The point that I am going to be talking about in this blog post deals more so with the backlash section of Douglas Rushkoff’s third chapter of his book (Open Source Democracy) called “Electronic community: From birth to backlash”. One of the main points that he makes is that the so-called “do-it-yourself” attitude of the internet community took a backseat in order to accommodate commerce. He says “when selling information online didn’t work, business people turned instead to selling real products online” (39). It sparked the new phenomenon of ecommerce. People wouldn’t have to leave their houses in order to shop for things. Businessmen realized that to make any money at all off the Internet (other than stocks) they needed to sell tangible products to consumers. A great example of this was and still is eBay. eBay was created in 1995 just around the time the dot.com bubble was being formed. eBay is an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy goods and sell goods and services worldwide. Since being founded in San Jose, eBay has become the epitome of the online commerce world.
The dot.com bubble burst in the early 2000’s however eBay seemed to be one of the lone survivors. It is still a website with a lot of traffic and continues to be one of the largest websites for online shopping. Back to Rushkoff’s comment, I think it was almost unavoidable that the internet be turned into a station for commerce. Americans (and others around the world) love to buy and spend money. That is what keeps our economy going. Rushkoff isn’t saying that this is a negative thing and I agree that it is not. I simply think it was inevitable that we would have a shopping mall right at the click of a mouse. Will eBay and internet commerce continue to be strong? I believe so. Although the internet is used for a great deal more than online shopping in today’s world (communication has become the big thing since the early 2000’s), it still holds a solid place in the infrastructure of the internet community. Online commerce is still a huge part of many lives today. Some people do nothing but shop online. Rushkoff really did his research and I think he made it clear to us how much we really value online commerce.
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