Many marketers today can’t remember a time when they weren’t using the internet for commerce, communication, research, and recreation.
Moving at the speed of thought has become second nature to most of us, and even most traditional brick-and-mortar enterprises now have an internet presence. In fact, the very expression “brick-and-mortar” is an internet-age moniker, born of a need to differentiate where and how—online or offline—products are being sold. Today, online businesses are the expected, while “brick-and-mortar” businesses are the exception; we actually have to specify when a business is only offline.
Following commercialization and the introduction of privately run service providers in the 1980s, and the internet’s expansion for popular use in the 1990s, the internet has had a drastic impact on both culture—and commerce, including the rise of almost-instant communication by email, text-messaging, text-based discussion forums, and more. It has its dark side, as the inflation and collapse of the dot-com bubble showed how investors were unready for the brave new world. But still the internet continues to grow, driven by commerce, greater amounts of online information, and the knowledge and social networking known as Web 2.0.
And as long as there has been an internet, there has been internet chatter.
The ability to communicate in an instant brought with it a wave of what we might today consider chatter (albeit disorganized!), and, in its wake, businesses that capitalized on that chatter. For example, dating sites sprang up to match prospective couples online—to facilitate their chatter and allow them a safe forum in which to pursue it. So chatter as communication thus became chatter as business. And it has been growing ever since.
But how did it happen?
Ask anyone who was part of the internet’s early history, and he or she will be glad to tell you—and at great length. At lesser length, here’s what you need to know: the ARPAnet, the internet’s predecessor, offered users mailing lists as early as the late 1970s. While the ARPAnet was meant to be used for research, one could argue that these mailing lists were used for business purposes: users discussed their jobs, asked for and gave advice on computer tools, and so on. The ARPAnet gave birth in turn to USENET, an electronic conferencing network that remains in use today (now it uses the internet as its method of transmission) but started life as a network carried by modems over dial-up telephone lines. (Here is a terrific history of USENET.)
USENET software was free and adapted quickly to transmit material, so it became popular very quickly: electronic conferencing, bulletin boards, and groupware sprang up everywhere, with information being transmitted all over the world. This communication was, again, not meant to be business-oriented, but inevitably at times it was.
USENET
The commercial status of the early internet was uncertain. USENET culture was non-commercial, and while early acceptable-use policies attempted to sketch out boundaries for commercial use, commerce often came up against that culture. The culture, ironically, was not part of the original intent of those who developed ARPAnet and USENET—the networks were meant for education and research, and commerce that supported that education and research was essential.
In the end, commerce prevailed over culture, and so businesses began to take advantage of the possibilities offered by a worldwide communication tool.
And with the communication came the chatter. The first rule of internet commerce, as every marketer has learned, is that one cannot fool one’s customers in the networked world, and for one simple reason: they talk to each other. No longer did a disappointed customer merely have recourse to a letter of complaint to the marketer or to the local Better Business Bureau: the world had become that disappointed customer’s oyster, and he or she was going to make the most of it! Bulletin boards began to proliferate that decried poor products or customer service, and as search engines began to be developed, these opinions were suddenly at everyone’s fingertips.
Good marketers took it in stride. If you can stand behind your product or service, then you welcome customers’ interactions with each other. Business marketing to a sophisticated customer community may be a challenging way to do business, but at the end of the day everyone—company and customer alike—is a winner, because goods and services have to be top-notch in order to acquire any kind of longevity on the net. It both allows and requires a level of customer service that would have been impossible in the past; the chatter of both delighted and disappointed customers has equal bandwidth.
If you don’t believe that, then visit a social media site and listen to what people are saying. And then go back and take a long hard look at your own customer service practices!
The milieu par excellence of chatter is now, of course, social media sites. Here you can eavesdrop on and participate in conversations about every product or service you’ve ever heard of … and any number of ones you haven’t. 
Listen carefully, because your next Big Idea may well be there, disguised as aimless conversation that starts with something like, “what if we had…” or “I wish there were a way to…” That is the true value of chatter, and is at the core of chatter marketing: the ability to become part of a customer or prospect’s life, to anticipate and fulfill his or her needs, and do it so seamlessly as to appear to have been part of the fabric of their daily existence forever. “I don’t know what I did before…” is a great phrase to hear!
Of course, no history of internet chatter is complete without addressing the issues of governmental regulation—of the exchange of information, over and covert—and spying. 
The 2005 movie V was a film about a totalitarian society ruled by a fascist government that maintained complete surveillance of its inhabitants (at a level that would make Orwell gasp). The movie has a scene in which a pair of spies drives down a residential street, holding a machine that records the conversations that people are having inside their homes as the mobile unit passes them. The machine, of course, rates the conversations as to their relative government antagonism, thus enabling the surveillance agents to act on that information.
Many bloggers have discussed in great detail and varying levels of rationality the similarities between this scene and the CIA’s investment in Visible Technologies, a company that monitors the output of social media in order to “read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon,” according to an article in Wired News. One blogger even joked that monitoring the internet for anti-government sentiment is a little like monitoring aquariums for fish.
