The Net-Setters
Among the thousands if not hundreds of thousands of shopping sites now available on the Internet, there is one called Netsetgoods that proclaims itself the “premier online source for global lifestyle accessories.” At this site, one can choose from a selection of apparel, accessories and home furnishings, everything from hair sparkles to beach mats to ashtrays, with the main objective obviously being not so much to find necessities as to create an image for yourself--in effect, to surf the trends.
The idea of acquiring things to make yourself appear au courant is old hat. But what the proprietors of Netsetgoods may not realize is what really makes one a “Net-setter” is not what one buys, however fashionable, but the fact that one knows enough to buy it on the Internet. Like the fanciest of boutiques, the Internet itself has cachet, and Internet savvy is becoming a commodity from which one can arrogate a new kind of superiority in a whole new kind of social hierarchy. That may be one key reason why the Internet exists: It offers a cyber version of the French Revolution in which one can become a member of a new cool elite.
Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, it was the jet set that was considered cool. These were rich, beautiful, well-known cosmopolites--actors, artists, athletes, industrialists, playboys--who shuttled between New York, Paris, London and Rome, where the paparazzi trailed them like pilot fish after sharks. They drank, they loved, they partied. What they had was glamour, and what they lived was the high life.
Today the idea of a jet set seems passe. What is emerging is a “Net set.” The first Net-setters were nerds who knew their way around the Internet, but their ranks have been expanding, as the Internet itself has, so that it now includes Gen-Xers with time and money on their hands who can shuttle among sites with the dexterity of pros or cruise chat rooms as if they were at some posh watering hole. What they have is not great wealth, style or glamour, like the old jet set, or even the knowingness about where to shop for the hottest items, but great networks and the knowingness of how to shop and play in the new technological ether. And what they live is the cyberlife--more thrilling to many than the old high life of the jet-setters because it has more variety. In cyberspace, there are virtually no limits to what you can purport to do.
New technologies often have the effect of rewarding initiates with power. The first individuals to own radios, television sets, Polaroids, stereos and computers were pioneers who inspired awe in their friends and neighbors. They inspired it not necessarily because they had the financial wherewithal to buy these appliances when the cost was high but because they had the temerity to buy them. They were wading bravely into the future.
The dazzle of those technologies, however, seems paltry compared to the wonderment inspired by the Internet. The Internet has the benefit of the proliferation of the mass media, so besotted with its potentialities that one cannot escape hearing of them. Every day we are inundated with stories of new Internet companies, new Internet applications, new Internet advances, so that the Internet seems to loom over us, even if, especially if, we don’t quite understand why.
Which is an important reason the Internet inspires more awe than previous technologies: It is far less comprehensible. Just about everyone understood what radio and television were, and just about everyone had expectations about how they would evolve. But most people have only the vaguest notion of what the Internet is, much less what it portends. We hear, repeatedly, that the Internet will dominate our lives: We will shop on it, go to school on it, communicate on it, read on it, register for licenses on it and do just about everything else on it.
Far from bringing comfort, however, this omnivorousness is creating concern since so few people, only about 25% of the population, are plugged into the Internet in the literal sense and even fewer in the figurative sense. Yes, the numbers are growing exponentially, but this is like saying that in the glory days of the jet set, more and more people were catching onto designer labels. Most of these newcomers are users, not true Internet sophisticates. They won’t learn to stop worrying and love it until they learn how to ease their minds around what it is.
What we are told is that it is, above all, a new way of accessing information. But so far it seems to be providing less information than speculation, so much so that its uncertainty has become its main attraction. One is hard put to think of any other technology whose future seems so indefinite but whose prospects ignite such frenzy. Internet stocks like Amazon.com and eBay have been soaring, though virtually none of the Internet-based companies has turned a profit yet. The only explanation is that investors don’t want to be left behind when the rocket takes off--never mind that not even the crew seems to know where it is headed or whether it will get off the pad.
But if uncertainty is what gives the Internet its financial appeal, it is also the very thing that gives a Net-setter status. Because no one knows where the Internet is going, anyone who claims to understand its vagaries and exploit them is part of a cultural advance guard. These self-proclaimed visionaries are the presumed masters of a future that the rest of us can only take on faith. They seem to know what they’re doing, and if they are a priesthood, it is not because they necessarily have more information than most of us but because they carry a certain knowingness, just as the jet-setters did. They fathom the great Internet mystery.
This sounds like just another byproduct of Gen-X culture traveling at warp speed, but mystification may actually be the crux of the whole Internet phenomenon, just as high living was the crux of the jet set. It is usually assumed that technologies arrive because the capacity to provide them has arrived. It is further assumed that, once on the scene, technologies begin to exert their force on society, often changing consciousness. In this view, for example, technological advances made the computer and then the Internet possible, and the latter can now begin to revise how we live and think.
There is, however, an alternative view. In this one, technology is not the source of a change of consciousness but a product of it, which is to say new technologies arise to answer a demand. In the case of the Internet, the demands seemed to be numerous. A society with a greater need for information got a way of accessing it. An increasingly atomized society got what amounted to a worldwide party-line, where like-minded could find one another. A society increasingly dedicated to ways of fulfilling personal fantasies got a blank tablet, namely chat rooms and e-mail, on which one could be anything one wanted to be, without being called to account.
Not least of all, a society with fairly rigid hierarchies got a mechanism for revising them. This, in fact, is what makes the ordinary person’s confusion about the Internet so integral to its function as a new social arbiter. The Internet is so vast, its implications so mind-boggling and its direction so unclear yet its possibilities so overwhelming that none of the old rules seem to apply. Indeed, only in this strange, topsy-turvy world could unprofitable businesses turn into market favorites and nerds turn into Net-setters.
Perhaps the central fact, though, is that wealth and social power, which mattered most in the jet set, don’t matter at all in cyberspace. The only thing that gains you admission to the Net set is being one of those who gets it, or at least pretends to get it, by surfing the Web, knowing the cool sites, lounging away in chat rooms and generally navigating the morass. For that, all the money in the world, or all the lifestyle accessories, can’t help you, which is the point. The real world may still belong to the rich jet-setters, but the cyberworld belongs to the cool and cunning Net-setters. Viva Net set!
