When you surf, do you travel with the herd or explore paths untrodden? Who knows? Outside of chat rooms, page counters, and telltale server lag, it's next to impossible to gauge just how many people are surfing exactly what you're surfing when you surf what you surf. In the absence of still-uncommon live connections, it may be impossible to pin down an accurate number of active viewers of any particular page; still, it's surprising that attempts to deliver live usage stats are so scarce. You'd think Net users would be looking to feel less, rather than more, alone - particularly when they're typically not alone at all.
Is this by design? In the world, people laugh in unison at the cineplex, sob in unison at ratings-blitz funerals, and do the wave in unison at 3Com Park. On the Net, people get apoplectic at the thought of cookies and start quoting George Orwell at the mere mention of demographic surveys. Would the perception of audience-tracking change if it were presented as entertainment in its own right? Certainly, surfers find gimmicks like WebCrawler's Search Voyeur fascinating, often for up to three or four uninterrupted minutes. But considering the Net's well-documented tendencies to abet people's more prurient curiosities, the resistance to surveillance - even general, anonymous monitoring - may be born out of more than natural shyness.
It'll be intriguing to observe the shopping public's reaction to AdEdge, a system of networked 10-inch video monitors set to infest supermarkets across the country by 1998. Coupon dispensers, tasting booths, and floor-printed ads are now common in the aisles of Safeway, but how will people react to Raisin Bran commercials playing inches away from the cereal boxes? Being seduced by a slick promo while standing alone is one thing, but assume a crowded market for a second. Can you imagine an impromptu audience of seven strangers staring at a Velveeta spot for 20 seconds and then reaching, simultaneously, for a jumbo-size yellow brick? The answer has to be yes, but it's still hard to imagine such an instant, communal display of unselfconscious consumerism.
The question brings to mind the phenomenon known to behavioral psychologists as the Hawthorne Effect - so-called because it was observed during a workplace-productivity study conducted at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois. At first, research seemed to suggest that increasing the intensity of lighting increased productivity. Then, it appeared that decreasing lighting accomplished the same, as did moving furniture, piping music, etc. The conclusion amongst the researchers was that the behavioral changes were actually unrelated to the changes in the workplace, but were caused instead by the simple awareness of being observed. Like the workers in this study, we're all on stage when we traverse the Web. For now, we can only wait to see how we react when the lights are turned on.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
