What are "vertical and "horizontal" integration mentioned by Rushkoff in this chapter? And how do they differ from the new requirement of "scaling up?"
According to the author, going vertical means establishing your business as the place to do it all in a particular industry. This means that your business is the one-stop shop for sports equipment, hardware supplies, etc.
Going horizontal means to offer a service that applies to all of these category's transactions. (Rushkoff uses the example of credit card transaction software.)
Formerly, businesses of various industries adhered to only one of the aforementioned integrations. However in the current age of the digital, we find businesses that are scaling up, or cutting through both the horizontal and vertical integrations. These newly aggregated businesses that utilize both the horizontal and vertical integrations are what we use as our search engines and other various web portals.
While abstraction allows us to use such important tools as language and math, it also makes us more dependent on centralized standards, such as the presentation of online identity and the categories and genres of cultural objects. What does this dependency do to the power structure of contemporary society, especially in the worlds of business and politics?
When the author says that abstraction makes us more dependent on centralized standards, he speaks of the central authorities such as indexers, aggregators, and currencies through which all of our digital activity must pass. So his argument is that rather than 'liberating the people and their ideas from hierarchies, the digital realm enforces central control on a whole new level.'
In a nutshell, Rushkoff maintains that the abstraction of the digital universe causes its users to rely even more heavily on trusted brands and companies. And I cannot say that I am fully exempt from this-I prefer to use my more trusted and reputable websites such as Amazon.com and the search engine Google.
Rushkoff takes it even one step further to generalize that the teenagers or digital natives of today are surprisingly the most common victims of this digital abstraction trap.
And I agree with him wholeheartedly on this assumption, however haven't we always relied on the familiar brands and trusted authorities? Even in the times before the rise of the internet? Is this concept really new or any different from the 80's and 90's in which we shopped in our most trusted department stores?
So we can see that in the world of business and commerce there seems to be a trend towards dealing with the most trusted companies and authorities. In my opinion, this is a natural human tendency that can be witnessed as far back as the dawn of time. Rather than taking a risk, we assess the situation and stick with the "tried and true."
According to Rushkoff, how can the German philosopher Walter Benjamin's ideas help us navigate and appreciate our abstract world?
The early twentieth century philosopher Walter Benjamin proposed an idea about photography and other reproductive technologies, and how these reproductions change our relationship to real art. He observed that when photographs of art were found in a mass-produced book, these reproductions somehow altered the "aura" of the original. He found that this mass production of photographs made the original more sacred.
So if we think of this proposed philosophical idea in terms of our abstract, digital world-it has a similar effect. If we use this digital bias of abstraction to our advantage, we can use the digital realm in the same way that Walter saw the art reproductions being used. Rushkoff says it best when he says-
"...our digital abstractions work best when they are used to give us insight into something quite real and particular."
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