An occasional column on marketing and its effects.

Internet Clone

A black screen shows a globe slowly rotating on it. The globe doesn't have a map but rather a grid of primary colors all fitting together as a grid does. There is no blending of the colors. A woman's voice comes on, but not necessarily a human voice. It is almost of that computer-generated stock of female voices that we know from phone systems around the world. It's a tad bit more real, though. Alluring, almost alive, and most of all inviting, she asks you to imagine a place where you could go to find friendship, organize your contacts, look up information about anything, and live a wonderful life. Finally she welcomes you to the theglobe.com, "your friendly, full service, integrated, on-line community."

When this TV commercial comes on, it never fails to draw people in. It is at least a minute long. The ambient electronica that it starts with, and the smooth voice makes it stand out among the usual blaring ads. Of course once we are sucked into the commercial by its lack of commonality, it begins to hit us with a commercial's common features. They want you to see how cool they are and how much you want what they can give you. But, this time, instead of a plea to buy what they make, they tell you to come and be a part of it. It seems as if they are giving you an opportunity to break out of your life, and start a whole new one, on the Internet. It's a good commercial; when it's over I always want to check out their site and see if it really is as cool as it sounds. A community on the Internet seems logical, and it even sounds like a good idea: to provide a forum of ideas shared by people without the preconceptions that are created when you actually see someone. But it doesn't work out that way.

Once you join theglobe.com you can join forums with topics that interest you and people that are supposedly just like you. You can communicate with them and become close friends through real time chats and email, just like that! They can visit your web page, and you can visit theirs. You don't even have to leave your house. Places (I use the word loosely, very loosely) like theglobe.com want you to turn on, plug in, and stay glued to your screens. They want you to live your life over the Internet. Worst of all, they want you to do it in groups filled with people who think just like you, while they sell you the idea of meeting new people with new ideas. Right. It all seems so exciting on the commercial. The chance to meet people, yet protect yourself--and the chance to know something about them first.

There are six themes at theglobe.com ("A&E," "Infobahn," "Life," "Metro," "Romance," and "Special") each with a multitude of "districts." As a free member, you are allowed to choose one to join. You get 5MB free space for a personal web page and this is how you pigeonhole yourself into a district. Your page becomes associated with that district. After you have established yourself in the community, you can wander around. Look for people with interests similar to your own by following the ring of pages that have the same association as you do. You can follow one of their links to a forum, and make new friends there. Easy as pie, you don't even have to look for it. Or, if you're feeling adventurous, you can choose a district that you are not a part of. Then you are pumped to that district's first web page. (Districts have stupid generalized names like "Sonic City," which has subheadings for "Jazz" and "Charts" and the like. (The worst one by far is in the romance section under the heading "Singles City," where there's a district called "HoBa (Homo Barrio)." I shit you not.) Others include names like "Epoch" in the Life theme, which has subheadings of "12th-19th streets," "20th-29th streets," and on up the hill.

What worries me most about this is not that we are expected by theglobe.com never to leave our computer. It's that they think we should be pigeonholed into these groups while they sell us an image of a big, diverse world out there on the Internet. Then they compartmentalize this "diversity" as much as possible. Somehow we are supposed to define ourselves as "Jazz" or "Area 51" or "HoBa (Homo Barrio)." You must align yourself with a narrow, pre-defined group, and there's little chance for breaking out, meeting people with different views on life, and learning from them about their interests. You may be lucky enough to find out that people in your forum have different interests and experiences, but chances are you won't try to expand the conversation beyond the topic at hand. As soon as you run out of things to say about the common subject, you can just log off.

In a world where you have to go to work and deal with people you wouldn't ordinarily choose to be around everyday, theglobe.com offers a place where you can be "around" others with a common interest, at least superficially. But while they bank on the fact that you will prefer a restricted environment in which to make friends, they sell it to you with a sexy image of diversity. Hah. It seems exciting at first, but the product they're selling is sameness, not diversity. Is that any way to live your life?