Something similar has happened to the Internet. Transcending its original playful identity, it’s no longer a place for strolling — it’s a place for getting things done. Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore. The popularity of the “app paradigm,” whereby dedicated mobile and tablet applications help us accomplish what we want without ever opening the browser or visiting the rest of the Internet, has made cyberflânerie less likely. That so much of today’s online activity revolves around shopping — for virtual presents, for virtual pets, for virtual presents for virtual pets — hasn’t helped either. Strolling through Groupon isn’t as much fun as strolling through an arcade, online or off.

The Death of the Cyberflâneur - Evgeny Morozov, via NYTimes.com

Humbly disagree. Must we posit the social web as inherently evil? Surely the social mechanisms of the web serve as a tool for dissemination of findings (albeit hoisted up on a system that trades in the monetisation of habits, trends and other personal data)?

While the web has practical use, there’s still plenty of other activity going on, and hey— not everyone’s going to be a flaneur, even under the best of conditions. The app market may be a fenced preserve, but with the growing range of apps available, particularly those that serve as portals for web content, surely that app market becomes another arcade for us to wander and explore? Agreed, Groupon doesn’t exactly fire the imagination, but since when was Groupon wholly representative of today’s Internet?

If the web today consisted of nothing other than Groupon, Google and Facebook, I might agree with Morozov more, and I’m certainly interested in reading his book “The Net Delusion” to see if his extended arguments might sway me. But in this regard, I’d argue less for the death of the cyberflaneur, more for the evolution.

Source: The New York Times