quick answer were likely not going to be engaged users on your website. Keeping them off your site might be a good thing, reducing your bounce and exit rates. Then again, you don’t know if more context, more of your expertise, would have turned them into an engaged user. Your site has been robbed of that traffic, good or bad.
ChatGPT and others have entered the search space, with everyone’s goal being the one stop a visitor needs to find their answers, plan their life, conduct their tasks, etc. A shift from using search as a research tool, visiting multiple links and thinking critically about what answers seems the most trustworthy, to relying on a bot to conduct those judgements in a black box puts us at risk of ceasing to think critically about imperfect information created by fallible humans and regurgitated by fallible machines.
If we take this to an extreme, websites that rely on advertising revenue to pay their staff and infrastructure will suffer. They might even start to close down. What happens to the sources for A.I. Answers if this happens? Does Google become the source and distributor of all information? Do we feel good about that amount of power?
The so-called “Death of Search” also plays into political divisions and information bubbles. More on that topic below. A great quote from the linked article in the Atlantic puts it nicely:
Much of what’s beautiful about searching the internet is jumping into ridiculous Reddit debates and developing unforeseen obsessions on the way to mastering a topic you’d first heard of six hours ago, via a different search; falling into clutter and treasure, all the time, without ever intending to. AI search may close off these avenues to not only discovery but its impetus, curiosity.
The flipside: It is possible that the opposite might become true. We now rely on the above-mentioned serendipitous search to enlighten our knowledge. If the future of A.I.-powered search takes that away from us, would we revert back to actual conversation with other humans for these interesting rabbit holes? Or will we continue to get lazier and more insulated from the human world?
Social Media replacing Journalism
In another area of the web, we can see that the political divisions have increased distrust in all institutions. Government and journalism have taken the biggest hits. News outlets have long been struggling to remain relevant as print distribution has been withering and (free!) real-time social media reporting has become expected.
Now influencers on Tik Tok and other platforms have become the main source of news for a large portion of our society (Wired magazine article, paywall). The dangers are many: influencers are not journalists, who aim to be as impartial as possible, and out digital algorithms promote the most extreme and divisive opinions and reporting. In the recent election, there was no doubt that the less rigorous podcast forums for political candidates influenced voters. On the one hand, it exposed more people to politics and the candidates than would have otherwise engaged. On the other hand, the hosts were far less likely to press candidates for the truth or to challenge them when they made false claims.
If journalism’s footprint continues to shrink, and as televised news increases its polarization, truth itself is eroding. We are each living in our own bubbles of truth, which means that nothing is universally true. We’ve already seen examples of these bubbles with QAnon and Pizzagate resulting in extremist events. Outrage has become a business model, and society is suffering from this manipulation.
Political Backlash continues
In our recent political climate, access to information is no longer a guarantee. Many think access to information is a fundamental human right because we have taken it for granted for sop long. But the recent moves from the Drumpf administration and DOGE have shown us that data and access can be removed. Climate change, DEI, and humans who identify as trans can be erased from one bubble of thought, which has ripple effects throughout the rest of society.
Facebook and Meta last month announced they would reduce fact-checking on the platform. There already exists social media platforms that encourage “free speech” which includes out-right lies, mis-information, and hate speech. Now Facebook will expose its billions of users to the same. When lies are everywhere, it gets increasing difficult to understand what is true.
Will the lack of reality and civil discourse drive people away from the internet, or suck them in further?
The Optimist’s Path Forward
It could be that these downsides, if they follow current trajectories, could make the internet less of an attractive place to spend time. An increase in misinformation and sensationalism, A.I. slop (paywall), toxic discourse, and the like could drive away most people. Where would they go? Perhaps smaller, curated communities both online and off. This would likely do little to expose people to wider viewpoints outside of these bubbles, but at the very least, it could lead to a desire to seek more authentic human connections that start from a shared agreement about what is foundationally true.
Some of these might go back to occurring in real-time, human, face-to-face connections. As someone who loves the idea of the internet and makes a living from it, I actually look forward to a world which relies on it less. What would that look like? The power that FAANG holds over us might dwindle a little bit. Do we retain some of that power for ourselves, or does another force/entity increase its power because of this shift?
None of these are answers. The answers are not going to come, because this is the future we are talking about. But I am very interested in all this and plan to dive deeper with additional reading.
Additional thoughts in a recent note about an article thinking similar things.
A.I. Assistance for these lines of thought
Prompts for Chat GPT with the Reasoning option turned on:
I am interested in predicting the future of the web over the next three years. The influences I am interested in learning more about are Artificial Intelligence; marketing forces and the cost of maintaining a website when traffic to them is decreasing in part because of Google's AI Overviews; the replacement of journalism with influences; and the increasing political division driven my algorithms. Please research and present articles written in the last year that address any of these topics with a focus on what it might mean for the future of the web.
Follow up: With the decrease in the reliability of internet search and the increase in toxic speech and misinformation drive people away from the internet and back into human interactions? Does the future look more like the past, with smaller communities and main streets thriving again, and the internet itself containing more bots than humans?
No sentences or fragments were copied directly from any of the A.I.’s responses.