Netscape Killed the Video Star
A fantastic history professor once pointed out to me that December 25, 1954 was a critical inflection point in the dynamics of culture because it is the moment when collective perception shifted toward being united. On that day, an enormous number of homes added televisions to their living rooms. The scales tipped such that the simple majority of U.S. homes would spend some time together, each day, intaking programming through both of their dominant senses — hearing and vision. In homes where families still gathered around a radio, each family member held a very different image in their minds. They were engaged, stimulated, and directed only through auditory content, which meant that their own life experience and associations furnished the form and movement of the ideas they received.
We made a radical jump from simply listening to the monied and politically entitled producers of media telling everyone what to think to a new show and tell scheme. It changed society in ways we’ll never really know the whole of — because we can’t see the control group.
When Netscape Navigator was released, on December 15, 1994, everything began to change. Netscape was the first graphical user interface (GUI, pronounced ‘gooey’) for the internet. Well, there was Mosaic, but did anyone really use Mosaic? Before GUIs, those of us who trawled the net did so strictly through typing, believe it or not. And there was really nothing there but, well, stuff like this — longform documents filled with information and ideas. With Netscape Navigator, the point-and-click masses were empowered to find other people who cared about what they cared about. And there were pictures. It was the pictures that really brought in the masses.
The point is that this is when culture began to splinter, after forty years of becoming increasingly common to each other, we began to grow apart. But only as a single cultural whole, smaller groups (groups that were always there) were empowered to find each other and connect more directly than they could before.
In this chapter, we’ll explore the largely unchallenged assumption that there is an average person. Spoiler, there isn’t. Not in any way or in any context does any kind of average person any longer exist. This is more accurate every day. What’s more, this simple realization has massive implications. And, some folks have already learned how to take advantage of this fact. Cambridge Analytica, the marketing firm that managed Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign understands this whole issue very well. And so will you, by the time we’re through with this chapter. We’ll look at why some terrible movies get high marks on Rotten Tomatoes, how I gamed the Etsy system years ago, and what all of these examples have to teach us about making social design decisions.
Hey, are you following me on Instagram? What about YouTube?
Yes to both? Excellent. Glad to hear it.