It has been said that the innovations of the 20th century that have had the biggest impact on our lives have been the automobile, television, and the atomic bomb. I think it is time to acknowledge a fourth humanity-shaking innovation of the 20th century – the Internet – which is changing our lives in ways that we are just beginning to comprehend.
The automobile, television, and the atomic bomb have been mixed disasters. All three seemed like good things in their time. We wanted them, and still do. The damage they have done – to our space, to our culture, and to our security – is recognized only by a skeptical few. It is easy to see what we have gained, to see what we have lost requires some imagination and an appreciation of history.
The Internet, as a newer innovation, still seems almost entirely positive. I certainly see it as a fine thing, but I am beginning to see aspects that are troubling.
What is positive, above all, is the opportunity for many-to-many communication. Television is a means of mass dissemination of information. A handful of corporations transmit, billions of people receive. With the Internet everyone can transmit, and everyone can receive what he likes from among the many millions of possibilities.
This is the great promise. Every small business can advertise its products, at little or no cost, via the World Wide Web, which can be accessed by anyone anywhere in the world. Any political opinion, any scientific report, any plea for assistance, any photo or video, can be posted for all to see; any song can be sung for the world to hear.
The creation of the Internet as a global interconnection of local computer networks dates back to the 1960s, but its commercialization via e-mail and the World Wide Web began only 15 years ago. It is therefore a spectacular fact that today approximately two thirds of the people in the developed world use the Internet. Many of us, and here I am projecting, use it a very great deal.
I use the Internet to send this column to The Free Press down the street and to communicate with friends and business associates around the world. I use the Web to do most of my research for my columns, and for my law practice, and I use it just for the pleasure of learning new things. The information, which might come from anywhere, assembles itself on my computer screen and from there enters into my consciousness. There is no doubt that over the last decade a great deal of what has entered my consciousness has come via the Internet.
Part of the troubling downside of the Internet is just that. We have eyes to see and ears to hear, and for our 10,000 years of civilization we have seen and heard what is immediately around us – our families, our neighbors, the sights and sounds of our community and environment. Television, appealing mightily to these same senses, has moved our consciousness away from our communities. The Internet is doing the same.
When a teenager sits at her computer “chatting” with her online friends, she is not walking down the street to play with real flesh-and-blood friends. The ramifications of this vast change in our way of knowing each other remain far from understood – far even from being much considered.
What has made this new way of connecting seem good is the idea that it allows us to connect as equals within a global community. Something is lost – our local connections – but something is gained that might be equally valuable. I am beginning to wonder, though, if this might be an idealization of a quite different reality.
The Internet, for all its openness and apparent equality, is clearly vulnerable to monopoly. Microsoft has far more power and market share in the computer and Internet sphere than any steel company or media empire ever had. Microsoft Windows runs 92% of all computers and the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser is used by 62% of all Internet users. The Google search engine is now used for 86% of all Web searches.
As a result, Microsoft effectively controls what most people can and cannot do with their computers, and also how information on the Web must be organized. Google Inc. controls the process by which you can find what you are looking for, or can be found by people who you hope will be looking for you.
Social network websites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace also represent a concentration of power over the connections people make. They are in principle neutral, but they make the rules. Social connections have never before been under this sort of corporate mediation.
So the freedom of the Internet may be illusory. Instead, the Internet may turn out to give a few corporations the power to direct and to control our intercourse as has never before been possible.
Who knows, but it seems to me on this reflection that there is a lot to be said for word of mouth, and for being close enough to whisper.
March 11, 2010
source: freepressonline.com