Using technology to increase governmental control isn’t a particularly new concept—or behavior. Technology has always been co-opted into service for the military-industrial complex. The real problem—also not a new one by any means—is that technological advances are occurring so quickly that by the time the government is able to present new regulations—imperfect regulations themselves that could be stopgap, arbitrary, or based on political necessity— those regulations will probably already be obsolete.
It’s agreed by all political parties that the U.S., as well as many other, governments move slowly in response to new situations; with technology moving at the speed of thought, governments seem to not stand a chance to catch up. As an article about California state government oversight has noted, “complicating whom to regulate and what kind of communications to regulate is the Internet’s penchant for anonymous chatter. Also, should a 140-word tweet sent on Twitter be required to include a disclaimer such as ‘Authorized by ID#123456’ if it comes from a campaign worker or paid political activist?”
Back in 2008 (well, this is a post on history!) a presidential directive expanded the intelligence community’s role in monitoring internet traffic to federal agencies in order to protect against cyber-attacks, a directive that was met with some concern. Yet that seems to be the tip of the iceberg. Where does legitimate surveillance —which is nothing other than listening in to internet chatter—end and gathering data for more nefarious purposes begin?
It is, says Stanley Chodorow, from UC/San Diego, “inevitable and worrisome. At some point, probably beyond 2014, the courts, at least in this country, may try to control the use of internet devices by law enforcement by barring evidence gathered in certain ways from being used in court. But that process will be very difficult and take a long time to evolve.”
The most telling response—and the one most interesting to marketers—is a comment made by Dan Ness of MetaFacts: “The interests to build in identification of everything from CPUs to clothing using a wide variety of markers—electronic and otherwise—will outpace the ability or interest of the populace to block or thwart these systems. Attempts by constitutionalists, libertarians, the privacy-minded, and individualists will lag behind commercial and security interests in their ability to enact policy to protect against this increased surveillance.”
And there it is. Comfort and convenience will always win out over privacy.
On the other hand, eavesdropping on internet chatter has been, apparently, one of the most successful twenty-first-century weapons against terrorism. Internet chatter picked up by various government agencies has enabled law enforcement in several countries to stop terrorist plots and keep disasters from occurring. It’s interesting to speculate how the Cold War might have been fought had there been an internet to use for covert communication; it’s certainly being used today by all sides in the global security arena.
The arguments over internet freedom—and more generally, 
freedom of speech and expression—run the gamut from tremendous economic issues (like whether a company has the right to market its wares online without regulation) to control (who really “owns” internet space?) to territorial considerations (who has the right to tax internet sales?) to criminal considerations (who has the power to shatter monopolies?).
All of the issues are complex—in fact, much more so even than they would appear at first glance—but all of them have one disquieting (or wonderful, depending on your point of view) reality in common: the internet has no borders. There is no king or queen of the world wide web to try offenders and enforce internet law … and the very existence of such a person or entity would be supposing that everyone could agree about what the rules, laws, regulations, precepts, etc. of the internet ought to be, which is clearly impossible.
The other side to politics online is the ability for grassroots organizations to mobilize quickly and efficiently. Petitions are signed, political candidates vetted, and internet chatter is used every day to sway opinions. So while the government may well be listening to the Average Jane, Jane is in turn conveying information to others about the myriad organizations and causes that she cares about. She has become a chatterbox (see chapter six) for her political, religious, and social allegiances. And the power of that chatter cannot be underestimated.
It’s worth taking a moment here to talk about blogs, 
arguably one of the major milestones in the history of internet chatter. Opinions that are being written and circulated on blogs are an increasingly powerful force: online word of mouth can make or break a brand, TV show, celebrity, company, or activity. Blogs record daily the pulse of the internet community and, for the marketer, represent a way to take that pulse in order to be forewarned about shifts in opinion, trends, and consumer behavior.
Consumers have become empowered by the internet, and there’s no going back. They express their skepticism of advertising, demand price points, and even mobilize for action.
Nielsen BuzzMetrics and other industry giants are trying to capture the chatter and make sense of it, sifting through hundreds of thousands of comments every day. The company can report on the number of times a subject was mentioned, who mentioned it, and the communities where it appeared. So it’s not a matter anymore of seeing information used by political entities; marketers have entered the fray and are staking an informational claim of their own.
The story of internet chatter is the story of the internet itself: an uneasy conflict between the internet pioneers, who would prefer to see the web remain a free zone where problems are handled cooperatively through self-regulation, and those in government, commerce, and assorted other players who would prefer to use the internet to further their own interests.
The reality is that the internet has always been defined by (and drawn much of its energy from) the tension that exists between chaos and control. That’s its history, and the history of the chatter that occurs daily in social media sites and networks, websites and blogs, forums and emails and chat rooms. That tension lies in the birth of the internet and is what will chart its future. That tension is both the strength of the internet and its greatest weakness.
And there’s no probability that this particular bit of history is going to change in the near future. Understand that, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
