Everything changes. Nothing changes.

This morning, I was reading a post from last April by Fred Stutzman about social networks like Facebook and MySpace when I came upon this sentence: “98 percent of the people who use MySpace don’t realize they are using a social networking community.” Suddenly, the fog lifted, and the sun came out, and on the tip of every blade of grass I could see a single perfect dewdrop and in each perfect dewdrop I could see reflected the entire glistening lawn. Ah, clarity! There’s nothing like a good squirt of mental Windex in the a.m. The man continued: “They are simply using a website that their friends are on – they are using it for the same reasons they use email or IM. The social networking aspects are practically moot – they are interested in the content (friends profiles) and goofing off.”

“They are interested in the content and goofing off.” Right there, in nine words, is all you need to know about the Internet and, indeed, all you need to know about all media, past, present and future. And the reason you know in your gut that it’s all you need to know – the reason you know it’s true – is because it’s true of you: You, dear blog reader, are interested in the content and goofing off. I, too, am interested in the content and goofing off. We are all interested in the content and goofing off. Social networking is bunk.

Oh sure, the idea of the Internet marking some profound change in our relationship to media, of it being a kind of alchemical crucible that – presto chango – transforms us from consumers into producers (or “prosumers” or “conducers” or whatever tortured neologism you might force through your lips) is an awfully pretty one. But most everything we’re learning about the actual production and consumption of online media contradicts it. On every glorious “community” site, it’s just a tiny group that’s producing the bulk of the content, which is, of course, the same few-to-many model that has always characterized the media.

Does that mean everyone else is just a passive consumer? Of course not. But that was never the case. Everyone has – and always has had – interests and hobbies and opinions. Everyone has always been a “producer” as well as a “consumer” of culture, and the Internet offers new (if not necessarily better) opportunities for self-expression. And that’s good. But it doesn’t amount to a reinvention of media. Today’s new media, as Steven Johnson writes, “are not historically unique; they draw upon and resemble a number of past traditions and forms, depending on their focus.”

What we are learning, day by day, is there is no such thing as “many-to-many” when it comes to media. Or, as one blogger recently put it, in a different context, “community doesn’t scale.” The Internet is a party line and a broadcasting medium and a mall. Sure, it puts a different spin on each of those things, but it’s fundamentally the same, not fundamentally different. If you want social networking, go to a cocktail party. Or a church supper.

Richard MacManus has published some striking statistics about Digg, supplied to him by the site Diggtrends. The data reveal that of Digg’s 445,000 registered users, only 2,287 contributed any stories to the site during the last six weeks. But here are the real eye-openers: The top 100 users contributed fully 55% of the stories that appeared on the site’s front page, and the top 10 users – yep, you can count ’em on your own two hands – contributed a whopping 30% of the front page stories. Peer production? I think a better term for it would be peerage production.

Diggtrends also reports, according to MacManus, that there was a sudden and dramatic increase in user submissions after Jason Calacanis made his offer to pay top social bookmarkers. Digg users, says Diggtrends, “have realized the value of being a top user and probably are aiming for Netscape money.” No doubt there are such things as reputational capital and attention capital, and people will compete for them. But they’ll compete harder for cash. With cash, after all, you can actually buy stuff.

UPDATE: Diggtrends (or is it Duggtrends?) has posted its analysis. Meanwhile, Calacanis gloats, announcing he’s succeeded in luring away two of the top 10 Diggers.

The World Wide Web has always been viewed as a place apart. The constraints of the physical world – territorial boundaries, national and local laws, even distance itself – don’t seem to apply to the virtual world, where everyone is every place (and no place) all the time. Back in 1996, John Perry Barlow issued his famous Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, proclaiming to the “Governments of the Industrial World” that “you are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” Many other influential writers and thinkers have echoed Barlow’s idea, if not his grandiosity. In Thomas Friedman’s terms, the web is “flat” – and it’s one of the main forces flattening the real world, too.

In their excellent new book, Who Controls the Internet?, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu calmly dismantle this view of the web, revealing it to be a naive and wishful fiction. They show, through a series of engaging examples, why the Internet, far from existing outside national boundaries and laws, is increasingly being shaped by those boundaries and laws. Location, it turns out, matters a great deal on the Internet, for technical, political and cultural reasons. The virtual world, like its physical counterpart, has a spiky geopolitical topography. The web, in short, is unflat.

“The Internet,” Goldsmith and Wu write, “was supposed to be the test case for self-governing systems that could flourish without respect to geography and territorially based coercion. It was supposed to allow like-minded people to join communities and govern themselves without respect to geography, without regard to the top-down coercive structures of territorial governmental systems, and without the usual pathologies and corruptions that characterize territorial rule. This was Barlow’s vision, and it is a vision that retains a powerful hold on globalization and Internet theorists today.” But it’s a vision that is contradicted by the facts. “What we have seen, time and time again, is that physical coercion by government – the hallmark of a traditional legal system – remains far more important than anyone expected. This may sound crude and ugly and even depressing. Yet at a fundamental level, it’s the most important thing missing from most predictions of where globalization will lead, and the most significant gap in predictions about the future shape of the Internet.”

The history of eBay provides perhaps the best example of the divergence between Internet rhetoric and Internet reality. Friedman, the authors note, “describes eBay as a ‘self-governing nation-state’ constituted by its feedback system and its vigorous community norms.” The company’s CEO, Meg Whitman, has promoted this idealized view, with statements like this one: “People will say that ‘eBay restored my faith in humanity’ – contrary to the world where people are cheating and don’t give people the benefit of the doubt.”

But when Goldsmith and Wu look beneath eBay’s “self-governing facade,” they find “a far different story – a story of heavy reliance on the iron fist of coercive governmental power.” eBay maintains a large and aggressive internal security force – numbering almost a thousand – and this force works in close harmony with national law-enforcement agencies to police the eBay community. “Perpetually threatened by cheaters and fraudsters, eBay established an elaborate hand-in-glove relationship with the police and other governmental officials who can arrest, prosecute, incapacitate, and effectively deter these threats to its business model … Without this powerful hidden-hand help of governments in the places where it does business, eBay’s thriving ‘self-governing’ community could not survive.”

Why do so many Internet enthusiasts continue to promote the myth that the web exists apart from existing governmental and legal structures, despite the evidence? Goldsmith and Wu conclude it’s because

they are in the grip of a strange technological determinism that views the Internet as an unstoppable juggernaut that will overrun the old and outdated determinants of human organization. This leads them to say things like, “When you give people a new way to connect with other people, they will punch through any technical barrier, they will learn new languages – people are wired to want to connect to other people and they find it objectionable not to be able to do so.” That’s Marc Andreesen, Netscape’s founder. But as we have seen time and again in this book, it just isn’t so. People will not always, or even usually, transcend technical barriers in order to connect to other people. Just as often, if not more so, they will conform to the technical barriers, and the technical barriers themselves will reflect local government preference.

Some will read Who Controls the Internet? with relief, some with disappointment, others with disbelief. As the authors demonstrate, the impact of any new technology, even an extremely powerful one like the Internet, is filtered through existing geopolitical, economic, social, and cultural structures and norms. The technology may alter those structures and norms, but the structures and norms will alter the technology as well – until a new equilibrium emerges. Technology is powerful, but history is more powerful.