Last Tuesday, Bill Gates led into and out of his San Francisco IE 4 launch event speech heralding the arrival of the "Web Lifestyle." Appropriately enough, he had little, if anything, to say specifically about IE 4. That, after all, is what a true lifestyle is all about - ubiquity and general invisibility of the core ingredients. It's tempting to pick nits over Gates' clunky coinage, especially in light of IE 4's intent to transcend the Web entirely. But "active lifestyle" has too many negative connotations, and quibbling over the name game would only detract our attention from the sumptuous potential of Gates' dream of Web omnipresence.
The emergence of a true "Web lifestyle" would signal an era improved upon the present in at least two crucial aspects: more practice, less theory. Many an op-editorialist has brayed over our unwillingness to pause and ponder before rushing uncritically into this electronic fool's paradise, but they're exactly wrong. In the slow-mo unfurling of the webbed world, the ponderous, plodding pause is about the only constant. Just as the "crazy computer" joke has entered the hack comic's stand-up routine, along with bits on airline food, VCR clocks, and Janet Reno, everyone with fingers and an audience is obliged to have an opinion on the digital age. It's what drives the upcoming New Yorker issue on the future. It's what prompted last week's New York Times Magazine special issue, "What Technology Is Doing to Us."
The answer to the Times Magazine question, conveniently given right there on the cover, suggests that the jig may be up: "It's making us faster. Richer. Smarter. Also alienated. Materialistic. And a little crazy." In other words, take your pick - technology is doing everything. Which is just one IQ point away from realizing what it's really doing: nothing much. Certainly nothing fundamentally different, and little that we weren't already doing to ourselves, albeit in less quantifiable ways. If networked communications have changed anything, it's the degree to which the tastes, trajectories, and rapidly shifting whims of groups and subgroups have become transparent - a promising can of worms left untouched by most cultural commentators.
But not, surprisingly, by the Times Magazine, which valiantly avoided such galling non-starter topics as "Is cyberspace robbing us of actual community?" and "Have we replaced knowledge with mere information?" in favor of some well-researched, non-moralistic essays on the quickening of kinetic media, the folly of Orwell's 1984 vision, and the remote control as the culmination of human civilization (or something). The difference lies in distinguishing between punditry and informed observation, and while the second is preferable to the first, even the most refined commentary becomes just so much wheel-spinning after so many years. Which ends up making the advent of a Web lifestyle, however dry such a reality might appear right now, seem an extremely wet dream. If it truly transpired, we might finally be blessed with something worth seeing. And, not coincidentally, something worth saying.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
